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 TV program for a fast buck, especially just after Fellini died." "Los Angeles Times" reviewer Kenneth Turan reported that what "is beyond doubt is Pettigrew's devotion to Fellini, whom he first met in 1983 and pursued for a decade to get the extended interviews [...] Then Pettigrew sat on the material for years before he found collaborators willing to finance his vision of how it should be used". From the beginning, however, Pettigrew made his plans known to Fellini and secured the maestro's agreement to cooperate. This proved to be a necessary final step in his education about a paradoxical