Criterion has just released a Blu-ray Disc of "Satyricon" with all sorts of extras. Though not my favorite Fellini movie (by a wide margin), this package is interesting.
For starts, it includes the feature-length documentary "Ciao Federico" which was shot on the set of Satyricon as it was being filmed. When I worked as a projectionist in college I showed this movie a dozen times, but I've never seen it anywhere since. It's fascinating, because the documentarian was given unrestricted access to Fellini as he worked. It shows the humor and the anger of the actors and crew on set and off, it shows Fellini bullying his carpenters and berating the actors, it shows Fellini's working method with all its warts (he was notoriously difficult to work for).
Elsewhere on the two discs are interviews with people who worked on the film. One was a young photographer who was given unlimited access to the set, and an assistant (of some unknown job title) who seems to have been mostly a go-fer. Both are surprisingly frank about Fellini's pros and mostly cons.
Satyricon seems to have been one of the first films in history where documenting the process of making the film was given as high a priority as finishing the film. For a director like Fellini, who was a very seat-of-the-pants director, prone to change the entire day's schedule the night before, it was a gutsy thing to do. He is seen wearing an early lavalier microphone throughout the candid on-set footage, and apparently recorded everything he said or thought throughout the process.
Other films -- Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo -- had had feature length movies made on the making of these films, but none documented the process from the director's point of view.
As to the supposedly 4k transfer of the film to Blu-ray ... Meh, it looks and sounds no better than my old DVD of it. It's fine but the extras really make the package here.
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