Fare un film
Fellini on filmmaking — not a manual but a collection of essays, interviews and reflections on what it means to make a film.
The book is as stylistically distinctive as his films: digressive, personal, occasionally surreal, always specific.
For product direction the transfer is not literal but practical: filmmaking is one of the very few crafts where a complex, technical, collaborative, expensive, time-bounded project is the norm rather than the exception, and the parallels with shipping software are obvious once you look for them.
Fellini is worth reading alongside Lumet for a complementary voice — the Italian auteur and the American craftsman approaching the same problem from different ends.
A book to read slowly.
Central argument
Fellini argues that filmmaking is not a technical procedure but an act of self-revelation that cannot be fully planned — the film discovers itself in the making, and the director's job is less to execute a blueprint than to remain open to what emerges during production. Across essays and interviews he insists that ambiguity, digression, and personal obsession are not obstacles to a finished work but constitutive of it. The implicit claim is that creative authority and collaborative craft are not in tension: the auteur's vision holds the project together precisely because it is irreducibly personal rather than managerial.
Critique
The book's central limitation is that it theorises creative leadership almost entirely from the position of unchallenged final authority — Fellini had, by the 1970s, a level of artistic control that is structurally exceptional and commercially underwritten by his own reputation. A thoughtful reader will notice that his account of openness and intuition in production quietly assumes that someone has already solved the financing, the schedule, and the institutional trust required to let a director follow their instincts. The model of leadership he describes is real but not portable without those preconditions, which the book never interrogates.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, Fellini's most transferable argument is that a product vision functions less as a specification and more as a gravitational field — it organises the decisions of a large, technically diverse team not by prescribing outcomes but by giving every contributor a legible sense of what the work is for. This reframes a persistent product direction problem: the failure mode is rarely too little planning and more often a vision so genericised by stakeholder alignment that it loses the specificity required to actually guide trade-offs under pressure. Reading Fellini alongside Lumet, as the curator suggests, gives you both ends of the spectrum — the director who works from feeling and the one who works from preparation — and the productive tension between them maps directly onto the debate between discovery-led and delivery-led product cultures.