I loved The White Sheik and I Vitelloni and La Strada, and of course 8 ½.

There was no road or footprints. I myself stepped the ground, kept walking everyday to try to leave the path to the young people. But I almost lost my direction. Watch Fellini’s LA STRADA to calm myself.

The next I would say is La Strada because, well, do I really have to say? I feel like it’s sort of self-explanatory. Like [laughs] Giulietta Masina, I mean every performance, but particularly the last scene in the movie, with Anthony Quinn and just being on the beach, and everything about that movie is beautiful.

There was an art movie house in the Village on 12th Street that showed foreign movies – French, Italian, German. This made sense, because even Alan Lomax himself, the great folk archivist, had said somewhere that if you want to get out to America, go to Greenwich Village. I’d seen a couple of Italian Fellini movies there – one called La Strada, which means “The Street,” and another one called La Dolce Vita. It was about a guy who sells his soul and becomes a gossip hound. It looked like life in a carnival mirror except it didn’t show any monster freaks – just real people in a freaky way. I watched it intently, thinking that I might not see it again.