Federico Fellini's film Nights of Cabiria was awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1957. This was the second year in a row that the award went to a Fellini film after La Strada won the award the previous year. Fellini has said that he developed the character of Cabiria from an early film of his, The White Sheik. It was Massina's performance in that film that inspired the director to move forward with Nights of Cabiria, which was based upon news reports of a woman's severed head having been retrieved in a lake.
Fellini has also noted that he modeled many of the female characters after prostitutes he met while filming Il Bidone. One, Wanda he even named after the real woman who told him stories about the life she led as a prostitute. The auteur is most well known for his ability to take what he has seen from life and masterfully portray it on the silver screen, and this film is no exception.
Fellini chose Pier Paolo Pasolini to help with the dialogue, as he had a working knowledge of the Italian criminal underground and how the people spoke that he encountered. Fellini did this because he wanted to give an authenticity to the characters that he was creating on screen. But, with this authenticity came difficulty finding funding for the film as noone was interested in putting up money for a movie where the main characters were prostitutes. That is until Dino De Laurentiis put up the money for production. Fellini gave his steady direction and inspired symbols to the imagery of the film as it went on to claim an Oscar in 1957.
