Watching Damian Pettigrew's documentary, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, is a very strange experience. If you love Fellini, especially the movies 8½ and Satyricon, you will love this film -- there are plenty of references to those movies. There are also interviews with Terence Stamp, Donald Sutherland, Roberto Benigni and Fellini himself. The strangeness arises from the fact that the Fellini sequences -- with the great man talking to the camera -- are the weakest in the film.

Early in the film there is a scene showing Fellini directing the two male stars of Satyricon as they lie on a bed and make intermittent love to a black slave. Pettigrew's camera shows Fellini's camera panning around the bed as the director gives his actors constant direction.

He speaks in a low and caressing voice. The camera stays on his face as often as it strays to the actors, and Fellini's face is a revelation. He is transported by the beauty of the scene he is creating. The way his hands move as he tells the actors what to do, the smile on his face, the absolute focus and absorption in the tableau before him -- this is a man engaged in the primary act of creation and it is no accident that he seems very much like a man beside himself with love.

There are other scenes that tell you a great deal about the art of filmmaking. In one, Fellini directs two women on a balcony. They will appear only briefly in Satyricon, but the director obsesses over each detail.

'Spread your legs,' he tells one of the women. 'No wider, wider.' He does not know their names so he calls them 'You!' and 'The other one!' When he becomes irritated, which happens often, he speaks as if he is dealing with inanimate objects that are malfunctioning.

He even admits to Pettigrew that he sees actors as little more than puppets, without thoughts or ideas of their own. How do the actors take this cavalier kind of treatment? More often than not, they appear thrilled.

Sutherland is the only one who seems (retrospectively) angry that Fellini treated him like some kind of retarded foreigner. But even he cannot keep the awe from his face. After all, Fellini is a certified genius, even if, at times, he seems nothing more than merely certifiable.

Stamp provides the film its most delightful moment. He imitates Fellini's directions to him in a thick Italian accent. 'Pretend you have been in a horgy [orgy],' says Stamp, imitating Fellini. 'A big horgy!'

As for the sequences in which Fellini speaks to the camera, the great director makes the mistake of explaining himself too clearly. He strips the mystery from his work. He is as pretentious and long-winded as his movies are direct and beautiful.

Watching him is an educational process. It should provide all artists with an object lesson in fame: Never talk about your work.