“FELLINI: Making films in color is, I believe, an impossible operation. . . . In order to truly express the chromatic values of a face, a landscape, some scene or other, it is necessary to light it according to certain criteria, in function of both personal taste and technical exigencies. And all goes well so long as the camera doesn’t move. But as soon as the camera moves in on the faces or objects so lighted, the intenstiy of the light is heightened or deadened; and, depending on whether the light is heightened or deadened, all the chromatic values are intensified or deadend; the camera moves, the light changes.

There is also an infinitude of contingencies that condition the color . . . these are the innumerable and continual traps that have to be dealt with, every day, when shooting in color. For example, colors interfere, set up echoes, are conditioned by one another. Lighted, color runs over the outline that holds it, emanates a sort of luminous aureola around neighboring objects. Thus there is an incessant game of tennis between the colors. Sometimes it even happens that the result of these changes is agreeable, better than what one had imagined; but it’s always a somewhat chancy, uncontrollable result. Finally, the human eye selects and in this way already does artist’s work, because the human eye, the eye of man, sees chromatic reality through the prisms of nostaligia, of memory, of presentiment or imagination. This is not the case with the lens, and it happens that you believe you are bringing out certain values in a face, a set, a costume, while the lens brings out others. In this way, writing becomes very difficult; it is as if, while writing, a modifying word escapes your pen in capital letters or, still worse, one adjective appears instead of another, or some form of punctuation that completely changes the sense of the line. However, in spite of these pessimistic considerations, the film I am working on is in color, because it was born in color in my imagination.

KAST: I have the impression that Giulietta of the Spirits is a film in which time does not exist: the past, the present, the future and the imaginary are mixed . . .

FELLINI: Yes, that’s quite so. The color is part of the ideas, the concepts, in the same fashion as, in a dream, red or green have this or that significance. The color participates not only in the language but in the plot itself of the film This is why, in spite of deceptions or fears that attend shooting in color, I believe that color is an enrichment, with the disquieting, sinister, carnivalesque, in a certain sense lugubrious, tone that it brings with it.”

—Federico Fellini, interviewed by Pierre Kast, 1965. From Interviews with Film Directors, by Andrew Sarris, 1967.