In a number of interviews to promote the film, writer-director Federico Fellini said that his initial inspiration for the film was a woman's sack dress—and what could hide beneath it. Said Brunello Rondi, Fellini's cowriter in the film, "these sack dresses struck Fellini because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside."
In writing the film, Fellini and his cowriters drew heavily upon events of the time. For instance, the 1950 suicide of Italian novelist Cesare Pavese inspired Fellini and his cowriters to create the character of Steiner. They also drew upon a 1958 investigation from Italy in which two children claimed to have seen the Madonna (or mother Mary) near the town of Terni. Finally, the dead sea monster towards the end of the film was drawn from the Montesi incident, in which the body of a young woman washed up on a beach.
As Fellini geared up to shoot La Dolce Vita, the auteur theory was not widely accepted by the general public. But Fellini adhered to the theory, which posited that the director is the biggest creative force in the film. And Fellini certainly exerted a lot of control on La Dolce Vita.
From a very early stage, Fellini decided to combine location shooting and shooting on constructed sets. This presented Fellini with a number of problems, but he was able to overcome them with the help of his genius and his crew.
