Daily Inspiration Quote by Federico Fellini

Fellini’s jab lands because it sounds like craft advice and behaves like sabotage. A “good opening” and a “good ending” are the two moments a director can most reliably control: the hook that buys attention and the final image that retroactively assigns meaning. By saying a film is good “provide they come close together,” he’s puncturing the respectable myth that cinema’s greatness is primarily a matter of structure and patience. He’s also confessing, with a grin, how many movies (including serious ones) coast on their entrances and exits while the middle sags under dutiful plotting.

The subtext is both aesthetic and psychological. Fellini came of age in postwar Italian cinema, where neorealism prized moral urgency and clean storytelling. His own work veered into memory, spectacle, dream logic - films that often feel like parades rather than arguments. That background makes the line read less like laziness and more like a critique of “the middle” as convention’s territory: exposition, causality, the polite machinery that turns life into narrative. If the opening is desire and the ending is judgment, the in-between is where movies fake certainty.

It’s also a wry defense of compression. He’s implying that cinema’s seduction is not duration but intensity: give us the spark and the afterglow, skip the padded explanations. The quip flatters audiences too - a dare to admit we remember films in fragments, not in perfect arcs - and it indicts filmmakers who mistake length for depth.