In celebration of the tenth anniversary of our magazine I thought I would look back forty-six years at the true inspiration of the title of the magazine along with the style and the philosophy behind what we have been trying to do and say with the magazine. We have always tried to present our stories and profiles with the same passion that La Dolce Vita inspired on screen: we have tried to celebrate life in all the varied ways we all chose to enjoy it.

In 1960 Italian director Federico Fellini widened the eyes of the world with his film La Dolce Vita, a fun loving film but a film of great depth and meaning that became an instant classic. In the film Marcello Mastroianni plays Marcello Rubini, a playboy journalist who specializes in covering the celebrity and pop culture scene. He drifts from affair to affair, from party to party, fully enjoying and embracing all the wild aspects of his life and career. But then he meets up with a beautiful actress he has always wanted to meet and when he has to face the death of a friend and fellow writer, he begins to re-examine his life. And the conclusion he draws from all his experiences is that life really is meant to be lived to the fullest, to be explored and enjoyed and reveled in. And that sense of living life to the fullest, enjoying the finer things in life, however you choose to define what those finer things are, is what we have tried to convey with the magazine over the past decade. To some, a good bottle of wine sipped on a breeze-swept terrace is as good as life gets; to others it is a fine meal; to others still it might be driving a sleek black Bentley. The what and the how of it is not the point – what is most important is that you live your life like each day is a new adventure. And that is really what the phrase ‘La Dolce Vita’ has come to signify. The words translated mean ‘The Sweet Life’ but over the years the phrase has been folded into the English lexicon in Italian as simply a way of describing European decadence.

But back to the Fellini classic… one of the most famous images from the film is the scene shot at the Trevi Fountain in Rome; the scene in which Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg dance around in the water under the fountain. Well, that sequence was actually shot in March, a time in Rome when the evenings are quite chilly. Marcello Mastroianni was so cold that he actually wore a wetsuit under his clothes and it still wasn’t enough to shake the chill. So he drank almost an entire bottle of vodka during the many takes of the scene, and there were so many takes that by the time the final take was shot – the take used in the film – Mastroianni was actually quite drunk. And for the record, actress Anita Ekberg was also asked to play the same scene in the fountain all night but did it without any special clothing and with no complaining at all.

Originally the film was to be produced by Dino De Laurentiis – who badly wanted to make this film with Fellini because he had a sense that the time was right for a film like this – but De Laurentiis had in mind Paul Newman for the lead role. Fellini rejected that suggestion outright because he had Marcello Mastroianni in mind all along. He thought Mastroianni captured what he was trying to say with the film almost perfectly (and what Mastroianni could not convey, Anita Ekberg and Anouk Aimee would certainly fill in). De Laurentiis did not like Marcello at all because he thought him too soft and ‘goody-goody’ – he thought he looked like a family man and not a man who flings women into bed on a whim as often as he feels like it. De Laurentiis came back with a suggestion that the roguish French actor Gerard Philipe be cast. Again Fellini said that if Marcello Mastroianni were not cast in the lead he would not go ahead with the film. At this point it was De Laurentiis who decided to back away from the project and it was one of those wonderful things that happens in movies: when a director fights for an actor who then does such a fine job in the film you can scarcely even imagine anyone else in the role.

Not everyone was so completely taken by the film. Italy’s Catholic political party, Democrazia Cristiana and the Vatican itself were quite angry about the way Fellini portrayed Rome. They took to calling the film in public ‘Le Schifosa Vita’ (the filthy life). Imagine if they had been able to see the version available now… the version with the orgy scene restored that censors in 1960 demanded removed.

Another indelible aspect of the film is the music; that breezy, jazzy music that makes one think of cafés and romance and life and lust. It was composed by frequent Fellini collaborator Nino Rota (who also composed a rather memorable score for another film called The Godfather).

There is also something else that we have now that we did not have before the film La Dolce Vita, that being the phrase paparazzi. The common phrase we now use to describe the legions of photographers that follow movie stars to capture their image and sell it to the highest bidder actually began in the film: the name of Marcello’s photographer friend is Paparazzo. Fellini named the character very specifically and almost prophetically; he said at the time that he called the photographer character Paparazzo (which means ‘sparrow’ in Italian) because he thought, “the press photographers fluttering around celebrities looked like little hungry birds.”

And while the film was the inspiration for this magazine, what was the inspiration for the film itself? There is a saying that genius is doing effortlessly what most people find impossible, and that seems to be the case with Maestro Fellini and this movie. He claims that his motivation in making the film was looking at women and how the fashions of that particular year, a few years before the film was made, actually made the women of Rome look like flowers in bloom. Fellini interpreted the feelings he had when looking at those women of Rome as one of the most glorious reasons to celebrate being alive he could think of.

Federico Fellini is rightly considered one of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived (with a significant school of thought proclaiming that La Dolce Vita might be one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time). What fueled the wonder and brilliance of Fellini’s films was the fact that he based a lot of his imagery and his ideas on his dreams – so if you notice that the scenes in a Fellini film are somewhat oddly arranged, well, that was by specific design. Fellini dreamed brightly and vividly and so his cinematic interpretations of his films were equally so.

Fellini was born in 1920 in Rimini, Emilia-Romagna, Italy and after going to school to be a journalism student in his youth, began to look to cinema as his outlet for creative expression after becoming infatuated with the American studio films he was seeing in the 1930s. When he was just nineteen years old Federico Fellini wrote his first screenplay and while he did not get credit for his work on that film (Imputato Alzatevi!) it forever lit the flame of desire in him to write and direct and produce and often appear in his own films. By the time Fellini was 30 he had written many screenplays and contributed as a touch-up man on many more. He figured he had gained enough practical experience to try his hand at directing – the result was a strange little film called Luci del Varieta (Lights of Variety). Four years later Fellini would make a film that captured the attention of critics the world over, making them sit up and look very seriously at this 34-year-old Italian impressionist filmmaker. That film was La Strada and it would earn Fellini his first Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. Three movies later came La Dolce Vita, a film of such timely brilliance that it had writers the world over describing Fellini as the European answer to Orson Welles. The film was also being compared to Citizen Kane. La Dolce Vita was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars and actually won the awards for Best Costume Design and Best Foreign Language Film, as well as winning the Golden Palm at the 1960 Cannes International Film Festival. Fellini’s next film three years later, 8 1/2, came very close to La Dolce Vita in terms of its quality but lacked its energy and beauty.

From the late sixties through early seventies Federico Fellini was the most prolific European director directing Satyricon, Roma and Amacord. Again Fellini was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars, winning Best Foreign Language Film. In fact, Fellini was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category four times and won all four times: La Strada, Le Notti de Cabiria, 8 1/2 and Amacord. After the triumph of Amacord, Fellini tackled the legend of Casanova for his film Fellini’s Casanova in which he cast Canadian actor Donald Sutherland in the lead role. I had the chance to ask Sutherland once about the film and about Fellini: “First of all I could not believe that Federico Fellini was actually asking me to play Casanova,” said Sutherland. “But then as I began working with him I found myself feeling like I was working with a great painter or sculptor and I was just the material he was arranging on the canvas or chiseling away at. It was one of the few times I have made a film with a filmmaker that I felt deeply was a real artist in the truest sense of the word.”

Fellini’s last feature film as a director was a surreal comedy called La Voce della Luna (Voice of the Moon) that starred Italian comedic genius Roberto Benigni, a film that was made three years before Fellini died of a massive heart attack. I spoke to Benigni at the Toronto International Film Festival a few years ago and he described Fellini as “a very brilliant man, a thinker, a dreamer, but a man with the heart and soul of a clown. He loved comedy and saw life as one long and beautiful comedy.” And interesting observation, given the fact that Fellini used to work as a circus clown in his youth before his career in films became his full-time occupation.

In his private life Federico Fellini was not an archetypal film director – he married a young acting student named Giulietta Masina in 1943 and remained devoted and married to her until his death on Halloween night in 1993.

If you have seen La Dolce Vita (and if you have, you’ve probably seen it many times), you know what a wonderful experience watching this film is. But if you haven’t seen the film, you really are missing one of the truly magical examples of the power of cinema. Either way, La Dolce Vita is available now on DVD in a gorgeously presented boxed set from The Criterion Collection. Outside of the experience of seeing the film on the big screen, this is the best presentation of La Dolce Vita currently available.

Not long before he died, Federico Fellini was asked to define his outlook on life. His words perfectly reflect the inspiration his film La Dolce Vita provided for this magazine. Fellini said, “There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion for life.”