[Strategia del ragno and Il conformista] share the theme of betrayal, a past that returns and the weight of the father g- ure, with the difference that in Il conformista the son, Trintignant, betrays Professor Quadri (the father gure), while in Strategia del ragno Athos the father is the traitor. Both, however, deal with par- ricide based on a past and a memory. In Il conformista the memory is of French and American lm from the ‘30s, while Strate- gia del ragno was fed by real childhood memories (…).
I shot Il conformista leaving it open to the possibility of telling it chronologically, like the novel by Moravia. Right from the start I was fascinated by the possibility of using the car journey as the lm’s “present”, a kind of vessel for the story. In other words, the main character travels in his memory as well. For this reason I shot a lot of ma- terial for Trintignant’s trip. With a great editor like Kim [Arcalli], bit by bit you can see the structure of the lm materialize as it is created. A lm’s structure is only outlined by the screenplay. It begins to ex- ist and manifest itself during lming. But it is during the editing phase that it takes shape de nitively.
Bernardo Bertolucci, in Enzo Ungari, Scene madri di Bernardo Bertolucci, Ubu- libri, Milan 1982

This is not the place to meticulously ana- lyze how and to what extent young Berto- lucci – between a freedom bordering on healthy insolence and trimming that was necessary – changed the gures and facts lling the four hundred pages of Mora- via’s novel and reducing it to less than two hours. Suf ce it to say that the eighty pages of the prologue (…) are turned into a short sequence, interspersed with hal- lucinatory, distorted visual effects, one of the dominant stylistic features of the lm. (…)
Sex and fascism are the two extremes of Il conformista. Or, if one prefers, the pulp and the skin. Conformist Marcello thirsts for normality to cover his unspoken, feared sexual abnormality. He becomes a fascist because he sees in fascism a collective myth to which he can sacri ce his own disorder, what makes him different from the others, in a mirage of order. He kills for fascism under the illusion of redeem- ing a previous crime with a criminal but legalized action. It is evident that Mar- cello is a fascist by chance, in reality he is a conformist: his conformism is fascist, but it could be another kind in different historical circumstances. It would be easy to reduce the lm Il conformista to being a lm “about” the fascist, as a costume, neglecting its powerful criticism of a class and of a generation.
Morando Morandini, Il conformista, in In viaggio con Bernardo. Il cinema di Bernar- do Bertolucci, edited by Roberto Campari and Maurizio Schiaretti, Marsilio, Venice 1994