Proof that not enough thought and not enough footage can get turned into too much movie, Damian Pettigrew's documentary Fellini: I'm A Born Liar turns a fond look back at the great Federico Fellini into an occasion for the kind of talky tedium Fellini's own movies would never have allowed. Centering on an extensive interview conducted a year before Fellini's 1993 death, Pettigrew takes a shotgun approach to his subject, scattering bits of the interview between film clips (including excerpts from virtually every scene in 8 1/2), archival production footage, shots of Fellini locations as they appear today, and interviews with a small handful of friends and admirers. The film plays like a dull DVD supplement, and the fault is partly Fellini's, but mostly Pettigrew's. No great fan of contextualizing his material, Pettigrew never identifies his clips, his locations, or even his interview subjects. That's fine when he's talking to the easily recognized Roberto Benigni, Donald Sutherland, and Terence Stamp, but he also expects his viewers to recognize novelist Italo Calvino or production designer Dante Ferretti on sight, to say nothing of a subject shot entirely in silhouette. But then, the film as a whole expects too much of viewers who enter with a less-than-thorough knowledge of Fellini; it eschews background information and simply plunges into a directionless discussion. Still, even a meandering discussion of Fellini is rooted in a compelling subject. Sutherland and Stamp provide some of the film's liveliest moments, telling tales of an obsessive perfectionist who treated actors as marionettes to realize his detailed, deeply personal visions. Footage of Fellini stage-directing every gesture of a sex scene bears out their accounts and justifies the film's subtitle, clashing with Fellini's own accounts of becoming a mere vessel through which his films flowed. Oddly enough, of Pettigrew's commentators on Fellini's work, Fellini himself ranks among the least insightful. When he describes a dream in which Picasso makes him an omelet using a dozen eggs, it sounds like nonsense that, had he had the chance to put it before the camera, might have become a great moment. Images, not words, made Fellini's reputation, and in I'm A Born Liar, words aren't enough to contain him.