So, happy 46th birthday to Fellini’s Casanova, a film in which Donald Sutherland was cast even though the director thought he was
a big sperm-full waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator
Sutherland knows this, too, because journalist John Patterson told him in 2005 — and this was the first he’d heard of it, 29 years after the film came out. He seemed quite happy to hear it.
Whether he’d be quite so pleased to know that critics described his appearance in the film film as “a sort of spectral anamorph of male genitals”, “lumpy eared, lazy-eyed, not-so-handsome” and “a bald, glabrous, waxen beanpole”, I don’t know.
(Those quotes are all from Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s.)
The original Fellini quote is from Conversations with Fellini, and is less enthusiastic than Patterson remembers it — making clear that Sutherland wasn’t the director’s first choice.
This is Gian Maria Volonté
…and you can see what Fellini means — but he needed American money to make the picture. Producer Alberto Grimaldi suggested Brando, Pacino, and Redford, but Fellini had a different vision for the character.
He had, apparently, read Casanova’s memoirs only after signing the contract to direct, and, according to the New York Times in 1977,
was smitten by a feeling of dizziness and the mortifying impression that I had made a wrong move
Sutherland, meanwhile
thoroughly researched the role. Fellini told him to forget everything
(according to Federico Fellini: Ringmaster of Dreams, by Chris Wiegand).
Any vision Sutherland might have had was quickly forgotten. He
was told where and how to move, how to turn his head, what to do with his hands…
Full disclosure: I still haven’t seen the bloody thing myself — I just love the quote. Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole interview with Sutherland, because he’s very entertaining, and at the end he emails Patterson about *that* scene in Don’t Look Now…