Interviewer to Fellini: Here, then, is one of those eternal questions that critics are always asking. Don’t you care whether your audience ‘understands’ your intentions? You must have thought about this question of the relation of artist to audience.
Fellini: How can I worry about something completely unknown? Anyway, what does that word ‘audience’ mean? Who are they? It is a monster without any collective conscience or identity, and so it is impossible to be conditioned by their wants. If you pay attention to all that, you put yourself in a very humiliating and subservient position: that of slave to a very mysterious boss, a boss who doesn’t know what he wants. It’s the worst position for a man to find himself in, that of serving. It is up to you, as an artist, to be the boss…I just say something that I like to say…
My brilliant daughter read this in school and wrote to say she saw similarities between it and Elmore’s attitude.
In this vein, Elmore has said, “my purpose is to entertain and please myself. I feel that if I am entertained, then there will be enough other readers who will be entertained too.”
Elmore devotees know well Elmore’s attitude toward screenwriting—“nothing but work,” trying to please clueless studio suits (as Fellini says, “a very humiliating and subservient position…slave to a very mysterious boss, a boss who doesn’t know what he wants”)—and his attitude toward writing his novels: “I look at the clock and see it’s 3 o’clock and think, ‘hey, good, I’ve got three more hours.’ and then I think, ‘I must have the best job in the world.’”
Cross-genre support here for the fact that great minds do think, and approach their art, in like manner.
