Federico Fellini Leopardi. Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli. Despite its modest critical and commercial success in Italy, and its warm reception by French critics, it failed to interest North American distributors. Fellini won the "Praemium Imperiale", the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the visual arts, awarded by the Japan Art Association in 1990. In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film". Described as the "Maestro's spiritual testament” by his biographer Tullio
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar I'm a Born Liar" is best watched in conjunction with the films themselves". Although he was "happy to have seen it", Roger Ebert declared the film "lacked specifics" and that as "a biography of Fellini the film is almost worthless but as an insight into his style, the film is priceless". In his review in "The New York Times", A. O. Scott explained that Fellini's style was precisely what the film was all about: "The interviews with Fellini and some of his collaborators, the snippets of movies both famous and obscure, the glimpses behind the scenes and the master's own