The history of Italian cinema in the mid-to-late 20th century can be summed up in two words. Dante Ferretti. The history of Italian-American cinema in the 21st century - and for a few years before - can also be summed up in two words. Dante Ferretti.

The 63-year-old production designer has crafted more important movies than you have had hot dates at the arthouse. While you were necking in the back row during the latest Pasolini or Fellini (ah memories!), Ferretti was up there on screen. He was showing - or his creative imagination was - that great filmmakers are only at the top of their game with a great designer. Ferretti made the sets and styled the looks of The Decameron, Salo, And the Ship Sails On, City of Women and Ginger and Fred. Later, he did the same for Casino, Kundun, Gangs of New York and, last for Scorsese and Oscar-winningly for himself, The Aviator.

He is the maestro. His job, he unabashedly proclaims, is second in the pecking order only to the director. “After him the first person they call on is the designer. He has to discuss the look of the film, the colour, the style. He has to scout for locations. I work many times with the same directors, but I’m like a chameleon. Every story has a different look, sometimes even if they are set in the same period.”

Take The Black Dahlia, now on release. Ferretti was invited to design it by thriller master Brian De Palma. The story is set in Hollywood, but early on De Palma was told by his cost-conscious producers, “You don’t want to film there.”

Ferretti takes up the tale. “Brian rang me and said, ‘Could you do part of the film in Bulgaria?’ I said, ‘I’ve never been there.’ ‘Nor me.’ ‘But Bulgaria has nothing to do with Los Angeles!’”

Too bad. Money had spoken. “So we go there and build a neighbourhood. We find a hill for the Hollywood sign. We build streets, shops, a movie theatre. We bring seven containers by sea full of 1940s props and furniture. We have 30 cars from America, 25 from Britain. Plus, I build 20 fibre-glass palm trees and bring the leaves from Israel. James Ellroy (author of the novel and screenplay) came to the set and said: ‘Oh Dante, it’s fantastic. I’m in Los Angeles!’”

Unbelievably, this was still cheaper than filming in LA.

The designer is a pack animal for a movie’s whole visual conception. He carries it on his shoulders with all its pressures, pains and paradoxes. This may explain why Ferretti is a burly man who looks used to bearing burdens. His features, by contrast, are patrician-Roman and his alertly darting eyes seem to be permanently on the qui vive for the collectible. We chat in a hotel bar during the Venice Film Festival. I keep wondering: is he mentally filing the Excelsior table we are sitting at as a prop? The coffee cups? The art deco ashtray?

His genius on screen is for combining a rich prolixity of detail with absolute harmonic assurance. Everything is up there; nothing is out of place. Your tongue hangs out at the opulence of the decor in A Thousand and One Nights (for Pasolini), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam) or Scorsese’s Casino. Yet the style is distinct in each. Persian miniatures; toy theatre; Vegas super-chic.

He learnt his craft as an assistant art director while simultaneously training as an architect. “I started at 17 with Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew. My last film as assistant was Satyricon with Fellini.” These two legendary filmmakers kept him occupied from 1964 until 1989.

“My mentor was Pasolini - I learnt a lot from him. He was a different kind of director from others, very poetic. His inspiration came from art. Everything was based on paintings. The Gospel was Mantegna; The Decameron was Giotto. For The Canterbury Tales there was no English painter” - I blench in national shame - “so we based it on miniatures.”

Salo was Pasolini’s Sadeian nightmare set in Mussolini’s model republic. Its sexuality and cruelty suggested a turmoil in the filmmaker’s life and prefigured, for many, his murder in a notorious gay cruising ground outside Rome. Was Ferretti aware of this darkening in the director’s life and soul?

“After Salo he gave me another script before he died. It was called Theological Pornographic Colossal. I still have it. I read it only once. I can’t tell you more.” But his expression, growing visibly more sombre even 30 years on, tells one a lot.

Fellini, meanwhile, spent years wooing Ferretti as a designer. “I had done Medea with Pasolini and Federico called to say, ‘I like you to do this film Roma, but you have to split it with Danilo Donati.’” Donati was the king of postwar Italian designers, a one-man explosion of visual ideas. “I say to him, “Listen, Mr Fellini, call me in 10 years.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why you want to ruin me? I just started. I make a film with Donati and if something doesn’t work everyone blame me, if everything works everyone praise him!’ Much later I meet Fellini at Cinecitta and he say, ‘Dantino, it’s 10 years. Now you have to work with me!’”

Fellini, it turned out, was obsessed with dreams. “He kept asking me what I had dreamt the night before. I say, ‘Why you keep asking? You suffer from insomnia?’ Every morning he say, ‘Dante, what you dream?’ The first times I say, ‘Nothing’ or ‘I can’t remember.’ Then I think, maybe I better start inventing some dreams. So on the car journey to Cinecitta every morning I make them up. It became a joke. He knew it was a joke.”

But Fellini was a jackdaw. He took or plundered everything he could (and frequently didn’t acknowledge it). Other people’s dreams, other people’s ideas. Ferretti, for instance, gave him the inspiration for the great coup de cinema in Orchestra Rehearsal.

“When the church is destroyed and you first see the wall fall from inside, he planned to use a bulldozer. You see this big machine like a monster. But a few days before, I had seen a Hollywood film about a demolition crew and they used a big ball. We don’t have balls in Italy.” (The table next to us falls silent, overhearing this, then realises what Ferretti is talking about.) “Usually in Italy they just build and never destroy! I say to myself, ‘This is interesting. The wrecking ball makes the scene more impersonal. It makes you think, ‘This came from where?’ It’s as if it’s fate, not human agent. Fellini say, ‘Dante, this is good. Maybe it’s a message from God!’”

The director and designer were soul twins. They grew up in northern Adriatic towns 70 miles apart - “We had gangs of friends like in I Vitelloni” - and both were besotted with cinema.

“There were only one or two theatres, so I saw the same films several times each week. I stole money from my parents to see films. My father always say, ‘Dante, why you not study?’ He ran a little furniture factory, so we were not rich. When I wanted to go to Rome to study production design he say, ‘If for once you get a good exam result I send you to Rome.’ I start to study. I was first in my class!”

As Fellini poached him from Pasolini, Martin Scorsese poached him from Fellini. “I was making City of Women. Scorsese was on honeymoon in Rome with Isabella Rossellini and he came to see Federico. A couple of days later he call to invite me to do The Last Temptation of Christ. But I say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m going to be busy with Terry Gilliam doing Baron Munchausen.’ Later, he want me for Cape Fear, but I’m with Zeffirelli doing Hamlet. Finally, he call me for The Age of Innocence and I have to say yes, otherwise he won’t call again!”

Ferretti was soon a Hollywood fixture. The Scorsese debut was followed by Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, shot in New Orleans when it was still New Orleans. “We built a period Mississippi waterfront right there on the river. We shot in the French Quarter. The rest we did - bayous, swamps, cemeteries - on 10 stages at Pinewood Studios, England.” Other Hollywood or international films included The Name of the Rose, Meet Joe Black and Cold Mountain.

But the enduring partnership has been with Scorsese. Ferretti researched Edith Wharton-period New York for The Age of Innocence. He spent a day with the Dalai Lama, who sketched Lhasa floorplans for Kundun. “He said, ‘This is where I slept, this is where I ate.’ He gave me five drawings and I say, ‘Could you sign them?’ He say, ‘Why?’ I say, ‘Cos maybe one day they fetch a lot at Christie’s!’”

The designer and director took over a Las Vegas gambling palace for Casino. “Scorsese say, ‘Stay here, look around, put your fantasy into it. Look - it’s a dream and sometimes it’s a nightmare.’ We had permission to shoot every day from midnight to eight in the morning. Then every day we had to remove the period dressing, take down the lights, put it back to normal so the customers could come in. Eventually we said, ‘We’ll have to build this.’ And we built a set in a disused Las Vegas dinosaur museum.”

Where else? Cinema is the art of necromancy; it is one step up from digging up fossils and assembling them to look like an animal. Re-imagining dead things - turning them into motor organisms or living history rather than museum pieces - is what great production design is about. And Ferretti insists you can do this anywhere. Vegas in a dinosaur museum. California in Bulgaria. For Gangs of New York, Manhattan in Rome.

“To recreate that period we built sets. And we said, if we build everything on backlots let’s do it at Cinecitta. At least we have fantastic restaurants in Rome. So there are, maybe, just seven or eight trick-photography backgrounds in Gangs... Why shoot against a blue screen? It’s as expensive as building sets.

“When we do The Aviator the computer-graphics shots cost much more than what we build. So we build the Chinese Theatre and a bit of Hollywood Boulevard. We build a section of Howard Hughes’s Hercules plane to full scale. We build the PanAm office and Coconut Grove. We build four villas for the scene of the crash and we build a huge model undercarriage for the plane as it scrapes the rooftop. All real size!”

Ferretti loves giantism. I learnt this 10 years ago when I went to the exhibition he designed and curated at Cinecitta in Rome, celebrating the studio’s history. A full-size replica of the crouching Colossus that adorned the chariot stadium in Ben-Hur stood sentry outside. Inside, the ceilings could hardly keep down the display pieces. Ferretti remembers the show - “I called it Cinemarchaeology.” And he mourns the grandeur that used to be Cinecitta before most of Europe’s greatest film studio was parcelled off in land sales.

“I grew up with it. Cinecitta was my mother, my father, my sister. Every set was as large as life or larger. If you wanted to build a church, you made it bigger. Now it’s no longer ‘Cinema City’. It’s Cinema Neighbourhood or Cinema Alley.”

Which doesn’t discourage Dante Ferretti. Nothing does. He loves his work. And he has no intention of suspending or sidelining it for lesser options like, say, directing.

“I don’t want to be a director. I’m a designer. That gives me all I want. I can create everything there is. Someone come up to me and say, ‘Dante, I hear you going to direct a spaghetti Western?’ I say, ‘No, I like only spaghetti to eat!’”

“The Black Dahlia” is in cinemas nationwide