Where to watch La Strada (1954)

Trivia & production notes

• Fellini refused his producers' insistence on casting Silvana Mangano and Burt Lancaster, determined instead to cast his wife Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina.
• Anthony Quinn initially told Fellini he wasn't interested in playing Zampanò, but changed his mind after watching Fellini's earlier film I Vitelloni at a dinner with Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman.
• Richard Basehart accepted the role of Il Matto for significantly less than his usual salary, partly because he was impressed by Fellini's personality.
• Giulietta Masina dislocated her ankle during filming in October 1953, forcing production to halt and allowing producer De Laurentiis an opportunity to replace her until Paramount executives praised her performance in the rushes.
• Anthony Quinn simultaneously filmed La Strada in the mornings and the epic Attila in the afternoons and evenings, waking at 3:30 am to capture Fellini's demanded early light before driving to Rome in his Zampanò costume.
• Fellini examined over 500 cigarette boxes before selecting the one Zampanò carries in the film, demonstrating his notorious perfectionism.
• When a crowd scene was needed, the production supervisor convinced the local priest to move a celebration of the town's patron saint forward a few days, securing approximately 4,000 unpaid extras.
• Fellini cut and styled Masina's hair by placing a bowl on her head and cutting around it, then coated it with soap and talc to achieve a specific appearance he envisioned.
• When funding ran short during the final scenes, producers De Laurentiis and Ponti forgave Fellini's budget overruns after he agreed to film additional pickup shots for the director of Attila.
• Fellini suffered severe clinical depression while shooting the final wharf scenes and required treatment from a Freudian psychoanalyst to complete the film.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article La Strada, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.