A wetsuit, under the dinner jacket. That's the story anyway, and I've never quite been able to check it, but it's the detail I trust most about La Dolce Vita — three in the morning at the Trevi, the crew in coats, Anita Ekberg standing in that water as if it were August, and Marcello, forty-odd feet from the camera, quietly insulated. Also, the way it's told, not entirely sober. Nineteen-sixty. Whatever kept him upright, it reads on screen as a man who has given up resisting.
Cut to Fontana Liri, 1924, a carpenter's son. And after the war a young man with neat handwriting in the Rome office of a British film company, doing accounts and drawings, which is a very ordinary way to be near cinema — a desk, a corridor, other people's productions going past you. He'd already been an extra as a boy; he'd end up with something like 147 films by 1996. But for a while there the film business simply had him as a clerk who could draw.
I've got a photograph up of a cinema front somewhere Dutch, two enormous hand-painted faces either side of the door, neon spelling CINEAC, and the banner underneath reading GISTEREN, VANDAAG EN MORGEN — Loren, Mastroianni, De Sica. Painters up ladders getting his jaw right in a city he'd probably never visited. That's the job, in the end. You sit in the fourth row in another country and the face already knows you.
Constance, Nino Rota wrote the Trevi music so it doesn't need a word spoken over it — that little wandering theme does all the talking while the two of them stand in the water. He and Fellini kept at it from the early fifties on, and Rota could hand over a cue in an afternoon. Listen for the way the horns hang back a beat before she says Marcello's name.
Constance, the Trevi is a fountain built into the front of a palazzo, so the stonecutters had to make travertine look like sea rock that just happened to be there — years of chisel work to fake an accident. And then a painter in Holland has to get Marcello's jaw right with a brush, on a ladder, in traffic.