Roberto Rossellini

Fellini assisted on the script and Fabrizi played the role of the priest, while Rossellini self-produced. Most of the money came from credits and loans, and film had to be found on the black market. This dramatic film was an immediate success. Rossellini had started now his so-called Neorealistic Trilogy, the second title of which was Paisà (1946), produced with non-professional actors, and the third, Germany, Year Zero (1948), sponsored by a French producer and filmed in Berlin's French sector. In Berlin also, Rossellini preferred non-actors, but he was unable to find a face he found "interesting"; he placed his camera in the center of a town square, as he did for Paisà, but was surprised when nobody came to watch.

As he declared in an interview, "in order to really create the character that one has in mind, it is necessary for the director to engage in a battle with his actor which usually ends with submitting to the actor's wish. Since I do not have the desire to waste my energy in a battle like this, I only use professional actors occasionally". One of the reasons of success has been supposed to be the fact that Rossellini rewrote the scripts according to the non-professional actors' feelings and histories. Regional accent, dialect and costumes were shown in the film how they were in real life. Read Less

Rossellini's films after his early Neo-Realist films - particularly his films with Ingrid Bergman - were commercially unsuccessful, though Journey to Italy is well regarded in some quarters. He was an acknowledged master for the critics of Cahiers du Cinema in general and André Bazin, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard in particular. Truffaut noted in his 1963 essay, Roberto Rossellini Prefers Real Life (available in The Films In My Life) that Rossellini's influence in France particularly among the directors who would become part of the nouvelle vague was so great that he was in every sense, "the father of the French New Wave".

Martin Scorsese has also acknowledged Rossellini's seminal influence in his documentary, My Voyage to Italy (the title itself a take on Rossellini's Voyage to Italy). An important point to note is that out of Scorsese's selection of Italian films from a select group of directors (Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni) Rossellini's films form at least half of the films discussed and analyzed, highlighting Rossellini's monumental role in Italian and world cinema. The films covered include his Neo-Realist films to his films with Ingrid Bergman as well as The Flowers of St. Francis, a film about St. Francis of Assisi. Scorsese notes in his documentary that in contrast to directors who often become more restrained and more conservative stylistically as their careers advance, Rossellini became more and more unconventional and was constantly experimenting with new styles and technical challenges. Read Less