Orson Welles documentary

[Music] and before that on bbc2 orson welles tells his own story of great achievement but also frustration in a career extending well beyond the cinema how's the weather down there the weather I'm sorry I can't give you that information that's a civilian secret oh how about moving your show over to camp Howard tomorrow well thanks a million awesome wells care power tomorrow [Applause] in 1944 Orson Welles was 29 years old he was to work his own particular magic for another 40 years in Las Vegas in 1982 Orson Welles spoke to us about his life and work his major triumphs and his biggest disappointments I've never had a friend in my life who wanted to see a magic trick you know I don't know anybody who's who wants to see a magic trick so I do it for fish well it's the only way I get to perform you know there are people in the world who say show us a trick you know I went once I went once to a to a birthday party for Louis be mayor with a rabbit in my pocket which I was going to take out of his hat and on came Judy Garland and Danny Kaye and Danny Thomas and everybody who ever heard of and then Al Jolson sang for two hours and my rabbit was peeing all over me you know and if the dawn was starting to rise over the Hillcrest Country Club as we said good night to we be mayor and nobody'd ask me to do a magic trick but the rabbit and I went oh what what makes a good magician seriously what makes a good magician it's a man who can get that rabbit out [Laughter] [Music] we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental radio news it is reported that at 8:50 p.m. a huge flaming object believed to be a meteorite fell on a farm in the neighborhood I wrote the script and directed it my name is Orson Welles this is a mercury production [Music] [Music] it's wonderful technology's finally reached the movies - 40 years of paralysis yes I was interested in a phrase you used in fact - he well them you said that when you arrived in Hollywood you had the confidence of ignorance yes can you tell me what that meant well it was pretty much like my my beginnings in the theatre I had the confidence of ignorance not knowing anything about it there was no basis for fear in other words if you don't know that there's a if you're walking along the edge of a cliff and you don't know it's the edge of a cliff you have perfect confidence you know I didn't discover the cliff in the theatre or in films until after I've been in it for a while what happens then when when ignorance turns into experience then you have to be very careful not to listen to anybody you know because when you're you you have to remember your old ignorant and ask for the impossible were the same cheerfulness that you did when you didn't know what you were talking about it does seem that you tried to recreate a sort of innocence in your approach to every single film I like that very much I think that's that's true and I seldom like anything is said about my folks so we were after a good start since the 1940s Welles has been written about in more or less conflicting detail and if his biographers got it right he was an enfant terrible earth from birth an expert magician and water colorist by for a musical virtuoso at three a theatrical impresario a scholar of Shakespeare and Nietzsche a subject for study by astonished child psychologists perhaps wells the consummate storyteller playfully encouraged these and other legends about him but there's no doubt that the young George Orson Welles from Kenosha Wisconsin was a prodigious child didn't you play King Lear at the age of nine one of those exaggerations my plates I played Mary the mother of Jesus at the age of thirteen yes very good and rank but no didn't touch King Lear until later on how much of this the whole business of the child prodigy is the musical part of it is true I was one of those vulnerable little creatures you know with a baton and I played the violin then I played the piano and there's nothing more hateful on earth and I was one of those and my mother was a professional musician died when I was 9 and I stopped playing immediately this kind of trauma traumatic shock from her death combined with I think you sensual laziness the delight of not having to go on doing those scales and abandoned my career in music but that's what I was supposed to be destined for but all the other stuff of that being studied as a child prodigy yes I was sort of yes I was I was I had a very strange I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child because everybody told me from the moment I was able to hear that I was absolutely marvelous I never heard a discouraging word for years you see I didn't know what was ahead of me I painted it they said nobody's ever seen such painting you know I played nobody's ever played like that and it just seemed to me no limit to what I could do in his early teens Welles decided to leave America and go on his travels he took his brushes and canvasses he decided to be an artist in a moment of autobiography his film ffh he describes the turning point in his life I told was once a hungry painter but not here in France no I was hungry in Ireland I'd come there to paint what a donkey and cart filled the cart with paints and canvases and went travelling at night I slept under the cart very nice but then when I got to Dublin the donkey had to go up for auction so did I my paintings were gone or given away to the Irish farmers who'd give me food I'd run out of paint and money I was 16 years old my career as he might say was at the crossroads winter was coming in why guess I could have found myself a nihilist child a dishwasher or something but no I took the easy way I went on the stage I never been on the stage but I told him in Dublin I was a famous star from New York and somehow got them to believe me that's how I started began at the top I've been working my way down ever since now I've got here what Michael McLamore writes about you in his autobiography it's the story of when you arrived at the gate Theatre in Dublin story we found a very tall young man with a chubby face full powerful lips and disconcerting Chinese eyes he moved in a leisurely manner from foot to foot and surveyed us with magnificent ations as though here was our chance to do something beautiful at last and where are we going to take it he had some ageless and superb inner confidence that no one could blow out that was his secret it's a wonderful description can you consider that the author was in London at the time this was happening in Dublin Michael was in in London the first six weeks that I was in the gate theatre and I got my job only with Hilton Oh Michael never saw any of the stuff he writes about but he couldn't have told the story as well he hadn't put himself in as an I would that's perfectly all right I saw this brilliant not necessarily an actor with a brilliant creature of 16 telling us he was 19 and telling us he'd had lots of experience which was obvious to us he'd had none at all but he was more than brilliant and Hilton said we've got to use that boy with you whether you like it or not and I very soon did like it because I think he's a wonderful person unjust still undisciplined creature of an enormous shall we call it talent I I only used the word genius but if it is like love but you weren't saying you were what eighteen years old yeah no I was yeah it varied from eighteen to twenty when I couldn't explain how I got to be that famous at eighteen I would raise it up a little it's why I smoked a cigar I got cigars and smoked them that day in order to look older and kept the cigar in order to seem like an older actor in fact I played mostly old parts another yes and then in America too when you went back to America yes because there were no parts for anybody was such a babyface now there was one other thing you're kidding about this time also as an old man and I think that was your very first film Arts of age it's not a film no it was a little joke one Sunday afternoon Welles little joke made with a few friends in 1934 has prompted at least one critic to see prophetic references to the imagery in Citizen Kane Welles first wife Virginia Nicholson appears made up as an old woman and Orson Welles himself is about to appear on film for the very first time we'd all seen either been well a cocked or somebody's surrealist movie we said let's make one and from two o'clock in the afternoon till 5:00 we shot some dumb stuff and put it together just to amuse ourselves and it's terrible and it's suddenly found its way into the earth when he was barely out of his teens Orson Welles really had become a star of the New York stage and the age of 23 he received the ultimate accolade the cover of Time magazine he joined forces with the producer John Houseman to create one of the legendary theatre companies of America the Mercury Theater their first production was a modern dress version of Julius Caesar with Welles as Brutus it was a spectacular success and then Welles astonished New York with the lavish production of Macbeth which broke all the conventions of the Broadway stage and used an all-black cast I wanted to give the black actors a chance to play classics without it being funny or even exotic it's just there it is and I directed Macbeth without ever giving them a reading and none of them had ever seen a Shakespearean play and it was extraordinary how good Shakespeare is if it's spoken by somebody who's never heard somebody say it before we had some marvelous effects and of course was a big production when we had I think almost 200 people on the stage we had Pudu drummers and witch doctors from the west coast of Africa and really no real ones yes it was the only other by all odds my great success in my life was that play because the opening night there were five blocks in which all traffic was stopped you couldn't get near the theatre in Ireland everybody who was anybody in the black or white world was there and when the play ended there was so many curtain calls that finally they left the curtain open and the audience came up on the stage to congratulate the actors that was that was magical but the vast scale and ambition of Wells and Houseman's productions was landing them in trouble these are the designs for their Julius Caesar the mercury theater was living from hand to mouth and Welles had to begin a hectic double life I've been contributing from my radio salary I kept putting $1,000 so every week so we'd get to show on and we got all our place on before anybody else because I was doing radio all day long soap operas everything else I used to go by ambulance from one one radio station to another because I discovered there was no law in New York that you had to be sick to travel in an ambulance so I hired the ambulance and I would go from CBS to NBC they nolan elevated for me i'd go up to the fifth floor go into the studio whichever i was booked for i say what's the character they say 80 year old [ __ ] and I'm due on and do the 80 year old [ __ ] and then rush off somewhere else and I was I had been for a year-and-a-half auditioning hopelessly as an actor never could get a job on radio suddenly I got one part and in about a month I was making in those days tax-free about 15 to 18 hundred dollars a week as an unknown radioactive without my name being Mitch [Music] [Applause] [Music] the weed of crime there's a shadow nose [Laughter] next week same time same station blue coal America's finest anthracite will again present another thrilling today wells played anonymously the hugely popular hero of the shadow for a year until one notorious Halloween 1939 when his cover was blown and his name became a household word we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental radio news faced with a dull script of War of the Worlds Welles came up with a brilliant idea the invasion from Mars would be presented like real-life news flashes the enemy is now in sight above the Palisades five five not even Wells had anticipated what was to happen next even before the broadcast had finished the roads were jammed with hundreds of cars heading for the hills the panic spread there were reports of attempted suicides even of rape by Martian invaders the next morning the name of Olson Welles was headlines all over America the thing that gave me the idea for it was that I work we had a lot of real radio nuts on as commentators of this period people wanted to keep us out of out of European entanglements and fascist priests call father Coughlin and people believed anything they heard on the radio and I said let's do something impossible and then make him believe it and then tell him show him that it's the only radio so that was what started it and then of course they passed a lot of laws now you can't do it you can't give a news broadcast say this is the news without all that but the people who tried it in other countries were all put in jail and I got a contract it really is the truth Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1940 at the age of 25 and on his own terms a carte blanche contract with RKO it gave him a limited budget but total artistic control because you were 25 and you had this amazing contract did you sense an enormous amount of resentment there oh yeah of course of course of a big resentment Ward bond cut my tie off in the middle of Chasen's restaurant and we went out in the parking lot and headed out and I there was tremendous resentment from of course because nowadays every star has directed a movie even the TV stars direct some of their segments it's perfectly normal for actors to direct themselves but nobody had done that since von Stroheim and it was unheard of and then that I should be the author and absolute producer now of course the producers hated me most because if I could do all those things then what is the need for a producer a year after he arrived in Hollywood Welles began to shoot a picture called Citizen Kane his cameraman was one of Hollywood's best Gregg Toland he came to me you know I know I know I didn't ask for him one day in the office they said there's a man called Toland waiting to see you and he was across the leading cameraman and he said I want to make your picture I said well that's wonderful why I don't know thing about movies and he says that's why I want to do it he said because I think if your left is alone as much as possible we're going to have a movie that looks different I'm kind of working with people who know too much about it and he was the one who said we came to a moment in the first week of shooting where or nor the second week where I suddenly was told by somebody that it was not the job of the director to do all the lighting after then I'd been doing all the lighting with Tolan behind me balancing and sorbets saying don't tell anybody you see and I had to go and apologize to him and everything then then another awful awful moment came when I didn't understand directions and that was because I had learned how to make movies by running stagecoach every night for a month because if you will look at stagecoach you will see that the Indians attacked left to right and then they attacked right to left and so on in other words there's no direction followed every rule is broken in the picture and I sat watched it 45 times so of course when I was suddenly told in an over shoulder shot that I had to look camera left instead of camera right I said no because I was standing here that argument you know so we closed the picture down and about 2:00 in the afternoon and went back to my house and Toland showed me how that worked and I said God there's a lot of stuff here I don't know and he said there's nothing I can't teach you in three hours and that's when I said that which has been taken as a very pompous statement that I learned everything in three hours it was tollens idea that anybody can learn it in three hours and then he taught it to me in three hours everything else is if you're any good or not wells and Tolan never claimed to have invented new techniques what they did was to combine existing ones into a virtuoso catalogue of effects film sets with complete ceilings overlapping sound deep focus photography expressionist lighting and if you'd ARP Wells own contribution to the look of Kane as some critics have look first at the lighting designs for his 1937 theater production Julius Caesar this is three years before he went to Hollywood and here's the sequence in the Thatcher library from Citizen Kane the story told through this dense and complicated array of techniques is an investigation into a man's life and Kane is seen at different stages of his life from youth to old age a piece of acting by the 25 year old [Music] girls delightful and Cuba stop could send you prose poems about scenery but don't feel right spending your money stop there is no war and Cuba side wheeler Annie yes dear wheeler you provide the prose poems you said once that Kane seemed to you to have been really quite close to parody as a character he said once he was rather close to burlesque I didn't know if you meant the way you played him all the way he was I don't know what I meant by that maybe that comes from one of those foreign language interviews where I pretend I understand the question and say yes you know there's a whole lot of things I'm supposed to have said that really come from me not hearing very well why not thing is a good a linguist as I pretend to be and they well there's a kind of interviewer and you're not one of them who tends to make it to make a statement and they'd say isn't that true and if I get very bored or as I see absolutely yes you know and that may be how come the parody because I can't imagine what I were what I had in mind what most people thought Wells had in mind was a real-life newspaper tycoon the biggest of them all William Randolph Hearst the Baron of the yellow press and one of the most powerful men in America look first at the description of citizen Kane's fictional Palace Xanadu from the march of time sequence on the deserts of the Gulf Coast a private Mountain was commissioned and successfully built 100,000 trees 20,000 tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu Mountain contents of Xanadu Palace paintings pictures statues the very stones of many another palace a collection of everything so big it can never be cataloged or appraised enough for 10 museums the loot of the world shantanu's livestock the fowl of the air the fish of the sea the beasts of the field and jungle told each the biggest pirate Zeus and slower and now look at these shots this is a home movie made at William Randolph Hearst SRI life Dallas San Simeon eight years before Kane Marian Davis the actress was too Hurst what the singer Susan Alexander was too cane except that Hurst had found himself a devoted lifelong companion a woman admired by everyone for her talent and her intelligence I thought we were very unfair to Marion Davies because we had somebody very different in the place of Marion Davies and it seemed to me to be something of a dirty trick and does still strike me as being something of a dirty trick what we did there and I anticipated the trouble from Hurst for that reason [Music] what are you doing oh one thing I never could understand Susan how do you know you have another before makes a whole lot more sense and collecting stashes [Music] that was the opening night of Citizen Kane in San Francisco and I found myself going to the top of the mark I am the elevator with mr. Hearst and I introduced myself this is the strange dinosaur you know he had ice cold blue eyes it had at a very high Unicoi boys like that and I said mr. Hearst I didn't bother him with my father and in that I just said I have some good tickets for the opening of Citizen Kane would you like to come and he didn't answer and I got off them off the elevator thinking as I still do that if he had been Charles Foster Kane he would have taken the tickets and gone he didn't say anything no but you you seem much more open now perhaps with the passage of time to to talking about Hearst at all in connection with Citizen Kane because well well Hearst you see launched such an attack on us particularly on me or his his minions did it was kind of Cano man rid me of this so on and I was once what the this would get terribly long and anecdotal but I'll try to tell him very quickly I was lecturing in Buffalo and after the black showers with some people having dinner and a waiter said this policeman wants to see you and I turned white I always feel guilty when policemen want to see me [ __ ] turn out be very nice he said don't go back to your hotel room I said why he said they've got an underage girl undressed and photographers waiting for you it's a setup so I didn't go back to my room that night I just stayed up took the plane in the morning but that was that was as far as they were prepared to go I would have gone to jail of course and they had the producers in Hollywood ready all together to pay RKO to burn the negative it was nip and tuck you know whether the negative would be burnt the pictionary shown the controversies over Citizen Kane didn't stop in the 1940s in 1971 the American critic Pauline Kael published her account of the writing of Kane together with a shooting script she paid particular attention to Welles co-writer Herman mankiewicz and drew some devastating conclusions based on the evidence of a couple of mank of its associates one of them his secretary is quoted as saying that Welles did not write or dictate one line of the shooting script of Citizen Kane and another alleged that Welles actually tried to bribe mink of its not to take a screen credit so that Kane would be seen to be wholly a Welles creation I thought it was a very very cruel mean-spirited and essentially destructive a job I think the thing was a perfectly perfectly clear attempt to assassinate Orson trying to take away the one picture that he you know that everybody said well he did make Citizen Kane so she wanted to say well he didn't Bogdanovich published his response to Kael in a short essay detailing his evidence against the allegations a mank of its secretary that Wells wrote none of the shooting script the point is that most of Orson's writing was done with his secretary with his right I found his secretary who said well she I told her that and she said well I don't know what all that stuff uh was that I was typing and then you know and the thing is she never met Orson she never even bothered to that's significant she didn't even want to talk to him here she's writing a book about Citizen Kane which includes the screenplay the presumption of not even wanting to speak to after all okay let's say he didn't write it he did certainly no question directed and if he didn't even do that he's in it evidence published more recently proves conclusively that Olson Wells wrote at the very least three major scenes himself most of Wells collaborators including Gregg Toland have died long since but we found one member of the original team still working in Hollywood Wells had taken on four Citizen Kane a young film editor from the staff of RKO he's now the successful Hollywood director Robert Wise working with him was it was never very long on an even keel it was either up or down marvelously exciting stimulating maddening frustrating he could one moment be guilty of a piece of behavior that was so outrageous and make you want to tell him to go to hell and walk off the picture before he could do it he come up with some ideas so brilliant they literally have your mouth gaping open so you never walked you stayed did the film kind of fall together as some films appear to do or do did you really have to work at it well no films really fall together most editors will tell you that but it was very well planned the the whole continuity so many of those very effective long dissolves from one sequence to know that with one side of the frame kind of going out and the other coming and those were all planned in the camera and not shot in the camera but plan to go that way so I think it was very well laid out very well planned that include the structure as well yes very much so I don't think that we changed one bit in terms of the continuity not that I can remember it listened in 40 years now but I believe it was all pretty well as quite well as is indicated in the script as far as the continuity of succession of the scene I don't think we changed anything there's another legend that seems to have attached itself to you over the years and that's that you're a profligate spender that you go way over on your budget and your shooting schedule I've never gone over schedule or over budget no one came in fact we were under budget on Kane and under schedule but we did that by a trick because I said I don't know anything about movies so for about 10 days I'm just gonna shoot tests and what we did was shoot Kane we shot ten days have came before we admitted we were actually shooting but we were unaware we would have been on his schedule anyway do you get upset these day and there's now so much literature on you do you get upset by some of those legends particularly the ones to do with people the ones that suggest that you've behaved irresponsibly - very badly I'm much too upset about the month oh my all my loving friends and keep telling me to stop brooding about it but I if it bothers me terribly anything has to do with my behavior I don't mind what they how they criticize what I do but the the total lies about about me bother me much more than they are - I don't know touchy about it I had I went into mr. Chow's restaurant in in London once to have lunch alone I like to eat lunch alone or dinner alone I brought a book and they have Italian waiters there you know an Italian waiter came and said to me in Italian did you ever make a picture after Citizen Kane and I had just been told by Hugh Weldon that I was out of fashion and one of his famously tactful moments so this came at the wrong moment and I said patiently to him yes after Citizen Kane I made Magnificent Ambersons and then I listed my pictures now Joan Didion wrote a piece in Esquire a few months afterwards which she described me coming in to mr. Chow's with impressive silence all heads turned I opened a book and sat reading it studying the book and so on and then suddenly this silence was broken by me saying I made Citizen Kane in 1940 and so on well you know that I've been brooding about that thing for six years now that I just sat and delivered a monologue to the audience of lunches at mr. Charles about the pictures that match so those guys those kind of things do do make me brood a bit but then that's the worst of them that's my real obsession the picture of somebody sitting by himself at a restaurant have suddenly reciting is free in fact it wasn't Joan Didion who wrote the article in Esquire the real culprit was one Robert Allen Arthur Welles doesn't appear in his second film but from the start the voice of the storyteller is unmistakable the magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873 their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city in that town in those days all the women who wore silk velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet and everybody knew everybody else's family horse and carriage the only public conveyance was the streetcar a lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window the car would bolt at once wait for him while she shoved the window put on her hat and coat went downstairs found an umbrella told the girl what to have for dinner and came forth from the house too slow for us nowadays because the faster we are carried the less time we have to spare were you deliberately looking for something in which you wouldn't appear yes why was that well I didn't want to be I didn't want to be I made a mistake I shouldn't have done it I had a I was obsessed in my hot youth with the idea that I would not be a star I would only incidentally play great roles now there's no such thing as incidentally playing great roles because you're not gonna get them offered to you or anything and I was in a position to promote myself as a star and I should have I should have gone back to New York and played Hamlet and and as long as it was going I didn't I had this idea that that I wanted to be known as a director that was it and I loved Ambersons wanted to make a movie the Magnificent Ambersons may not have the technical dazzle of Caine but it has its own style more subtle no less marvelous Welles intention had been to create an elegy on a disappearing America the decline and fall of a great family their mansion house and their way of life a world of security and tradition destroyed by progress and the age of the Machine you really think they're gonna change the face of the land they're already doing it imagine it can't be stopped automobiles are a useless nuisance what did you say George I said automobiles are a useless nuisance never amount to anything but a nuisance they had no business to be invented of course you forget mr. Morgan makes them also did he share in inventing them he went so thoughtless he might think you're rather offensive I'm not sure George is wrong about automobiles with all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization the real point of Ambersons everything that is any good in it is that part of it which was really just a preparation for the decay of the Ambersons you'll never see that part of the film these stills are all that remain of three or four missing reels the film was cut by the studio in Wales absence at least 45 minutes of his version has totally disappeared it was thought by everybody in Hollywood while I was in in South America that it was too downbeat famous Hollywood worried at the time downbeat so it was all taken out but it was the purpose of the movie it supposed to see how they all slid down here all you see in one way or another Wells has expressed enormous bitterness over the cuts that were made in it well I'm sorry about that cuz I was involved in all the cuts but none of those circumstances that couldn't be helped he was in South America of making a film for the government to help for war effort in that good neighbor policy we had to South America he had been sent to Brazil to do that he was not up here when we previewed the film after we got it all finished we had sent him a print and he had some some changes he wanted made which we made but then we took the picture out for preview and the owners just wouldn't sit still for it they laughed at it I laughed at some of the performances they walked out in droves and it was about this disastrous of previews you could possibly imagine and the studio was very naturally very upset they had a lot of money in this film when they went to get an out so Jack Moss who was his man here is the social producer on the film and I were kind of caught in the middle between arson news his is an ability to come up here and do anything about it but still running a voice in it and the studio on the other hand who was wanting to get something done with this film that would allow him to release it consequently we did cut about 25 or 30 minutes the original film and we had to make two or three or four new bridge scenes side together and there was a new ending shot and then finally after the fourth preview after making all these changes and all we finally had a preview that they thought it seemed to sit for and at least not walk out and didn't get any bad laughs and that was the way it that was the way it went I can only say that all of us up here did the very best job we could with the problem one of their solutions was actually to shoot and tack on a happy ending for the Ambersons set in a hospital corridor where Agnes Moorehead and Joseph Cotten seemed all set to walk into the sunset I wouldn't tell this to anybody you but it seemed to me as if someone else was in that room and through me she brought her boy on to shelter again and that I've been through at last to my Truelove notwell style and certainly not his intention there's no scene in a hospital and nothing like that ever happened in the story and the great long scene which was the P long scene at the end which was Aggie Moorhead in a in a third-rate lodging house near where there were elevator was passing in the some they're playing a comic record - Black Crowes on a gramophone some old people in the back or playing cards and Joe cotton has come to see how she is and that was the best scene in the picture it was what the picture was about I held the preview cards in my hand which I didn't tell you and there were these terrible reactions to the picture that said that you know everybody who made it ought to be hung and and the other five to 10 to 20 that said it was only the greatest movie ever made that they'd ever seen I think they were probably close to the truth it probably was among the five most important films made I think in America ever and it's I think the greatest artistic tragedy in the movies that that particular film was so mutilated because you barely get a sense of what it was was that was that kind of cutting reordering and even remaking of a thumb taken for granted in those days because he wonder Joseph Cotten and Robert Wise were very close to - and they you know and cotton I know felt very bad about doing it and yet he rode horse and you know several letters in which he explained why he thought it was best and and you know you feel sorry as you read it because you know he's betraying Orson but he doesn't really realize it it's very sad it wasn't anybody came out of it good i phi would i would have to say this that i think from a purely artistic point of view purely that it was probably a better film and it's in its entirety looking at it from the film bust and I don't think there's any question there but we are faced with the realities of the part of it I only have to say this that I think the fact that they that the film has come down through the years and its own right is somewhat the liner if not more of that classic means that we didn't really bastardize it completely it's gone whole end of it the whole the whole an actual plot was changed in other words it's about the time major Emerson dies the picture starts to go to become another picture becomes their picture do you ever get over something like that not really you don't you don't but you see I was in terrible trouble then because I was sent to South America by Nelson Rockefeller and Jacques Whitney I was told that it was my patriotic duty to go and spend a million dollars shooting the Carnival in Rio now I don't like things like carnivals and Mardi Gras and all that but they put it to me that it would be a real contribution to inter-american Affairs in the Latin American world and so on so without a salary but with a budget of a million dollars I was sent to Rio to make up a movie about the carnival but in the meantime comes the new government RKO is now a new government and they asked to see the rushes of what I'm doing in South America and they see a lot of people black people and the reaction is he's just shooting a lot of jigaboos jumping up and down you know they didn't even hear the Samba music because it hadn't been synched up the RKO bosses had been hoping for a public-relations job something morally uplifting what they got was thousands of feet of film showing revelers in the streets black people and white dancing together embracing dangerous stuff for an American studio in the early 40s they felt their control over wells was slipping in his other role as goodwill ambassador working for the US government he'd complete freedom in Brazil filming as and when he pleased ignoring their cables and phone calls but still expecting them to foot the bill so I was fired from our field and they made a great publicity point of the fact that I had gone to South America without a script and thrown all this money away that I never recovered from that from that attack so the fact that they had also they had promised me when I went to South America that they would send a moviola and cutters to me and that I would finish the cutting of Ambersons there they never did they cut it themselves so they destroyed Ambersons and the picture itself destroyed be I was I didn't get a job as director for years afterwards so that I did Jane Eyre Joan Fontaine starred with Orson Welles in Robert Stevenson's film Jane Eyre in 1944 it was the first time in his Hollywood career that Welles had been forced to work as an actor under someone else's direction [Music] did you look at that stage as if people were kind of breathing a sigh of relief thing oh yeah thank god we've got hockey Oh had his stationery that year it's official stationery archaea use and it's slogan for that year printed on every piece of paper that went out from our CEO was showmanship instead of genius in other words the reason you should buy an RKO picture was that you didn't get Orson Welles the genius came from I never said I was a genius nobody ever called me a genius seriously certainly not in those days but Louella Parsons called me the would-be genius and she called me that she was a Hearst columnist and she called me that so often that this terrible word got stuck to me so showmanship instead of genius and that was their big selling point they didn't have me anymore and then next picture I did do was the stranger and I did that to show people and I didn't go in the dark you know that I could say action that cut just like all the other fellas the stranger directed by Welles in 1946 starred Edward G Robinson as a Nazi hunter whose search for an escaped war criminal leads him to America and a small Midwestern town Welles is the Nazi Kindler sheltering under a false identity as a respectable teacher and Loretta Young plays his unsuspecting wife Robinson mingles into the social life of the town waiting for the break-in Welles impeccable facade you have no faith in the reforms that are being effected in Germany I don't know mr. Wilson I can't believe that people can be reformed except from within the basic principles of equality and freedom never have never will take root in Germany the world of freedom has been voiced in every other tongue all men are created equal Olivia take a little tentative in German there's marks proletarian June I too have nothing to lose but your chains but Mike's wasn't the chairman Mike's was a Jew Wells originally told the studio he wanted a woman for Robinson's part Agnes Moorehead I thought it would have been much more interesting to get Borman trapped down by a spinster lady than by Eddie Robinson but they they wouldn't agree to it and Robinson wasn't actually a crony of yours or no I didn't know him at all and he against got into a big sulk the first week I couldn't understand what it was about he said you keep shooting me on my bad side no can you imagine any Robinson having a bad sign and I was shooting him that way because Loretta Young's side was the other one is he so I told her about it she said all right shoot me on my bad side to keep him happy but he was a may immensely effective actor and he was very good in the picture I know that's the first time you came up against that kind of yes yes well I was working with two stars and my had to decide you see when you work with stars you have to make love to them yeah what do you work with actors oh my it's the business of the director is to be a kind of carry on a continual courtship where the people he sticks in front of the lens and when you deal with stars you know real stars you have to you have to really make love you know and it seemed to me natural to direct my attentions to miss yeah that's a little jealousy there between Eddie and and particularly because she allowed me to hold her arm there's a shot where I hold her arm and she's five stories above it she really is I'm holding her arm and Annie was too scared to put his feet over the edge you see so there was a lot of there was a lot of unhappiness about that it was nothing we could do about the fact that he was scared but except mm you see that was a real clock time we built a clock was a size that we're now some skyscraper stands and we were running around on that yeah [Music] we had a one shot that would put poor John Russell out on a flagpole hanging on to his camera and it was the one shot where I fall could never be duplicated because the stunt man and all that got paid so much for doing it and the next day at rushes we put in all the sound effects over black film in order to make Russell think he'd forgotten to rackover that's the sort of cruelty that was common on the sets and those days and we were all very forgiving doesn't matter we're doing again tomorrow night if it's so scared [Laughter] in 1943 Wells and Joseph Cotten had co-written and starred in a Grand Guignol thriller journey into fear and the where rumours that Wells had taken more than a passing interest in the direction they could release the books about me which give me credit for that picture are wrong because it really is a Norman Foster's picture and he deserves any credit that's going and if you'd seen the picture before they cut out or didn't advance the action you would have realized what a good movie made oh yeah in spite of my very handmade performance but it was supposed to be a hammy performance it wasn't unconsciously so that's all I can say about that its a bright guilty world in 1947 wells went tropical with an exotic thriller called the lady from Shanghai travelogue scenery luxury living but shot through with Welles own sense of parody and the bizarre watch our guest Michael think the world is coming to an end and there was a start to the word subtype so I guess they're do stuff like $5,000 that's what I said $5,000 fella and where do I have to duel for it I'll fill in the details later $5,000 all you have to do is kill somebody mr. Grisby I'm particular who I buried it and from his supporting players Glenn Anders here he coaxed performances that go right to the edge I wouldn't like to kill just anybody that's how I know oh yeah but you'll never guess thank you it's me I'm perfectly sober Michael I'm willing to pay $5,000 if the job is well done this is a straightforward business proposition I want you to kill me when he first viewed lady from Shanghai producer Harry Cohen offered anyone in the room $1,000 to explain the plot in not even Wells took him up on it the gossip columns had a field day Wells his co-star was his recently divorced wife Rita Hayworth and the circumstances of the making of the picture in the first place are almost as bizarre as the story Wells had actually left the movies for a year and returned to the theater to lose a lot of money putting on a new musical it was called around the world in 80 days I put all my money into it and before the opening in Boston the costumers were sitting in the railway station and there was there was $55,000 to pay for them or they wouldn't go to the theater for the opening night so I I was in the box office I was trying to think who in Hollywood could send me $55,000 before in the next three hours I thought Harry Cohen only one with the courage to do it I called him up and I said Harry he said what is it what do you want I said I've got the greatest story you've ever read and I turned the paper back around that the girl and the box office was reading it was called the man I killed Isis it's called the man I killed written by such-and-such a paperback by it I said you get me $55,000 to Boston in two hours and I'll make the picture write it and direct it and act in it 55,000 came I did around the world in 80 days lost a fortune on it but we had a musical at Brecht went to see seven times and was I think the best thing I ever did in the theater but it was a financial disaster and I had divorced from Rita and she came to me and said I want to make your picture I want you to come back with me and Harry sent for me and said I want you to do that with Rita for his sake well that turned it from five weeks to a big super movie and the essential plot is the plot of the book when I pointed to which I had never read so the theory which has been printed a thousand times that this was an act of vengeance against Rita that it was a great device which I was going to degrade her and so on it's nonsense because all that's in the book she'd read the book and wanted to play this garrick turn sure she was an actress you build her up as is the end of soft focus yes all that then put her in the gutter at the end [Music] comes a change of heart you do seem to need that edge all the time don't you that it's a sort of balancing act between drama and melodrama and parody yes and I'm bored with stories that don't seem to be balanced dangerously like her you know if you walk down a highway with a story instead of on a tightrope I'm bored with it you know were you to some extent though setting out to make a critique the very kind of film that the studios wouldn't like because you had a leading man who was stupid enough to get himself into the situation the part you played you had a sort of sex goddess playing a parody almost of a sex yes there's of course of course there's that element wells delight in subverting the classic scenes of melodrama runs right through lady from Shanghai and in one of his most stunning set pieces he turns inside out the traditional B picture finale the shootout well you aren't the only one who wants me to die our good friend the District Attorney is just itching to open a letter that I left with him the letter tells all about you lover so you'd be foolish to fire that gun these mirrors it's difficult to tell you are aiming at me aren't you I'm aiming at you lover cost killing you is killing myself it's the same thing but you know I pretty tired of both of us [Applause] [Music] and this by the way was the film that Hollywood the studios and even Welles friends thought was probably the worst thing he'd ever done his reputation as a rebel an uncontrollable kind of anarchist who didn't fit within the system had grown so big that it looked as if no one would ever touch a Welles project again and that reputation never left him I've never heard you all read you being bitter about Hollywood no I'm not I'm not I don't think it's ridiculous to be bitter about Hollywood anybody who goes to Hollywood can see right away what the setup is and in my early days it was much more fun it was much more fun to outwit the dinosaurs than it is start with college graduates from the conglomerates you know but Hollywood is Hollywood it's there's nothing you can say about it that isn't true good or bad and if you get into it you you have no right to be bitter you're the one who sat down and joined the game you know but the people who have done well in the system of the people whose instincts whose desire who want to make the kind of movie which producers want to produce not what the public wants but producers want to produce people who don't succeed the people who've had long bad times like Renoir for example so I think the best director ever are people who didn't want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make producers didn't want to make a Renoir picture even if it was a success people don't realize that nobody in movies is interested in money everybody thinks Hollywood is interested in money because they talk about money all the time well they talk about sex all the time and they don't do much of that they're really interested in it's all an ego trip they're interested in having produced this picture in power in status all sorts of things money is only is only a other the counters in the game nobody's really interested in money or there wouldn't be nobody would go into movies if they were really interested in money if you understood money you'd go into a business in which you make bigger sums easier so that's the trouble with Hollywood isn't it isn't it isn't it's money aspect in this you speak of a crash of temperaments not at all it's the pictures I like to make are not the pictures Hollywood producers and particularly modern Hollywood producers want to make another project that Hollywood wasn't ecstatic about was Welles 1948 version of Macbeth Republic Pictures accepted it but they gave him only 21 days shooting and a tiny budget I thought I'd have a great success with it and then I'd be allowed to do all kinds of difficult things as long as they were cheap but Life magazine came out that they in always had what Martha Gellhorn always hated me anyway she came out that week with help hole they murder Macbeth there's something like that you know and it was big critical failure its biggest critical failure right now you have said that it poses great problems when you actually appear in films in your films because of your presence or your personality yes because much more than in the theater there's of this I have a kind of personality which requires that I play certain kinds of parts or I discombobulated the scene and that's it's a kind of handicap there used to be a there used to be a former division of actors in France in the Comedie Francaise were called King actors they weren't necessarily the best actor they were the actor who played the King you know and I'm a King actor maybe a bad one but that's that's what I am missing and I have to play authoritative roles but Truffaut is quite right when he says about me that I always show the fragility of the great Authority and that that's that's the thing I do I think I would be intolerable if I didn't if getting Macbeth done in record time was something of a minor miracle Welles next venture into Shakespeare was to prove the most torturous journey he ever undertook have large company biggest company I've ever had as a director on location of about 70 people I think it was besides the actors and everything came to Mogador on the west coast of Africa to shoot Othello and we arrived and got a telegram the day after we arrived that scelera the biggest Italian movie studio with whom I had a contract to make the picture had gone bankrupt and we had no money we were in Africa we had no costumes nothing but Welles refused to give up he began to pour his own money into a fellow that didn't get him far into the schedule and he gathered his cast and crew from all corners of Europe Suzanne Cloutier from Paris and his old boss Michael McLamore from Dublin Welles got into the habit of suddenly leaving his crew on location flying off to star in someone else's movie and rushing back weeks later with the money to shoot a bit more this story has grown up that these unfortunate actors were left stranded while Orson Welles the actors loved to tell that story that's story because of course they were stranded but what they forget is that they were stranded in the in the four star luxury hotels of Europe they were in the stranded if in the Grand Hotel in the Europa in Venice and in the in the colon door and the Provence and so on and they were stranded only to the extent that I didn't want to send them home I wanted to keep them together and I went off to get money and left them at great expense eating and sleeping in luxurious conditions during the two years it took to make a fellow Welles had plenty of opportunity to use what he calls divine accidents the first sequence to be shot was the murder of Roderigo it's a brilliantly cinematic idea to set it in a steam bar but in fact only Iago's costume had arrived the others had been impounded when the Italian studio went bankrupt so Welles decided to shoot the scene in a bathhouse where the actors didn't need any clothes at all I had a very good art director for that big ship drownin was one of the best movie history but because of lack of funds we ended up shooting it mostly in real places there was much for him to do but he designed a wonderful Othello which somebody should do some day the invention continued all over Europe with Welles art directing on the run and creating marvelous set pieces like the fight scene filmed in a sewer in Portugal the long filming schedule caused other problems Welles often had to shoot his pickup shots in different locations this fight starts in a street in Moroccan the final punch is delivered 2,000 miles away in Italy we're about I don't know at least seven or eight different Italian cities including from torch lo2 to the south of Italy just where there would be a little piece that would be right you know didn't need something added to it and of course that determined the kind of cutting which I wouldn't have done otherwise you know I'd have played longer scenes but I had to it had to be done in in cuts because it had to be done in cuts because I need a little water I think I said that well I think said when I find the cutting early on a bit confusing in Othello yes sort of why sort of why I don't like that I don't like several bits there and then in Venice I think the weakest thing in the pictures Venice and it's some of it's quite weak indeed I think do you do you accept the label people people who put on it they've called it a flawed masterpiece because they've drawn attention to that and to the dialogue sound which they find for that against these brilliant images yeah well they they they I don't know what happened to the sound it was alright when we were done with it but something something happened in in making disability distribution copies or something that did hurt it so it's flawed and to the extent that we weren't able to control the quality of the of the release print it was actually alright as we did it with awfully good music wonderful music mmm I don't know flawed masterpiece I don't know masterpiece you know I can tell you things I don't like in all my movies and if that's that makes it flawed then it's flawed and I don't think I ever made a masterpiece but there are wonderful in a fellow in its marriage of film and theater in wells use of his real-life film set and in his own performance she might lie by an emperor hanger I do but say what she is so delicate with a needle and a proper musician oh she will sing the savageness out of a bear so high and plenteous wit Finch she a thousand thousand times then so gentle I - gentle may that's it we can we go on to what we call the I see I see that Othello is that one of your after after one of those questions would you agree that it's a flawed masterpiece I love those questions we them after a slight pause say could we go on I think we'd better mr. accountant well that's the real flawed one yeah is it oh yeah that's that's a disaster mister our Cardin is another story of an investigation into a man's past I'll sink it a tourist a mysterious and powerful stranger has hired a small-time investigator to inquire into his past his secret purpose is to cover up his tracks simply by disposing of every contact the investigator makes Wells plays the mysterious our card in a kind of perverse cane figure there again the plotline proved virtually impenetrable but that film was taken away from me completely and was totally destroyed in the cutting that is the real disaster of my life that one you know flawed masterpiece how are you there's there's your flawed masterpiece Arkady and I hate to think about it the beginning of one of wells most spectacular opening sequences it develops into a continuous three-minute 20 second crane shot Wells had been living and working in exile in Europe for nearly 10 years when he returned to Hollywood in 1958 to create almost by accident one of his most unforgettable screen performances and one of the finest crime thrillers ever made the script had originally been sent by Universal to Charlton Heston under the title badge of evil it was a fairly routine police story but even had it been a better script as I pointed out to them with the exception of westerns they'd been making police stories longer and oftener than any other single genre and therefore it's extremely difficult to come up with a script which has a script will will survive on its own I said the director is even more important in this than in most kinds of pictures I said who's gonna direct it he said well we haven't picked a director yet we have Orson Welles to do the heavy though this was on the long-distance phone and after static-filled pause I said why don't you have him directed he's a pretty good director you know and the reaction at first was a prolonged silence as though I had suggested that my mother direct the film and after a while I said duh yeah that's right we'll look we'll get back to you so they quickly called me back again and said will you direct this picture we can't fail you anymore I said I'll direct it but if I also get to write it every word of it an entirely new script they said yes so I had three weeks before we were forced to start I hired about about 12 secretaries around the clock and made an entirely new script Orson then proceeded to rewrite the entire script in about ten days by himself which I knew he would and vastly improved the whole script and his part which I know he would the touch of evil is of course really the story of the decline and fall of captain Quinlan Orson's part ah my part the Mexican lawyer Vargas serves as a witness even my did some kind of Mexican I wonder what makes her so very sure it was dynamite my leg what sometimes he gets a kind of a twinge like funky do for a change of weather intuition he calls it he must be physically the most grotesque character yes yes is pretty grotesque and I gave a dinner party not long after I started the picture for all my old producer friends and big star frenzy old Hollywood Brigade my wife laid on a splendid meal and I was a little late so they were all there having their drinks before I would sit down I came in in order to derive in time in my makeup and costume and they all said how are yours and you're looking great and you know I was acid monster you've been cooking in this yard that's clean enough have you forgotten your old friend I told you with her clothes I'm a Quillin I didn't recognize you you should lay out those candy bars no fever the can tear the hooch I must say I wish it was your chili I was getting phantom anyway you're sure you're a mess honey they didn't know they had my Lena Dietrich she turned up in the rushes they said that's mylanta Dietrich and they called her up and said you're in this picture and she said yes and they said well what's your salary and she says you don't put my name on the picture it's the minimum you put my name on see my agent so so they saw our agent they were delighted and it was roses all the way until that gate closed on me it's still a mystery I have no idea what about once again Welles was barred from the post production of his own film and cuts were made in it why again in this case we shut out from I have no idea that's never been explained because they love the rushes every day the head of the studio came to me and wanted me to come to the office and sign a deal for several pictures and oh it's great stuff then they saw a rough cut of it and I was they were so horrified that they wouldn't let me in the studio and nobody's ever explained what horrified them they tried very hard really to stop it Heston had won an Oscar and was a great star and they released it without a press release without fresh showing second on the bill or the B picture and it was shown in Brussels right afterwards at the World's Fair where it got the prize for the best picture of the year and the distributor the Belgian distributor who had put it into the contest against the will of the studio and had worked for the universal for 20 years was fired it then opened in a small theater in Paris publicist word ran two years it's made a lot of money even in America to their tremendous rage the last thing they wanted was a success and nobody has ever explained it to it Chuck Heston doesn't know they never told him they certainly never told me we don't know what it is it's just too dark for them too strange too I think you know I don't think we would have had that reaction now you're a little too tough a little too black but that's a guess I just don't know it's arson really it seems to me just wants to work but at the same time there is something in him that drives him to alienate the people with the money perhaps there is a subconscious streak that makes him resent that unlike a painter who if he had to could work in a supermarket bagging groceries and earned the money to buy paints that as a director he cannot do that he must somehow persuade his studio to give him the money and perhaps on some subconscious level Orson has never been able to accept this I cannot believe that he would not have been more successful than he has been at getting them to give him the money to make films there is a a myth in the film community for example that arson is an unreliable director that he is profligate with no disrespect to directors like Mike Nichols and Michael Jimmy no and Spielberg and Coppola Orson hasn't spent as much money in all the films he has made in his life as they have wasted in overage on any one film and this is a simple statement of fact and I dare say they would subscribe to it Touch of Evil not a great film but certainly one marked with touches of brilliance was shot on the shortest schedule I ever worked on and it came in on schedule and slightly over budget the budget was less than a million dollars was it it also um so much of it gives very little room for maneuver I mean that the famous opening shot is one shot the Chapman bombshell Alice he didn't did he cover himself no no we spent all night shooting that shot if indeed if you look in the printed take you can see the touches of dawn breaking on the horizon that was the last shot you were going to get it was it that only used the last time yes [Music] but the hard thing about that shot was the small part player who played the customs inspector at the very end of the SHA kept blowing his lines which is one can understand he would see this vast entourage bearing down on him from two blocks away and finally whoreson said to him look I don't care if you forget the line he said just move your lips he said I begging you just don't say oh gee mr. wells I'm sorry but it is one of many remarkable struggles in a film you folks at American citizens I am yet where were you born this mrs. Asya name is Vargas they're in town see you oh yeah sure mr. Vargas I'm on the trail of another dope ring on the trail of the chocolate soda for my wife your wife Dahlia bride officer hey talk up here about how you crack that brandy business all right here you caught the big boss only one of them the Grammys are a big family good night no purchase is mr. lineker my do you realize this is the very first time we thing together in my country do you realize I haven't kissed you in over an hour we are yeah yes of our viewers will know that because this is on film there are conversations that go on between rates between reloading and somebody said that Touch of Evil seemed very unreal and yet real and I corrected that statement and said what I was trying to do was to make something which was unreal but true and I think that's the definition of the highest kind of theatricality the best kind and that's the kind of theatricality that can exist in films too as well as theater and I think because there is you know what is more unreal and stylized than Cagney it's a totally stylized unreal performance no human being ever behaved the way he does and every moment of Cagney the entire life in films his truth he never had a second that wasn't true now that's that's the he certainly was larger-than-life he did everything dangerously and you know as though we were playing in Madison Square Garden and it was always cinematically true but unreal if that's the difference I guess I think there's always that for the viewer anyway that a kind of moral ambiguity about the characters in the the Quinlan yes character although well you know what Renoir said he said everyone has his reasons and that's that really sums it up you know there's no villain who doesn't have his reasons and the bigger the villain the more interesting it becomes if you the further you explain his villainy not in psychiatrically it's not because mama didn't love him but because because you humanize you anymore the more human you make the monster the more interesting that the story must be it seems to me also Quinlan's instincts turn out to be right even though the method see that's right wrong you see his method is totally wrong in my my position in the political or moral sense is completely anti Quinlan I'm absolutely on the side of Heston myself personally but playing Quinlan and having a character like that I had to make him a real person I've been trapped into a troopers of what I hope is a troopers a true monster because he was a successful cop using means which do work but which are simply against every every good instinct that we have in a democratic world he's everything we we hate but he isn't what we hate it's his method and yet he would never have got those people behind bars if he hadn't done it and it's that ambiguity which gives tension to a story you know that ambivalence rather you also allow him yes yes well she was pretty good pretty good casting for that yeah it's it's their last great performance no doubt it so Quinlan was right after all isn't somebody going to come and take him away yeah just a few minutes you really liked him didn't you the cop did the one who killed him he loved him that was a great detective all right and a lousy cop is that hard you have to say for him he was some kind of a man what does it matter what you say about [Music] another fraud recipe since 1949 when he created the character of Harry Lime and Carroll reads the third man wells had always felt at home with European cinema and for the last 25 years of his life his films as director were all made outside the Hollywood system including the one Welles himself regarded as his masterpiece chimes at midnight well spoke to us about these and other films from the European years about his discovery of documentary and his unfinished projects but leaving America had also meant the end of one other activity that had always been close to his heart mr. Charles Foster Kane in every essence of his social beliefs and by the dangerous manner in which has persistently attacked the American traditions of private property initiative and opportunity for advancement is in fact nothing more or less than a communist that same month in Union Square Orson Welles always resisted attempts to find autobiographical references in his work but there's one major theme in Citizen Kane that was a lifelong obsession with Welles himself during his Hollywood years he was actively involved in politics speaking at anti-fascist rallies broadcasting political commentaries on the radio writing his own daily column for the New York Post and actively campaigning for Roosevelt I didn't run for the Senate for several reasons the most cogent of which it perhaps is the fact that I didn't believe anybody you see if you run for the Senate everybody who does in their hearts hopes that they might possibly get to the top you know you I have to admit that's if you're gonna run for the Senate you've got your eye on that big building and I didn't think anybody could get elected president who had been divorced and who had been an actor I've made a hell of a mistake both directions [Laughter] and the thing of my conscience is that it was with Roosevelt was very anxious for me to run there was a study made in the California I had the the the Southern California communist Beverly Hills communist division was against me I was a dangerous revisionist and I only had the north and my advisor in California about how to run was Alan Cranston who later became the senator so I don't think he was totally disinterested so it was finally discovered that the best place to be to run was Wisconsin where I was born and we made a study of that and discovered that the dairy interests who I felt I had to fight were so powerful and I would almost certainly be beaten unless I was the greatest campaigner ever known but now supposing I was the greatest campaign I've ever known because if I had been there never would have been Joe McCarthy he was the candidate who ran on the Republican ticket and got in so I have that on my conscience maybe I could have run and beaten him and there never would have been a McCarthy what happened to that political activity their political activity stopped when I had to go to on Europe and earn earn my money to pay the taxes right in there close the door laughter nobody on this community in 1962 Wells was offered his own choice of subject for a film in Europe he picked the novel by Kafka the trial [Music] Anthony Perkins plays Kaye the faceless Clark persecuted by an incomprehensible legal system the film was seen by many critics as a kind of contest between Welles and Kafka with Kafka coming off second best it wasn't very long into the project before I realized that Orson's view of Joseph K was that far from being the innocent victim of bureaucracy that Kafka had written that but in Orson's version and I can hear him saying I can hear his thundering voice he's guilty as hell I said what guilty of what he said of everything of he's guilty of everything well this certainly is a revolutionary view of Joseph K made it rather difficult to play I said you know I don't think this is gonna be a very popular concept of Joseph K he said well I can't repeat what he said but it was definitely not one he was going to be shaken from so I decided in in deference to Orson's judgment I would get right behind it and play it that way if you make an opera oh hello you have a right if you're a Verdi to make a great one or if you're Bellini to make a good one or if you're Jack Shamokin to make a bad one but you can make your own opera out of that play and the same thing goes for movies I don't believe in in an essential reverence for the original material it's simply part of the collaboration and I felt no need to be true to Kafka in every essence I thought it was necessary to capture what I felt to be the Kafka atmosphere which is a combination of modern horror creeping up on the austro-hungarian Empire I saw it as a European story full of old European bric-a-brac with IBM machines lurking in the background and that was the way I wanted to present the picture well it's a strange picture it's an uncomfortable movie to watch the most interesting screening I ever experienced was when I was sitting with Orson I don't know what year it was in the early 70s in Paris when they revived it and they gave him some award or something and Jean Moreau was there she gave him the award and then they ran the picture and started you know it was terribly respectful audience sort of like sitting the Museum of Modern Art you know Marie cinephile and upper-class kind of wealthy people who wanted to appreciate the finer things in art and an Orson sitting next to me roaring with laughing the movies done he started screaming of course I he'd always told me he thought it was funny but I quit sitting next to him you know you I started to laugh - and I think Sybil was with us she was laughing we're all laughing and the entire audience coming you know well we're laughing at this movie that he made and they're thinking people don't have any appreciation of art I'm sorry to disappoint you but afraid you won't find any subversive literature of pornography don't touch those record albums like this thing that's my pornographic what's this what's what a circular line with four holes you know it's not really circular it's Mauro Bueller Bueller sake why not Oh Bueller now write it down just because you say we shouldn't over here there isn't even a word you deny that there's a no viateur shape concealed under this Rudd he denies everything the humor in the wordplay which happens early on no no that's entirely muscles and well there's nothing it's very solemn it may be funny in German but it certainly isn't an English oh now you want money I suppose well you've got the wrong man that's what they all say I mean the opening sequence for example it's all one long take did that kind of thing take an enormous amount of rehearsal here nerve sheer nerve and Orson coming up to you at 3 o'clock in the morning in the back of the car where you've been sitting we had no dressing rooms or anything like that to say look there's only enough film for two takes it's got to be right you've got to do it perfectly and let's go he has a field marshals affection for the troops in this case the crew the actors the extras he a wonderful manipulator and I mean that in the best sense of people and their soft spots and the ways to get them behind his vision of things you were talking about working making love to actors I mean I think from what I hear of you from actors you do it far more than any other director to the extent that you will kind of stay up all night with your leading players that you will invite a kind of collaboration that seems to me quite really quite unusual with we run out of film [Laughter] signe aboard esau to make me marry forget what I'm gone you stopped me weeping if you say so Wells as full stuff perhaps his greatest performance certainly one of his finest films chimes at midnight strange the desires and so many years had left the foam just give me flattering voices I kissed thee with the most constant heart I loved the better than I love eres curvy young boy of the mall I was supposed to have my scenes with Orson I will wait in one day and in two days and then three days and each time Orson would apologize and would come to the hotel and take me out for dinner and we would talk about all sorts of things but the film so I finally I said but what's going on Orson he says what I'm sorry my darling but uh we can't do our scenes yet I don't have my makeup my little suitcase you know my little suitcase with all my makeup has been lost oh sure he says of course I am sure so maybe we shoot tomorrow but we loo the shots reverse shots on you without me I said well Orson it's quite difficult we haven't started and you're going to start with close-up something he said Wow what can I do you manage you'll manage okay so I arrive at the studio and in one of those little boxes where they were supposed to put cars that was the make up room and then the Orson's secretary calls me because she wanted to give me some new lines so I go into this little she the room and why she's fumbling amongst the papers looking for the papers or Senate left for me i sat on the floor there was no chair and what did I see under a very old sette Orson's makeup kit hidden oh I said look so she jumped around she said just don't say it don't say it it's been hidden for days so in fact as an actor he had stage fright and he was hiding himself and he said that he didn't have his makeup so finally after two hours of shooting I said you know Orson I've just covered everything I know where the makeup is oh so what am I going to do you know it takes me two hours to do my makeup I said we have time why don't you do it and we'll do the first scene the two of us it's a famous scene when doll tearsheet is jumping on the bed on top of Foster so finally we get to that scene and we rehearse but he was not in the count on the couch with somebody else and then finally we said shoot and I jump on him and he screams and he says you've this tried my nose God God we can't do it today Welles plays against the traditional Falstaff the lying drunken clown he creates a character who's flawed and overindulgent but also intelligent and humane and his final rejection becomes the more poignant because of it [Music] [Applause] which no right show I speak to me my heart I know thee not old man all to thy prayers our ill white hairs become a fool and jester I have long dreamed of such a kind of man so surface well so old and so profane but being awake I do despise my dream Falstaff I think is the most unusual figure in fiction in that he is almost entirely a good man he's a gloriously life-affirming good man and there are very few gigantic silhouettes on their horizon of fiction who are good they are always flawed they are always they're always interesting because of their of their of what is wrong with them and Falstaff is I don't somebody once said that Falstaff was Hamlet who stayed in England and got fat you know which is amusing to think of but I don't think it's true because Hamlet is not a good man I don't think and there is hardly a good man in dramatic literature who dominates a whole a whole scene and Falstaff is I think really merry England I think he I think Shakespeare was greatly preoccupied as I am in my humble way with the loss of innocence and I think there has always been in England an older England which was sweeter and purer where the hay smelt better and the weather was was always springtime and the daffodils blew and the gentle warm breezes and it's the you feel a nostalgia for it in Chaucer and you feel it all through Shakespeare and I think that he was profoundly against the modern age as I am I'm against my modern age he was against his and I think his villains are modern people just as they're likely to be continental I always see that the villains in Lear are non anglo-saxon they are from over there and they're from they represent the modern world which includes gouging out eyes and sons being ungrateful to their fathers and all the rest of it I think I think he was a typically English writer arch typically the perfect English writer in that very thing that that preoccupation with that Camelot which is the great English legend you know and innocence is what Falstaff is he is he is a kind of refugee from that world and he has to live by his wits he has to be funny he has no way he he he doesn't he hasn't a place to sleep if he doesn't get a laugh out of his patron so it's a rough modern world that he's living in but I think you have to see in his eyes that's why I was also very glad to be doing in black and white because it's in color he must have blue eyes you know you've got to see that that look that comes out of of the ager that never existed but exists in the heart of all English poetry then that rough modern world explodes into one of the most violent I think but terrible battle scene yes which is it he's supposed to show the end of the chivalric idea you know it's supposed to show the way it's gonna be from now on even the funny tin can running about which is for here up in his Armour but it's funny pathetic it's not yet a belly laugh or a career [Music] the real fact is that that hotspur another refugee from hamelot is dead and the VDI tutor is getting ready to be an English hero you know and to build that establishment under what Shakespeare must have struggled because it was a very real establishment [Music] it seems that the chimes have been that gives you a particular pleasure to hear my favorite picture here if I if I if I wanted to to get into heaven on the basis of one movie I would I would that's the one I would offer up I think it's because I think because it is to be the least flaunt let me put it that way it is the most successful for what I tried to do I succeeded more completely in my view with that than with anything else two years after chimes at midnight John Merrow appeared in another Welles film the immortal story playing a woman hired to bring a fiction to life Welles is mr. clay a wealthy but friendless old man obsessed with a piece of sailors folklore the story of a penniless young man who's paid five guineas to sleep for one night with a woman he's never met mr. clay can't accept that the story never really happened and he commits the folly of trying to bring it to life young can find healthier limbs don't ache you sleep at night because you move without pain you think you move at your own will not so you know but my bidding the two young strong and lusty something jacks his old hand imagine it's very tempting to see mr. clay almost Tim he's played by the director but to see him as a kind of as a director as he is a kind of director isn't it yet and it's very tempting to show it as the total uselessness of the directors job [Laughter] these two actually do you actually think the director is overrated oh yes oh yes I think the I think there are the exceptions by the exceptional directors of which there are very few up to now but the actual job of the director in 99% of all movies is minimal it's the only really easy job around it really is you in 1949 wells had acted in a film for the British director Carol Reed he created one of the most memorable anti heroes of all time the racketeer Harry Lime the third man he dominates the picture although he's actually on screen for less than 10 minutes he doesn't even turn up until the fourth reel but when he does it's one of the most magical appearances in cinema [Music] but kind of a spider you think you are satchel foot what are you telling need for cat got your tongue come on out come out come out whoever you are step out the light let's have a look at who's your boss some sparkly new rockin Santa tapered ya see my knee [Music] yes you were saying about about it being rare for for directors to be very fond of actors and acting and I was saying that Carol Reed nobody ever loved acting more than he did and was passionately interested in in his actors and in the process of acting without the remotest feeling that he was imagining himself in that position or imposing himself he was the real act as a director his joy was in your work not in seeing something of his come to life he was exceptional in that case oh man you never should have gone to the police you know you know I leave this thing alone if you have a seed any of your victims you know I don't feel comfortable on these sort of things victims they melodramatic down there would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stop moving forever if I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped would you really old man tell me to keep my money or would you calculate how many dot secretive chord to spam free of income tax a woman breathing context don't we can save money today and did he invite your collaboration oh yes he invited everybody's collaboration as I do that's why I loved working his style is so much like mine in the respect that he wanted he wanted any suggestion he could get my eyeball was neither do you know I'm good I can tell you scenes in in in pictures of mine that were suggested by members of the crew you know anybody can make a suggestion that doesn't mean they get to have it in the picture but if it's good it goes and he welcomed it and so that at an earlier time when I was being in interviewed in another language I gave the impression that I somehow co-directed my scenes with well that's not true and I never meant to say that I give that impression I was however to a large extent the author of the dialogue of Harry Lime including the cuckoo clock and all that kind of stuff these are gloomy what the fellow said Natalie for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare terror murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance in Switzerland they had brotherly love then 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce the cuckoo clock but that is what I do when I act in other people's pictures I never argue about the direction but I'm usually come up with a rewritten scene that's the headache they have to put up with and then if they don't like it I'll go back to the other but I go back home at night right next day seen hope they'll take it instead of what it is but I never would tell it direct him would you do that or something unless they asked me do directors often tell you how to do things when your act oh yeah sure sure our Dora I had one director in in England who yes wonderful about halfway through every take he'd say cut cut there'd be a long silence look at him you know see how would you like me to do it just just do it again so we do it again and then there'd be this curtain we went through the whole picture like that and I never I never knew what was giving him this pain what was there it directors get up to such things you know some directors are great actors of being directors Rene claimed law for example is absolutely superb he's like Lenny Bernstein are not carry on you know when he tells you how to sit in the chair and so on it's just wonderful to watch and Houston is the most fascinating of all actor directors because his performance of a director is so all inspiring and unnerving it's it's absolutely bombers because it's tremendously charming and attractive and terrifying you know in one picture I've made a lot of pictures with a bid five pictures with and directed him and not in another and in the in the land and what I think one of the last pictures he was he was had a penthouse above the stage and while I were relighting he would go back to his penthouse and then slowly they would get a silence on a set and we would realize that John had come back that there would be a voice that would say all right action then cut you would go away in the darkness again well everybody was speechless you know we were he could get up to the damnedest things you could imagine you know because he's virtual spectre of being a director Welles acted for the first time for John Huston in 1956 playing father Mapple in Houston's Moby Dick a project Welles himself had once wanted to direct I was having trouble writing father Mapple into the end of the script and it was became a kind of stumbling block for him you know and the blind area and I tried that didn't satisfy me and I tried again it didn't work and I told Orson listen he said well let me let me take a whack at it and didn't it was it was excellent he's a fine writer by the way and we had the congregation there at the church and Orson had difficulty getting up into the pulpit there was a rope ladder the the pulpit was supposed to be like they figurehead of a whaling vessel but finally he made it he got up there with his the pages and turned pages and whispered lines and and finally said John he said I've never been so nervous I don't know how do I count four but I'm just all all nerves could I have a drink as long as you like Oh brandy so I said I've got a bottle of brandy we put it in the pulpit and Orson referred to the bottle of brandy three or four times and I said well should we have a rehearsal and he said no let's just let's just try and shoot it started the scene Orson went through those six pages and every I dotted and every T crossed he was superb and a beautiful rendering it was and eternal delight should be is who coming to lay him down can say Oh father mortal or immortal here I die I have striven to be thine more than to be this world [Music] or my yet this is nothing I leave eternity to thee of what is Pam that he should live out the lifetime of his god have you found yourself turning down really substantial parts because he wanted to get on with directing no I haven't been offered them I would have sold my soul to play The Godfather for instance but I never get those parts they offered to me at all why why have you accepted so many parts no matter how what you may have done them in the end that we're facing live from bad spirits to Lilith I have to live in them you know if you if you burn it if you're going to try to finance movies and live you have to earn your money somehow and I've done most of my movies have been movies I didn't want to make I've never done a movie that I disapproved of morally the last star part that I was offered was Caligula and I refused it on moral grounds and yet there I would have been playing the leading part in a 8 million dollar picture and it would have been nice to do that but I did I didn't even have a moment's doubt about not doing it and the same thing would be for political reason or anything like that I've turned down a lot of things for those kind of reasons but no great parts I haven't had any great parts offered me only a few good ones in all these years they hire me - they hire me when they have a really bad movie and they want a cameo that'll give it a little class you know so every time I do one of those things I chip off something more from me as an actor it's kind of yeah you know you're in liquidation when you do that and that's why I hope to avoid it now it looks as though I just have a chance for to direct a couple of more movies and I've got a couple of good parts I've written for myself only way else yes so I played all the great parts of the theatre by by running you know this at all OH saying in the it'sh theater that the stars the man who owns the store you know so some of my stores have been rather small establishments but I was the star because I owned my next experiment ladies and gentlemen I would appreciate the loan of any small personal object from your pocket a key box of matches a coin in his later years wells most saleable commodity was himself his own personality and his unrivaled skill as a storytelling and behold before our very eyes a transformation we've changed your key into a coin but up to the key it's been returned to you look closely sir you'll find the key back in your pocket may we see it please after your old tricks I see why not I'm a charlatan well enough of that you described yourself as a charlatan yes well I describe myself as a charlatan in order it was complete trick like everything in them up in that movie it was a trick because I don't regard myself as a charlatan are we out of film no no I said I was a charlatan in order not to sound pompous talking about all the charlatans that were in the movie and that's why I did the magic and so on I thought by saying charlatan that will keep me from looking like some superior moral judge of tricksters I didn't think I was a Charlaine but a lot of very serious film writers have taken that up and written at great length about Orson Welles as a charlatan you see out of his own lips and all of that but that was the that was the trick - it was all a trick you do everything about that picture was a trick ladies and gentlemen by way of introduction this is a film about trickery and fraud about lies tell it by the fireside or the marketplace or in a movie almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie but not this time this is a promise during the next hour everything you'll hear from us is really true and based on solid facts who is MIA that question as he had to be answered with any real precision it has that lovely magpie quality as well I mean you've got that film from another source yes BBC everybody knows hell yeah tell me of what he has about 60 times the same name de Hory his colleague named avi and rushed over the BBC to look at it and bought the film yes it's his world is a world of make-believe I am NOT a professional actor he's a leading actor in this movie his profession it's true was painting a painting fakes among all fakers mere his number two when I finished there for fake I thought I had discovered a new kind of movie and it was the kind of movie I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing and it was the failure of f4 fake it was one of the big shocks of my in America and also in England was one of the big shocks of my life because I have to really thought I was onto something I did promise that for one hour I tell you only the truth that our ladies and gentlemen is over for the past 17 minutes I've been lying my head off in f4 fake you you appear as Orson Welles and you're the story Darin I think that is it right in don quixote you appear yes as the story yes and it's very interesting that Cervantes set out to write a short story it's just by coincidence I set out to writer to make a short film but the figure of Quixote sees is you and Sancho pants and carries you forever it's no end to them as but they have become ghostly they're starting to fade like an old movie piece of old movie film that's that's what I'll have to make we were talking about the essay film hmm and I haven't said that I'd like to do take another shot at at this time on the subject of Spain Spain and the Spanish virtues and vices specially virtues because Cervantes wrote a figure of fun a man who had gone mad reading old romances and he ended up writing nigh a story about a knight real one when you finish up with Quixote you know that he's the most perfect night whoever rode out against a dragon and it has taken tourism you know on modern communications and maybe even democracy to destroy this if not destroy at least to dim this extraordinary Spanish thing that's that would be the subject of my essay on Quixote in Spain when I finish it and I'm going to because it won't cost much money let's be very pleasure to do and you know the title when are you going to finish Don Quixote that's what it's got to be called because you've heard about some ways so many times since it's my own little picture and I put my own money on I don't know why they don't bug authors and say when are you going to finish Nelly that novel you started 10 years ago you know Welles never did finish Don Quixote and he never allowed anyone to see what he'd already shot sometimes he joked that he wasn't altogether sure where the various bits of it really were sometimes I tried to imagine Orson having different bedrooms in different motels and hotels and the doors to this room bedroom is locked and under the bed are hidden maybe because of the makeup kit I discovered hidden you know boxes and boxes of film who knows Jean Moreau starred in another Welles film that remains unseen the deep completed in 1969 and never released and John Huston acted in another unfinished project this one held up by complicated egle tangles it's called the other side of the wind the story of an aging and respected film director surrounded by admirers but with the typical Welles irony unable to find the money for his next picture worsen hasn't made half as many movies as he wanted to and could have but Orson of anybody that I've known should have been subsidized he should have had a patron somebody just wrote the checks you know because that's never been his bag dealing with getting the money and that's all he's had to do that's why so many it's so much of the time he spent his own money he didn't want to be bothered with having to get it or he couldn't get it and he had a tremendous desire and urge to make pictures I think I made it essentially a mistake and staying in movies because I but it it's the mistake I can't regret because it's like saying I shouldn't have stayed married to that one but I did because I loved her yeah I would have been more successful if I hadn't been married to her you know I would have been more successful if I'd left movies immediately stayed in the theater gone into politics written anything I've wasted the greater part of my life looking for money in trying to get along trying to make my work from this to have expensive paint box which is a movie and I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie it's about two percent moviemaking and 98 percent hustling it's no way to spend a life do you feel that's going to go on oh I'm going to go on being faithful to my girl I love her I felt so much in love with making movies that the theater lost everything for me you know I'm just in love with a key movius not very fond of movies I don't go to them much I think it's very harmful to see movies for movie makers because you either imitate them or worry about not imitating them and you should do movies innocently the way Adam named the animals in the first day in the garden and I lost my innocent side every time I see a picture I I I lose something I don't gain I never understand what what directors mean when they complement me young directors that say they've learned from my pictures because I I don't believe in learning from other people's pictures I think you should learn from your own interior vision things and discover as I say innocently as though there had never been DW Griffith's or Eisenstein or Ford or Renoir or anybody jean-luc gotta writing about Orson Welles may we be accursed if we ever forget for one second that he alone with Griffith one in silent days one sound was able to start up that marvelous little electric train all of us always will owe him everything and to me Orson is so much like a destitute King and destitute King not because he was thrown away from the kingdom but on this earth the way the world is there's no Kingdom that is good enough for us and Welles that's the way I feel [Music] and the classic Orson Welles story Citizen Kane is next on bbc2 in a few moments [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Luis Samanamud

Views: 293,000

Rating: 4.8391223 out of 5

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Id: w269hFyfKJ0

Length: 139min 10sec (8350 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 01 2018