"There's no rule that states a director can't become one of the most important and influential in history unless they take their talents over to Hollywood to see if they can succeed in the industry's most vaunted hotbed, but Federico Fellini considered it nonetheless. Cinema has given rise to countless icons and legends who couldn't have cared less about making a mark in America, but Fellini wasn't one of them. He had a vested curiosity in conquering that frontier, and yet he never overcame his entirely well-founded concerns to make the leap. Nobody is going to say that Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, or Andrei Tarkovsky, to name just three have glaring holes in their filmography because they never decided to pitch up in the United States to shoot a film on foreign soil, and the exact same can be said of Fellini and his incomparable body of work. He's been cited as a direct influence on a number of auteurs who occupy vastly differing positions in the landscape of cinema, which speaks volumes of the shadow he cast. Martin Scorsese doesn't make the same type of movies as George Lucas, who doesn't make the same types of movies as Terry Gilliam, who doesn't make the same type of movies as Yorgos Lanthimos and on and on it goes. And yet, Fellini inspired them all, with his distinct visual and thematic style trickling down into every aspect of modern cinema. A larger-than-life character who often made larger-than-life films, some of his favoured motifs include self-awareness, social criticism, the exploration of the human condition, the notion of memory, and the blurred lines between fantasy and desire. All of that and much more would have placed him in very good stead to take that risk and cross the pond when the 'New Hollywood' movement was in full swing, with many of its most famous purveyors indebted to Fellini. In the late 1960s, he even admitted to Playboy that he was tempted to take the plunge. When asked if he'd considered Hollywood, Fellini pointed to the inherent restrictions as being one of the major reasons why he'd kept it at arm's length. 'I've been sorely tempted to try it anyway,' he said. 'I'd love to do a film there on what caught my imagination during my visits to America. But even if I had a clear idea of what to say, the practical realisation of it, the actual translation of this idea into images would embarrass and probably defeat me.' In his own words, Fellini knew what he was doing and how to do it in Italy, something he wasn't entirely convinced he'd be afforded in America. ..."
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