Filming 'The Trial' [1981] (Unedited) - Rare Orson Welles Documentary

[Applause] good evening thank you for coming they're two bikes does that mean they're both mine or are we one is for the ones i see and i talk into this one it doesn't matter what making of the trial was just a few stories about it and it would seem to me that this was the best place to get some questions and and try some answers and i hope not to bore you my cinematographer mr gary graver master of technical things doesn't know what to do with the chord you ready for me to give the thing all right real real one take one okay again i never did that very well all right okay any questions yes sir i noticed there were classical elements of the music and the score and also jazz and i was wondering how you decided on the different elements and where each type of music would go in the film well you know that's uh there are two ways of answering that kind of question one is pompously to pretend that i had a master plan and the other is to admit that i put it in where i thought it would sound good you know uh which sounds like begging the question what is the truth the basis of course is the is the jesualdo which is the basic music of it which became a hit as a result of that nobody had ever heard it and there was one very limited record of it and after that it was europe it was played all over like a hit tomb in fact a lot more people heard that music that saw the movie anywhere it's extraordinary piece of music because it's a it's uh it's got musical ideas in it that didn't turn up again for 200 years and it's curiously romantic for barack music and full of doom and and beauty and i liked it for the picture i don't know if i would now as you notice i came in afterwards i never liked to see my movies because i like to remember them as being so much better than they really were and that's true sir what inspired you to make the trial well that's a story i take you to the mountains of austria where with my family i was enjoying the winter sports hoping i would be able to pay the hotel bill at the end of it and had just completed being interviewed by orianna folacci who had stated in the italian press that i was undoubtedly the next american president my constituency at the time consisted of my wife and daughter so i didn't see much future in it uh for me and the white house and i was waiting for the phone to ring is it which is what all of you will be doing if all of you are rash enough to go into the film business and a family of people called the salkins came into my life they are a dynasty of filmmakers old man salkin who was an adorable little old gentleman who hadn't paid a bill in about 32 years but loved movies genuinely loved movies and his son alexander came to see me now the old man salkan has gone to dwell beyond the morning stars and is a sort of dean of the salkan tribe because it's his son who has made the supermans and the millions and millions and so on that the salkins have made the old man the adorable old man had made the a famous movie at least in my youth in the textbooks on movies it was considered a great movie which was the don quixote of shalyaptin and he had made the first garbo movie and he had a distinguished career they had then escaped from europe and become mexican film producers where they'd made about 40 mexican pictures the quality of which i i'm not prepared to speak about they arrived in this little tiny austrian alpine village in a taxi cab which they had taken from from innsbruck and for which they did not have the money to pay but this is really true and uh that didn't come out till later and they said we want you to make taurus bulba and uh well taurus move is a wonderful story uh google is my favorite russian writer and i thought that's absolutely wonderful these people have come all the way up into the alps they're all ready to make tartarus bulba splendid i started to write a script of it and then i must stop and say that they had to borrow the money to get the in the cab back to innsbruck but that was supposed to be because of problems with the exchange they hadn't been able to get austrian shillings or something later i was to discover that they didn't have any money at all which i think is admirable you know here they were making a trip across europe coming to ask me to make a movie for which they didn't have a cent they didn't even have to eat and they came back again in another taxi and they said we've just read that yule brynner is making taras bulba in the argentine which indeed he did i saw a little piece of it for the first time the other night on television it was pretty bad but there it was uh uh tyrus bulba they said we can't have two of them i said that's true they said we have here a list of movies we are ready to finance you pick up the out the one you like they didn't say what do you want to make they said here is our list and i said i couldn't add to this list any no they said here they are and there were about 82 titles most of which were impossible and the most likely of which was the trial so i said we'll do the trial so we made the trial and i know that kind of answer is very disappointing because you want to think of a film maker as having studied at his library the work which sings the most perfect song to him and that i had spent my life wanting to realize kafka on the screen i'd never given a thought to it but it was uh it was a book i admired a writer i admired and i was a challenge i was very happy to accept and challenge indeed it was because we went to yugoslavia to shoot it and i designed all the scenery which was going to be a physically a very different movie the scenery was going to come begins coming slightly apart all the time so that it was sort of flying away into the darkness it was very elaborate and uh i think interesting maybe maybe pretentious a visual idea for it and all of this was to have been built by the yugoslavs and we did those yugoslav scenes which did not require sets we needed an enormous building where we could do that office scene where all the people are typing you know and they did indeed get from olivetti ten thousand typewriters and ten thousand uh uh desks and all that we shot that and then the yugoslavs did a trick which they sometimes do i don't mean the yugoslavs as a race i mean the yugoslavs as producers because like all people who have lived under occupation for a long time the irish for instance and particularly the yugoslavs had lived for 400 years under the turks and we must understand that all people who are occupied for a long time learn as an act of honor to steal from strangers quite seriously in other words they won't steal from each other but it's a stranger comes with a lot of money from hollywood or whatever it is steal if you can and uh in the case of the trial they did what they did to hundreds of italian co-producers they got us right up to the day when we were going to be in the studio which we never got to see for some mysterious reason it was always a breakdown of a car so we never got to look at it finally they came to that day and they said we made a miscalculation in the money and we need another three hundred thousand dollars well the salkins didn't have the money to pay our hotel bill in zagreb much less for these sets which had not even begun to be built and the yugoslavs believed that they had us by the well-known situation as indeed they've done with many co-productions and so on and i said to to old man salkin get a train the night train tickets on the night train don't say anything we're all leaving town so we all left town to the astonishment of the yugoslavs who had expected that they'd be able to get the other half of the picture and own it in order to provide the sets so we arrived back in paris there were no sets there was no money out loud enough i should explain that um in my reading of the book and of course everybody reads the book as a different book and my reading is probably more wrong than a lot of peoples i see the monstrous bureaucracy which is the villain of the peace as not only kafka's clairvoyant view of the future but his racial and cultural background of being occupied by the austro-hungarian empire and i see the a curious combination of the book of an unthinkably sterile future combined with an unthinkably dusty accumulation of of those traditions which bureaucrats set up in order to perpetuate their their monstrous lives if i sound like our president i pro profoundly apologize so i have made a parenthesis here about that style to explain how it was that we came to do it we came to do it because i picked it out of a list and we shot most of it in paris because i wanted a 19th century look to a great deal of what would be in fact expressionistic and on the first night in paris i was in a hotel near the same and i am very very i hate to use the word superstitious because i take it more seriously i'm awfully serious about the moon i think the robert graves was right when he said that the most blasphemous thing that has happened since alexander cut the gordian knife uh guardian knot was when we landed on the moon and having let loose with a piece of eccentricity of that kind you see what you're dealing with a point there is that the only name on the moon is nixon and that they played golf [Music] anyway we are in paris and i am looking out of the window at three in the morning wondering how we can shoot and i see two moons two full moons and i go out on the balcony of my hotel room and i see that they are the two clocks on the gar door say i went downstairs got in a cab went to the guy door say which was empty it only had two trains that came in a day and i wandered around and i saw that that was where the picture could be made so that is how it happened to be picked and why it happened to be made that way i'll try and give you a fast answer to the next one yes ma'am this might give you a chance for a short answer uh in this film joseph k runs down that hallway with those alternating arched mirrors and in citizen kane that famously in in that archway where she appears in between oh yes and you get the mirrors and lady from shanghaine and citizen kane i wonder if you would comment on at maybe on the frequency of multiple mirrors that you use in in a number of your films in which a man usually a man but a character in distress sees himself over and over and over in these mirrors i can give you a an impressive answer which will embarrass me and i can also to remind you that i'm a magician and that people say that everything a magician does is done with mirrors you know which is a frivolous answer and then i can try to give a serious answer which is that the camera is a peculiar kind of mirror and that uh turning the mirror on it seems to me a kind of a magical thing to do i can't tell you why way in the back sir why don't you come up here all right yeah come down that's good i was wondering whether you thought there was enough sympathy for the main character in this film i didn't hear that enough difference between do you think that there was enough sympathy for the main character in this film were you satisfied no that's an interesting question and i'm glad you asked me that a strange thing happened with that movie it got wonderful press all over the world even in america even in time and newsweek and everything wonderful press and perkins got very bad press all over the world and the entire blame for that is mine because he is a superlative actor and he played the character that i saw as k and paid the price because nobody else sees it my way i find in the book repeated indications that kay is a pusher on his way up the bureaucracy not mr zero in the adding machine not little mr nobody not the poor little faceless accountant but a young man very anxious to get ahead in this awful world and doing his best to do that and therefore in a state of of real neuroses because he is both terrified of and anxious to conquer the same thing i recognize that i did tony who is one of the best actors we have a great disservice because he deserved to have made a tremendous success and if he didn't with the critics the blame is 100 percent with me yes sir um in the making of othello you said you believed in the existence of evil and the evil here in this film seems to be from within man from its his people his laws his buildings it seems as if you're saying in this film that evil comes from within man and not from outside from nature do you believe that i didn't hear one word i'm sorry i'm sorry in the filming of othello you said you believed in the existence of evil and in this film the evil seems to come from within man from his people from his buildings from his laws they seem to control this man of society's life and destiny are you saying then that evil comes from within man and not from outside from nature wow wow uh i do indeed believe in the existence of evil and to that extent i'm at odds with most of the people especially of my generation uh i think evil is a force so great that it is beyond me to decide whether it is generated entirely within man or whether it is a condition a contagion as well as uh something that we generate within ourselves the power of it is so great that uh uh it humbles me it's the metaphysics are beyond me on that i could i'd like to sit at a coffee table and argue it but i wouldn't like to be on a distinguished diet of this kind in a great university saying something for quotation on such a majestic theme and i have a mic and you don't my english is very bad your english is very good and that's nothing to do with that it's it's it's it's i really enveloped that and if you reorder the chapters in the story for any particular did i reorder the chapters in other words did i change the did i change the plot line uh the the the narrative line of course of course every film is an original work a film should never be an illustration of a book or of a play it should be itself and it cannot be itself unless its creator a word for which i apologize because i hear the word creator and creativity much too much nowadays but the maker the picture maker is after all engaged in an art form which is entirely different from literature and the theater and he has not only the perfect right but the obligation to turn the work into something a little different than the author intended not to perfectly realize it if he perfectly realizes it we might just as well have lantern slides and somebody with a lovely voice reading the book i hear her perfectly we usually do yes already oh this was all lost the only good answer is gone forever all right yes sir one of the things that i find most interesting about the film is again your use of architecture and how all the buildings seem to be connected except i guess for kaye's apartment he seems to go through hallways and get to the different rooms even though the architecture is quite different i'm wondering if you comment more on this it's part of the i say in the picture that it's a dream that i made a picture like a dream i attempted to make a picture which is like some of the dreams i have had i think it's pompous and silly to say what a dream is like because we're all dreamers and we all dream different ways and uh i i move from one kind of architecture to another in my dreams without any difficulty whatsoever and uh it's a little harder to do with a camera and make make you believe you're in the same movie but that comes from years of hanky-panky and sidearm snookery do you think it is a dream no no i don't but i had to say something to a mass audience i had to find a way to make this accessible to an audience of many millions of people and the way to do to do that was to say it's a dream so i slightly evaded both questions um one of the changes the amazing story was at the very at the very end when joseph k is killed he's killed in a very alarmingly different way than in the book and i was really curious as to why he changed both the way he was killed and the way he was acting when he died because the book was written before the holocaust and i couldn't bear the defeat of kay in the book after the holocaust i'm not jewish but we are all jewish since the holocaust and i couldn't bear for him to submit to death as he does in kafka masochistically submit to death it it stank of the old bro prague ghetto to me and i had to let him i had to let him shout out defiance until he was blown up there's also an embarrassing thing in the picture which is the mushroom-shaped cloud well it turns out that any big explosion you could make ends up in the shape of a mushroom so we spent an afternoon trying to get a cloud that wouldn't end up looking like a mushroom because i hate symbolism but there it was so i said all right there's going to be symbolism whether we like it or not you know yes sir this film the computer is portrayed as sort of a dumb adding machine the people manipulating it are the ones evil is that your belief about the computer that it's merely a big adding machine and that it's not intrinsically evil itself well the question is interesting because there's an enormous scene in the picture which was cut out by me two hours before the opening night in paris which was a scene about the computer which would have more fully explained my attitude at that time about computers my attitude has changed slightly but only slightly since then and i believe that the what that scene did which had uh uh uh played almost nine minutes and as i say i cut it out the afternoon of the opening what that seed did was to show man's slavish relationship to something which is really only his tool that was a splendid thing to say but it turned out to be rather a drag in the picture so i took it up look at how nimble she is uh why is the condemned man attractive after 19 years do you have anything to add to that why is the condemned man attractive or attractive you comment in the film about you know the women find him attractive and then your character says that people seem drawn to him and he's fascinating yeah well you know my character is you you don't believe a word i say do you in the movie you're not you're not supposed to that's that's that's the real like that's the that's a real masochistic that that's the that's the kafka the masochist that is most uh narcissistic you know look at my beautiful blood you know as it streams down but of course nothing the advocate says is meant to be true the reason that you like to dub the voices of minor characters in your films and which characters did you dub in the trial i don't like to dub the minor characters but by the time we get to dubbing there usually isn't any more money particularly if you're working with the salkins at that period and as in the case of othello where i did play practically the whole my supporting cast it was economic because you don't get it you don't get a good actor for free to go into a dark room and spend all day trying to lip-sync you know it's a thankless job yes way in the back you in the pretty white dress cannot be passed down she's got to repeat why did you choose for yourself the role of the advocate and not one of the accused well i thought that i didn't want to play the advocate i didn't want to be in it and you would be astonished at the different people i offered it to including gleason i did i played the advocate because there was no other actor of my caliber that i could afford but i enjoyed doing it once i saw romeo in that white uh nurses uniform i enjoyed every minute of it yes how did you cast the actors in the trials how did i cast the actors in the trial the same as i cast in any movie but by i i i don't want my answer to sound uh condescending uh by uh picking the people that seem to be best adapted for it in uh in the case of the trial of course i had a co-production and a co-production means that you have different nations involved so i had to have some germans and some french and some english and therefore there are some german actors who might not have been german otherwise but i think all the germans are very good at it uh the uh i had to get tamarov in it was an american so we had to have a plenty of french actors so i had a very good actor maurice tennac who played the manager so i was very happy to have him i was limited by the nationalities but that's not such a terrible limitation the world is full of wonderful actors who who uh luckily speak our language although they are getting fewer and fewer because after the war every young actor quickly learned english thinking that was the only way to get ahead and nowadays actors of your age do not speak english in all the countries in the world very few bother to and you're left with those same old faces because uh they don't pictures have ceased to be international think how few international pictures play here or in london or in berlin i'm not speaking of festivals i mean in theaters so what everybody thought they're going to make english-speaking pictures forever everybody learned english so it was much easier 20 years ago to uh cast it across the european continent as well as you could and not be disappointed with the result i miss cast of course every director does that every director makes terrible mistakes and and uh there's nothing you can do about it but i i don't remember that uh uh except for the my controversial reading of k that there's anything that could possibly be called bad casting in it but i don't know is there would somebody say if they think somebody else was badly cast be interesting to hear it won't hurt my feelings a bit i think you do yes great for you god good out to just at the keyboard uh oh better in one word the real problem don't roll the real problem because the middle of a story is nothing to do that's why so many of my answers turn out to be low-class economic works you know no we have a we have the lady there how much how much obligation do you feel to a mass audience ah we we were on the lady back or i met you then go ahead how much obligation do you feel to a mass audience how much obligation do i feel how much must you modify your vision so that people will there's a missing word here on between what i feel and to a mass audience obligation i would love to have a mass audience you're looking at a man who's been searching for a mass audience and if i hadn't had one i'd be obliged that's all i could say [Applause] here comes the man who looks like he's about to shoot me talking about money do you think if you'd had a great deal of it it would have made your films better or did your poverty help your creativity in any way did my poverty help my creativity uh no no i think however that it is possible to spoil a young director by giving him too much money so that he does not learn one of the main arts of directing which is the ability to walk away from something when it is not perfect no fine movie was ever made by a director who wants everything to be perfect any more than because every bad painting has every leaf in the tree and every great painting makes you see a tree and there are great lessons to be learned by not using money by not using the studio largesse unquestioningly but there is no advantage in having to reach in your pocket and pay madeline robinson her salary at the end of every week otherwise she'd leave the picture which is what happened to the trial i can't remember many of them i was thinking on the way here trying to remember them because i thought it might be amusing to think of what i what a fool i'd been not to have done this or that and i can't remember what they were there were a lot of 19th century french novels uh and plays for the most part and some russian ones all in the taste of the old salkin and not very much in mine obviously this one but a number of other ones generate a sort of a palpable feel of oppression are you as pessimistic as that seems to indicate or is that just what you like to deny as pessimistic as would seem to be indicated by the feeling of oppression in the trial and the sort of visual oppression that comes over in a number of your other pictures yes i am a profound pessimist with a sentimental inclination to hope that pangloss was right and that i'm wrong i have a sentimental inclination toward hope i believe in bravery and uh worship it to me it's one of the the greatest virtues there are and the fact that i'm a pessimist is part of what gives bravery such an importance to me don't call me a macho that's not what i'm talking about yes every time i see this film i'm so struck by the brilliant use of space in so many of the environments and yet in the kafka story all the spaces seem very cramped i wondered if you would talk about what led you to change the conception of space was it the different medium or your own vision or anything else i mean in terms of moving it away from the kind of space that was in the novel and the kind of space that you have in the film that's a better question than i have an answer for honestly it is i i don't know i would want to think about it i think i think my answer would be frivolous and i'd like to think about it it's it's a it's a it's a worrisome question i don't know i i thought that i was being faithful to a uh to my reading of the book and i know that nobody agrees with me including those people who like the picture as well as those who dislike it but i did not consciously uh change what i thought was its essential meaning but uh that's as far as i can go as big a boast as i dare to make yes what do you um what do you see as the role of seduction in bureaucracy there seem to be lots of sexual symbols or sexuality is almost the second as almost the antagonist along with the bureaucratic oppression that really is catholic it's part of the fascination of the book uh is the uh is that is that insistent and almost honoristic eroticist eroticism i find that in the book it's not a it's not an obsession or a specialty of mine uh i'm not uh i'm not um i would be happy to make a movie in which i would be happy to have 40 years of movie making ahead of me in which it would never be necessary for me to ask the leading man to take his pants off you know but the eroticism in kafka is is inevitable it's there and it's very strong i think yes um you have been quoted uh as uh in an interview that was taken before the trial was filmed that you did not think that you would be the man to film the trial tonight you have said that uh you took the trial on own practically because it was the least intolerable prospect offered to you not least tolerable at least intolerable at least intolerable no i didn't find no i if i said that i was making a bad joke and i i i've expressed myself badly best of the 80 or the most likely you said of the 80 that you were working it was the title i liked um anyways uh i would say that the main character is somewhat less passive than the characters i've read in kafka uh taking all that together do you think that your world vision is uh close to kafka's and do you think that's uh something to take into consideration for you to make a movie out of his work you know i didn't follow that help me out oh i'm sorry let me why it's my world vision close to god of course not not at all i you know he was a creature uh born entirely of the uh austro-hungarian empire of of his uh of his own people his own religion uh the uh uh between the two world wars there's every possible difference between us we could not possibly have the same vision even if our genes were the same there's no way we could see the world the same at this different moment in the turning of the globe and therefore you will say i shouldn't have made the picture and there's no answer to that either yes sir can you tell us about you my work as a cinematographer your work with the cinematographer in planing the look of this film i never never sit down and plan with a cinematographer no storyboard no no no i had storyboards in kane only because i was made to out all right sound roll five the question is about planning right did you go to the set each day not knowing what you're going to where you're going to plop the camera down or i do i do i think i believe i'm the only director that i know of who does this particular thing which is probably the worst way to go about it i didn't begin this way but i have developed this way i light a set before i decide where anybody will go with the cat where the cameraman and then when the set looks right to me i put the actors where i think they ought to be i don't put the actors and then light the set that's the exact opposite because the set is all we have besides the actors and and it ought to have a chance and and the only way to give it a chance is to begin with it that's my theory anyway who yes who have been who i'm at uh how much did the trial cost to make how much did the trial well that will never be known it cost me about eighty thousand dollars i never made any money cost me about eighty thousand dollars in fact it's cost me a lot more money to be a film director than i've ever made that's literally true so let that be an encouragement to you all in the red in the corner that's a corner with nikoi in the uh program notes it's it mentions that the film was not as great a critical success in britain and in america as it was in the on the continent in europe that's wrong we got wonderful reviews uh uh except uh except for the character of kay it's been my questions tossed out no uh what i was going to comment on was that during the while i was watching the film i i had a feeling of a very what i would consider something that comes from american traditions of law and british traditions of law of this campaign this exactly this can't happen and that uh i thought that maybe that was a very american thing in a very british account and not a european thing yes well it is a very european film it was made by me really as a european director it was not it was it was made with a europe essentially european cast there was no attempt to stick into it things which would make it seem as though it's also america because i don't think there's anything in kafka which will support that to me is middle europe middle europe middle europe and no escape from it it's part of his prison it's part of his enchantment you will use the same actor today or what actor you will choose today to make the triad to make uh k yeah if i were going to do it again you mean giving given the difference of age i think um pacino but then i think pacino and almost anything i can think of such a fan of his but i think he'd be marvelous yes but that's accounting for the difference of age of course tony's too old now we're not running him down we've got somebody they're the easiest one to reach isn't it unfair all right with um with all the escapist movies that that have come out in the last few years is there some topic that you would like to make into a movie that to to retaliate against all of this uh bs to retaliate against uh escapist movies i love escapist movies i love it i see i see no obligation on the part of the of a filmmaker to uh to be serious uh or even to be uh adult i think it's very nice to make movies for children and to make movies for the child which is in every grown person my difficulty with with science fiction movies i used to write it for my living when there was a thing called the pulps which only the most elderly of you will even recognize as a word but i was a pulp writer and i used to write lobstermen from mars and all that and i have a certain uh notoriety in the science fiction field but uh it's never been anything i like very much because i don't believe in the future that doesn't mean i think where everything's going to end at this moment but i think this future is a total hypothesis i believe in the present insofar as we can grab it and the past and if anything about the future i don't believe all they've got to do is put on one of those those bike helmets you know and silver things and start off into the world of of optical printing and i'm up the aisle you see and not because they're bad movies but because i don't respond i didn't like westerns until i was about 50 years old and i began to see them rerun on television i never went to them as a child and i now i'd adore them and i might learn to like uh you know zing zing and up in outer space but for the moment it doesn't say anything to me but i'm in favor of them i think it's fine i don't think as long as they are not uh violent for the sake of violence or or uh in any way fascistic in their tone as long as they partake of a myth or of the mythic quality which a film can can call upon i think it's a marvelous exercise in virtuosity and i immensely admire the people who make them are there any child-like aspects to the trial and if you made it again would you uh insert any do you think so i i have a great difficulty finding them yes i don't think there are but there are there must be because uh nobody is completely grown up and no work of art god what a terrible thing have i said no uh no movie no movie uh uh no movie is made by a complete adult you know first of all i don't know any complete adults in civilian life so why how could they have infiltrated movies you know it's unthinkable seems to me could you wait just a minute okay thanks go ahead in regarding that gentleman's last comment i did find some a lot of childlike aspects in it especially in relation to certain kinds of fairy stories uh especially in the trial especially alice in wonderland and the wizard of oz and your big scene when you're booming to akim tamarov i was wondering if you were thinking of that to some degree yes they are they are they are perhaps they're childlike uh perhaps that's the right word for them i thought of them as as uh simple-minded and uh uh i thought of them as being related to the to grim you know and that of course takes us to childhood but you know the the great the great fairy tales which were invented uh by people living in forests uh before the electric light uh still live on and our reactions to certain kinds of horror and delight and even to cruelty which is in uh which is in this picture you've seen is i suppose childlike yes but i hadn't thought of it i i'm you're teaching me things i didn't know yes such a wonderful big house you know that's what makes it where is this person having seen citizen kane and the trial it seems that both films seem to adopt a sort of brechtian view of man and society or man versus man and i was very curious had you ever thought of doing a breakfast or did that ever well uh dick wilson here was my partner for a long time was sitting in the front here and i were going to do the first production of galileo and i worked with brecht and lawton on it and that's as far as i'm prepared to go about on the subject of what is brechtian and not because i admired him enormously and thought that he was two people one a jesuit trained literature man who wanted all of his works published in the best leather and kept forever and a dogmatist and all of that was very superficial he was essentially a very astute theater man and his theory was mostly self-defense i was wondering um what you did to affect really the dizziness of kay in that movie because i felt very closed in uh when he was getting dizzy inside that courtroom and when he was trying to escape you felt very closed in when i was dizzy and trying to get out of the the courtroom yes that was the idea i'm just wondering how you did sorry if you hadn't no what did you do oh how i did it the mastery of the cinnamon i'll tell you how we did it we put entirely too many people in in in the room that there was you see it was we made claustrophobia by overcrowding sir well i think it is i think it is the picture very much in poland and it has been dubbed there i understand i was told by a polish director the other day however no picture of mine has ever played in the soviet union but all the satellite countries yes could you uh tell us a little bit more about the ending how you arrived at it uh you told us a little bit why but how did you come upon the ending as you did i i don't know how i came upon it i wanted i wanted kay to make a final gesture even if it was fruitless you know if we want to be if we want to pin a label on it it's existentialist i couldn't bear for him to have his throat split like a pig and he throws the he throws the grenade back uh which is a j which is a way of saying no and it seems to me seem to me that putting a man in a hole with a bomb and letting him try to throw the bomb out expressed that as well as i could think it was as simple a way of stating it as i could think of and i haven't since then tried to think of a better one maybe i i would have but i having done it i yes some full-throated gentleman out there here we go okay i have a question about your coverage of scenes you've been noted for many rather exceptional long takes such as the boarding house sequence and kane are the first sequence in the room in this film do you customarily cover everything in a map i cover nothing okay cover nothing never cover so you mean when when we see on the screen a long take does that mean that that's all you've seen that's all there is okay that pretty much i was taught that by jack ford because once when ford finished a movie he never cut it you know he had nothing to do with the editing he never went into the moviola he never saw a rough cut he usually went on a big drunk and the way he had it protecting himself was to give them nothing to go to so if he wanted the if he wanted the girl to say yes duke that was all she got to say she didn't get to listen to all the rest of the scene or say the dialogue that he expected her not to say that's all he shot and he told me to do it and i followed his instructions yes sir yeah with respect to that opening long take moment sure with respect to the opening long day yeah with respect to the opening long take how did you determine exactly when you chose to cut away from it when to cut away it's midway through the scene where you begin to break it up into individual shots what what determined the change in the handling of the song i can't remember i just it's uh all i have is a dumb answer i really can't remember because i believe it occurs right to the right in the middle of a section there's no special reason why the long take necessarily ends at that point maybe maybe there's a mistake there of some kind you know i don't know uh it seemed to me that we cut only when we went into the other room with a uh with a woman that was the intention no or what i i don't know this so i i really don't know when we cut short maybe that may have been that short end of the film yes as long as we're still talking about as long as we're still talking about the uh long takes um i was wondering if that tendency in the films is more out of uh your roots in the theater and presenting something in real time or was it more for an expressionist reason no a long take for me is uh depends on two things a very good technical crew and there are less of them every day in the world all over the world because of television and very good actors the longest i've done very long i've done i did the first real length takes that were ever made and they ended up not that because they cut into them in ambushes but they were real length and in macbeth they are real length full in length i believe that uh it is an enormous help to a cast if they're good enough to play the rhythm of an entire sequence uh rather than uh leaving it to the director entirely because the director has i always suspect a little bit too much power in movie-making i think the actor is in in film studies the actor is underrated the story and the director is gets a little more credit than this deserved because actors keep showing us things we never suspected any good director is constantly astonished by something that his cast has given him you know yes but i got a lot of could you repeat yeah there yes sir maybe i'm an incurable optimist but i got a lot of hope out of the picture um partly out of the character's integrity and and that he was kind of a hero in his integrity and things and he wouldn't stand for things did you mean for a lot of hope to come i am the kind of optimist that believes in integrity and in all the all these all these virtues which illuminate western civilization and which are only i hope temporarily out of fashion uh i don't believe that these that the that the um physical outlook of mankind changes virtue and only our obliges is to behave better although that's awfully solemn that's uh how about them i know we're neglecting some people been there back there we do this first here and then go back there look at her she's way down there maybe we could pass it on how about how about trying to shout it i'll repeat it i know i was um i noticed the continuity between the the trial and a lot of your films dating back to citizen kane as your view seems to be opposed to some of the best interests of the corporate elite of which you speak directly about in the trial and i was wondering if you thought your personal financial position as a film director is directly related to the fact that a lot of your views and your films throughout these ages have not exactly expressed their interest [Applause] would anybody like to answer that question good stand up let's hear it my personal opinion is that it's true and that from what i've read from your career although i wasn't alive at the time you first were making films that that you've had a tremendous problem with the press and corporate bureaucracy dating back you know since the earliest portions of your career and that this is continuing today and that's one of the reasons why you're been unable to finish uh some of your more recent projects well the only uh yeah there are only two main projects which are unfinished one is uh the other side of the wind and when i tell you that my partner in that project is the brother-in-law of the late shah of iran you will understand why we are having a little legal difficulty the other unfinished film is don quixote which was a private exercise of mine and it will be finished as an author will finish it at my own good time when i feel like it it is not unfinished because of financial reasons and when it is released its title is going to be when are you going to finish don quixote yes there's a there's a and going up look at that thank you uh thank you you have to do this terrible slap real something or other that's what makes it so easy for the cutters i appreciate so very much your use of depth of field especially in this film my question is why do you think that it's being dropped in filmmaking today why do i think why do you think it's not being used in filmmaking today did you have any peculiar problems with it or is it just a style i don't really understand the question i'm sorry not just the words you never get the same depth of field in color as you do in black and white and uh secondly a lot of the depth of field in the in kane was fake it was split screen people you know we made up we said we'd invented a new lens that was just publicity no truth at all what was it called dick we had some great word for it i forgot and it was a fake whenever the shot became impossible we we did the old split screen that's it that's it are you used [Music] uh i expect to use it i'm going i'm about to make two movies and one will have no depth of field whatever and uh because it's a very romantic story and depth of field is the enemy of romance it is and the other is a modern story about uh an american political candidate and it'll have as much depth of field as we can get [Applause] somebody that hasn't who's nearest the mike or doesn't seem a fair way to go about it anybody who looks for justice in this world yes got somebody yes um your implication or your statement that this film is a dream as you express it it uh seems to say that the conflict within the film is within the main character's mind would you care to define the conflict within his mind you know you're all above my head you mean do you mean well if this film's a dream yeah obviously it'd be the main character's dream if you say it's my dream okay well if it's your dream then the conflict is within your mind what is the what is the mental conflict in the film it's not just it's not just this one man against against society it's obviously something that's going on i dreamt about him okay i dreamt about him and it's not a conflict with society it's a failure to flourish and and flower in society he's not really in conflict with society he's based the man is basically a conformist he's not in conflict with society but you see that society is is killing him even though he's not fighting it he doesn't put up much of a fight yes in the back way in the back blue shirt wait for the money thank you he fights for each of you as each issue comes along but you don't see a man in a in a real aggressive position against society yeah uh on that uh that response i'm wondering then if you say that he's not really in conflict with his society whether that makes him if you say that he's not in conflict with the society okay would that make him an autobiographical character for you no i don't regard societies in conflict with at least in terms of your filmmaking career no no i mean anybody who goes into films uh it has to be a little crazy and uh has to be ready for every kind of uh of uh disappointment and defeat and must be grateful for any kind of uh evening such as this that he can get out of it uh it is an almost it's mathematically almost an impossible medium to succeed in on the on any sort of important level and to have achieved enough interest for you have come into this room is uh is uh the answer to conflict with society i'm in no conflict with that i'm in conflict with the reagan administration [Applause] or what who who's got a microphone near you who's near a microphone there yeah i was wondering why in the prologue to the film i was wondering why the prologue to the film you chose to use the pin screen technique when there really wasn't that much actual animation instead of just using charcoal paintings or something well this is the attempt this is the attempt to destroy him to destroy his his faith to destroy his character that that fairy story is part of the plot against him we are all told fairy stories some of those fairy stories are in tv commercials some of them are in presidential addresses some of them are uh in editorials some of them are are in skywriting and uh that prologue which by the way is made by a couple of wonderful mad russians living in paris and they make their they make their pictures by putting pins into blocks of wood little needles and the needles are at different degrees of depth so that when a light falls on it you get the light and shadow from the pins or the needles that's what those extraordinary pictures come from and i thought they gave a uh in other words that was the marriage to the brothers grim and we repeat the story when uh when i attempt again to corrupt him i'm there i miss chief corrupter i'm the devil if the fable is a lie and what hassler says are also lies why do you tell the story at the beginning of the movie in character as yourself because the film is contained the the life of this man is contained within a lie we do not have the kind of novel in which a character leaves a real or benign world and enters a world of nightmare he was born into it conceived in the womb of horror that's why i begin with it in other words he can't escape because that's where he was born any more than a baby in bangladesh can escape dying of starvation i don't know if this is a meaningful point but when you are speaking at the beginning of the picture you are not in character as hassler you are playing the voice of orson welles as you are playing at the end of the day now that's the magician i'm tricking the audience into believing that that's a point of view so that in a certain atmosphere because that kind of trickery is legitimate i think i want the audience to feel the doom into which k is born and to believe that it is there it's the voice of the devil but it's not my voice it's not my dream yes you've made today continuous references to spain when you talked about bravery when you talked about don quixote when you talked about your project i was talking to spain i think i once read that you wanted to become even a bullfighter what did one do i was one i love hard to believe i did it i did it by buying the bulls what i wanted to know is what does spain culturally represent for you a great deal for it anybody of my generation spain means it means enormous things you cannot possibly appreciate because the spanish civil war was the central was the central uh uh tragedy of anybody's life who is my age and it's hard to explain to anybody who's younger but there it is and it's part of the subject of the political movie i'm a contemporary political movie i want to make which is called the big brass ring are you just as politically engaged and politically minded now as you were in the 30s and 40s because at the time you wrote a lot about politics yes i'm not as politically engaged for two reasons i'm as politically minded i'm more interested in politics than in anything in the world much more interested in uh politics than i am in movies or art or anything i'm absolutely fascinated by politics and how i've been all my life uh i was deeply engaged in politics at a time when i had a chance to be engaged when uh roosevelt was president and when the world was open to young people to enter the world of politics out i'll continue this uh that's rolling that would be as foolish as saying uh as the uh as the old stalinists used to and as a as a a lot of unregenerated uh leftists still say that it is the duty of every artist to make a political statement the truth is that every work of art is a political statement when you deliberately make it you are you the audience going to get dizzy when you deliberately make it you usually fall into the trap of rhetoric and the trap of speaking to a convinced audience rather than convincing an audience i don't believe i think some movies and some books and god some paintings have changed the face of the world but i don't think it is the duty of every artist to change the face of the world he is doing it by being an artist that just automatically goes with it and he may be doing harm when he doesn't mean to but oh god deliver us from the people who tell us what is right and what is wrong what is moral and what is immoral from a political point of view it's just as inexcusable as from a sexual point of view seems this instrument of course we hate the real vices of the world of course we hate racism and we hate oppression all of that kind of that goes without saying if you if if if you didn't agree with that you wouldn't be here you wouldn't have sat through the trial we wouldn't be getting along well together i'm talking about that majority of people who can read a book and talk about something who are in general agreement about what you have to call the basics rather than dogmas yeah i was wondering what's seen in the trial that you felt what did you say that's so cruel it's just like a scene in the trial repeat you know again and um and reviewing your prints now years later i wondered if you could uh give us some hint as to what you thought you would change in the trial what scene that you feel the worst about that makes you cringe the most and how you would change that to make it a better scene i would be able to answer that question if i'd ever seen the trial since i made it [Music] but i don't go i never see my movies after i make them [Music] that's why i don't go to see it be one long regret you know there it is in a can forever i can't see where our microphone is so i don't know who has the best fighting chance over there i remember your eulogy to jean renoir a couple of years ago in the los angeles times and i was wondering if you'd share with us your feelings on the passing of abel gantz a couple days ago i'm so sorry i i don't have the wish of abelgas it's a very painful very painful question for me because i have enormous respect for his inventiveness and his originality but he is not in my top list of directors and the fact that he died does not change that sorry i i made his last picture with him and that my opinion is not from that picture it's based on napoleon he was a man obsessed he had a magnificent obsession he had an enormous visual sense he contributed incredibly to our vocabulary in the cinema but i'm much more interested in in movies about people and i don't think he made one napoleon is a big subject and it can be dealt with with a cast of 20 people [Music] one of the great moments in film was in the third man when the light falls on you and you're revealed oh it is one of the great moments but remember i didn't direct it carol reid directed it and you know that we went do you know that every we had that set built on another stage and every afternoon for five days at the end of the day shooting we went and shot it again until carol had it exactly the way he wanted it because he knew it was the key moment of the movie i expect the i think that you see what do i look for in actors and i think acting is like sculpture not modeling the kind where you carve it out of marble i think that a performance what it is deserves to be considered great or important he is always entirely made up of the actor himself and entirely achieved by what he has left in the dressing room before he came out in front of the camera in other words it's what you take away from yourself to reveal the truth of what you're doing that makes a performance and if an actor doesn't have an ability to do that i use him only if he has a good face for a few lines i think i can tell those actors from others i've made disastrous mistakes but i think essentially uh there is no such thing as becoming another character by putting on a lot of makeup you may need to put the makeup but what you're really doing is is uh undressing yourself and even tearing yourself apart and presenting to the public that part of you which corresponds to what you were playing and there is a villain in each of us a murderer in each of us a fascist in each of us a uh a saint in each of us and the actor is the man or woman who can eliminate from himself those things which will interfere with that truth so i look for those kind of people and i look for the right face because after all the camera the camera is uh makes pictures and it likes people and dislikes people you have to try to guess which ones it will like and which it won't yes sir yes i don't see where this person is he's a smart man he's not going to work without the mic he's hiding off did you have any reason in particular sir why you updated uh kafka's novel trial into the 1960s here's a man with a big mike says when he didn't have the mic i understood him perfectly now he's dropping he's up with the voice did you have any particular reason for updating the trial into the 1960s when you made the movie you made it as a present from the time yes it was impressive i i i tried to do a a rather tricky thing i tried to make a picture which really existed in its own time but which didn't abuse the eye of the audience and not abuse alienate the audience by becoming a costume picture but i made it as though it were happening in its time and the people were accidentally dressed in our own time that was the intention whether it was successful or not as as for you to tell me uh in sir just a minute in working on a project like the trial some of your other films where you have written and directed uh does orson welles the director ever get in the way of orson welles the writer or how closely does one follow the other i think of it as a happy marriage seriously no i don't think so i rewrite when i have an original script and in shakespeare somebody didn't write it i am rewriting all the time on the set and the director never gives me any trouble at all and i think because i feel a sense of obligation to the to the script which is rather more acute because it's my own you find one more difficult than the other to do writing or directing well everybody finds writing the hardest thing in the world to do you know hemingway used to describe to me how marvelous it was to have spent the morning when it was all true and it was all coming right and it was all it was like the greatest love making in the world it was like a true moment at the arena and all of this and about a week later we were forced by our wives to go to the ballet and i shared with ernest and i was his friend so long ago that i called him earnest he wasn't even papa when i first knew it uh i shared with him an intense dislike of the valet i only like great ballet dancers at great moments the rest of the time nod you see and uh we were sitting there and i felt him moving around like this you know and he suddenly said to me christ i'd rather be writing good that's it you

Channel: Akash Chandra

Views: 154,053

Keywords: Orson Welles, The Trial, 1962, 1981, Filming The Trial, Surreal, Q&A, question and answer session, interview, Kafka, making of, Franz Kafka (Author), Footage, Exclusive

Id: RbUe-bM6bXg

Length: 91min 33sec (5493 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2012