My Lunches with Orson

by Peter Biskind

  OW: Knees.

  HJ: Knees. Do you rub anything into your knees?

  OW: Never mind. Let’s talk about the medical part of it later.

  HJ: I just found something very interesting.

  OW: Give it to me. I’ll rub anything in. But let’s not talk about my knees; let’s talk about Lear. If there is real interest in it, I really must do it.

  HJ: The hardest thing for me has been to pin you down about the budget. How much money do you really require to do it?

  OW: Well, I’ll tell you. Because of the constant changes in rentals—When I first talked to you, the rentals of studios in Hollywood were 40 percent less than they are now for independent productions. And Italy has a new production agreement that has raised the rates 30 percent. In other words, nothing is fixed. We have to decide at what moment we’re really going to go after it, and make the budget then.

  HJ: Well, which budget do we work from?

  OW: The budget I sent you. That is the budget that allows me shorter working hours, and addresses the problem of the five- as opposed to six-day shooting week that is routine throughout Europe.

  HJ: That’s a doable budget. We could get that money.

  OW: I also need to have some money for myself, as an actor. I want to play the part that I was born to play. And I cannot bear to lose it. And I’ve done the script for it already. Big job, making a movie of Shakespeare. Because you have to take terrible risks, do things that people don’t like you to do. And always criticize you for it. But I think it’s what he … would do.

  HJ: Sure, if film had existed then.

  OW: For one thing, his stage at the Globe Theatre was very big—people forget that. The distance from the inner theater out to that platform was a long way. And he had to march these armies on and write these boring speeches to give them the time to get off again. He turns into a different kind of writer when he’s moving armies. You could almost write the stuff yourself, the level is so mundane. Now, in a movie you don’t have to do that.

  I’m gonna do it in 16 millimeter black-and-white. The camera is so small that you can carry it like a typewriter. If only the people who put up money didn’t turn white with terror when you say “16 millimeter.” It’s the only way to go. Even though it still has to be turned into 35 millimeter.

  HJ: Which makes no sense.

  OW: Especially in an age when most of your public is gonna see it on a television screen anyway, and the other people are gonna see it on a small screen in these smaller theaters.

  HJ: Regular 16? Not Super 16? It’ll have to be mostly close-ups.

  OW: It will be mostly close-ups. With my little machine, I can cut in my bedroom. You know, just get out of bed and—

  HJ: I don’t even think it’s necessary to tell people you’re going to shoot in 16.

  OW: But how do you do that? Unless we made a 35 millimeter blimp and hide the 16 millimeter camera inside it. And never say a word about it.

  HJ: And use the money we save for …

  OW: Just leave the word 35 out of the contract. When I think that in the last decade of my career I have to make pictures which are essentially much cheaper—require more ingenuity and faking around than when I started—and yet, they will be judged by the standards of the time when I had more money, I don’t like that at all, you know.

  HJ: Do you want to finance Lear through any of these cable people who have been interested?

  OW: I don’t think so. It should be a small movie that plays in small theaters everyplace in the world. And then there’s the casting. I’ll have to do it with people who are eager to work with me, you know. They’ll share a piece of it—or nothing, or whatever.

  HJ: I think you should make the rounds in Europe again, to take advantage of the interest that article has stirred up.

  OW: I think that I should consider, very seriously, going to Cannes this year. The cultural importance of the festival vanished years ago. It’s now ceased to be anything except a market. But if you get one of the top prizes, it helps your business.

  HJ: We should make arrangements.

  OW: Oh, there’s nothing to arrange. You know, the Cannes people are my slaves, pretty much. But I don’t want to go as a guest of the festival, if I can help it. I’ll let ’em pay for the hotel, as long as I’m not obligated to do anything. They’ll probably want me to do some things that I don’t want to do. And if there are too many of them, I’ll pay my own hotel bill.

  HJ: I bet they want to give you some award or something.

  OW: It’s a disadvantage to be an American there. They don’t like to give the Palme d’Or to Americans. I experienced that several times. The most notable time was with Othello in 1952. I didn’t know whether I was getting the prize or not. Because they never tell you, you see, that you’ve won it, until the very last minute. And the way I learned it was when they came to my room in the Carlton, desperate, and said, “We can’t find anybody who knows the national anthem of Morocco.” Because I had entered the picture as a Moroccan picture! The Moor of Venice, you know? All the things I’ve entered in Cannes for prizes have always been as Italian or Spanish—or Moroccan.

  HJ: Didn’t you get some kind of consolation prize for Chimes at Midnight?

  OW: That one was nominated for the Palme d’Or in 1966, and it was “the” picture that year because the competition was so weak. All my old French friends were on the jury: Marcel Achard, Marcel Pagnol, somebody else, I’ve forgotten. And it was that thing of [Claude] Lelouche, his first movie, Un Homme et Une Femme, that got it.

  When I got word that I was being given a special prize, I said, “I don’t want to come to the ceremony.” Because it’s very undignified. But then I thought, “If I don’t show up, it’ll look like I’m a sorehead.” So I went. And it was the greatest triumph of my life. Because when they announced that Un Homme et Une Femme had won the Palme d’Or, the audience stood up, booed and yelled for ten minutes. Then they said, “We’re giving a special prize to Orson Welles,” and there was a fifteen-minute ovation. So it was clear what everybody thought—except the jury, you know.

  HJ: And did you ever get an explanation from people like Pagnol?

  OW: No. It was a French thing. To promote their industry. I hadn’t figured on that. I should have insisted that Chimes at Midnight be shown out of competition. Instead of enduring the humiliation. The year you make your masterpiece, the Rumanians will get it, you know. I was in Cannes the year of the revolution. In ’68. When all the leading directors withdrew from the festival. And I joined them. It was “to the barricades!” They all said to me, “We don’t even think of you as an American.” But I’m very American! My pictures are very American! All they mean is that they like them.

  HJ: And you’re content to let them think your pictures are un-American because it helps you there?

  OW: I’m a hypocrite. A sellout. You know, Louise de Vilmorin told me a story about Malraux.

  HJ: De Vilmorin. You mean the writer? Madame de…, from which [Max] Ophuls made The Earrings of Madame de…? She was Malraux’s mistress, called herself Marilyn Malraux, was she not?

  OW: The very same. You know, de Gaulle made Malraux Minister of Cultural Affairs. She told me, “The limousine meets him in the morning and takes him to the ministry.”

  HJ: My God! A hero of the Spanish Civil War, of the French Resistance, in a limo? With a driver?

  OW: And then he ended up a stooge. There was a picture in Paris Match at the height of the ’68—the “troubles,” as we called them in Dublin—in which there was a great right-wing demonstration in Paris where they all filled the Champs-Élysées right up to the Arc de Triomphe. And there was de Gaulle, standing by the Unknown Soldier, with a flame coming out. And there was Malraux, with his head leaning over onto de Gaulle, with tears running down his cheeks. That’s what can happen to intellectuals, you know? They are the biggest pushovers. They love power. They cluster around whatever golden boy, or man, is in power and begin to justify it.

  HJ
: I wonder if it’s because they feel that sense of being an outsider so early in life …

  OW: Yes. And suddenly they have access to power. We saw that with Kennedy. It was such a beehive. I got a letter from Arthur Schlesinger, who wrote an article in a magazine called Show in which he talked about me as a person who inexplicably had a certain cult following. Now he’s forgotten all that, and wants me to be a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters. They can’t do better than make me an honorary one, because there is no category for films. And I am rather tempted to say, “Create one or do without me.” They’re all feebly trying to imitate the Académie française, which is a useless institution, anyway.

  HJ: I wonder why they don’t have a category for film.

  OW: They’re the last holdouts. Because when I was young, the movies were considered to be not quite serious. The theater critic is what mattered. The movie critic was a little fellow who covered hockey or the dog show.

  HJ: Does the Académie française have a category for film?

  OW: They do. René Clair. Pagnol. Cocteau. By the way, when is Cannes this year?

  HJ: May something—tenth? To the seventeenth. In that week or so. When are you going to Paris?

  OW: I go to Paris for the show at the Louvre. I’m committed to that.

  11. “De Mille invented the fascist salute.”

  In which Orson displays his grasp of ancient history, art history, and French history, venturing several dubious theories while scheming to hijack an ambitious French television series on the Louvre.

  * * *

  Henry JAGLOM: What are you going to do at the Louvre?

  ORSON WELLES: Between the Socialists and TV, the French have put up an enormous sum of money for thirty hours of programming on the Louvre.

  HJ: What do they want you to do?

  OW: To rewrite the thing. Not wanting to do it much, what I did was to make conditions that I thought rendered it impossible for them to say yes. It was a little bit like my contract for Kane. They asked me, “What are you interested in, what subjects?” So I said, “Well, considering it’s the Louvre, I would like to do the Egyptian collection, because I have a particular thing I’d like to say about it in France.” To my great astonishment, they said yes. The scripts only arrived the day before yesterday. You’ve never read anything so terrible in your life.

  HJ: Why am I not surprised?

  OW: The director of the whole show is also the writer, thus making it impossible to argue, because he’s the one who calls the shots. A voice from heaven, never explained, delivers the commentary, and two people—Elle et Lui—go trotting around the Louvre. Saying banal things like, “Oh … the Egyptians, I believe? They’re the people who invented a writing called hieroglyphs,” and, “Then the mummy is placed in a coffin, which is called a sarcophagus.” Any intelligent fifth-grader knows what a sarcophagus is. Every once in a while there’s a little spirited remark, such as—they’ve been looking at the zodiac things and Elle says to Lui, “What’s your sign?” So much for the great patrimony of Egyptian art. There’s no story; there’s no theme, no revelation, no point of view, just a number of stupid statements that aren’t true, beginning with, “Like all ancient religions, the Egyptians were obsessed with death.” So I immediately said, “I will name you several ancient religions in which death is incidental: Judaism, to begin with. Confucianism. Taoism. Shintoism.”

  So I thought to myself, legally I can say, “I don’t like the script,” and everybody goes home. The French will be deeply embarrassed by this, and it’ll look like I’m being capricious. So I decided, I won’t attack the director and his script. I’ll say what I want to do, and ask to write it, not just rewrite it.

  WAITER: Gentlemen, bon appetit. How is everything?

  HJ: Thank you.

  OW: We’re talking, thank you. (Waiter leaves.) I wish they wouldn’t do that. If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they’re talking.

  HJ: You were saying?

  OW: The great story is that Egypt was an incredibly closed society, which lasted longer than any other society in the Mediterranean world, in a state of total rigidity. Egypt is like the Japan of the Mediterranean, elegant, cruel, inexplicable, and then suddenly opened up. Who by? Napoleon. That’s why the story of the Egyptian collection is fascinating. That never occurred to these French people. It’s also very nice, because it’s the one moment in Napoleon’s career when it’s possible to speak well of him without reservations. So the half of the population that adores him is not gonna hiss me off the screen. Napoleon in Egypt is beyond criticism.

  And I pointed out that not only did Napoleon give us all these savants and the Rosetta Stone and [Jean-François] Champollion, who broke the code and therefore opened up Egyptian art and culture to the world, but Egyptian art and culture dominated the aesthetics of the First Empire.

  HJ: I didn’t know that.

  OW: Study the interior decoration. It’s full of Egyptian elements, just as the Deuxième Empire of Louis Napoleon drew on Arabic and Algerian sources for exoticism. Just as the English used India for exoticism. Paris is full of imitation Arabic places left over from the Second Empire. To which was then added Caesarism—Roman elements—foreshadowing Mussolini. Because every dictatorship has always adapted the gestures and costumes of an ancient nation. That’s the kind of thing I would like to do on TV, to take people through all these kinds of connections. Including when you go into the Caesarism of Mussolini, there is the fascist salute. [Cecil B.] DeMille invented it. He had to come up with something for the crowd, all those extras, to do, and Mussolini picked it up from there. Then it went to Hitler. And everybody else has been doing it ever since.

  HJ: So Mussolini sees DeMille’s version of ancient Rome, and …

  OW: Oh, you’ll get historians who’ll scream about it and say it isn’t true, but I’ve never been able to find one who could disprove it. And I’ve had some arguments in Rome with historians. I said, “Come back to me when you can show me that everybody always saluted like that.” They weren’t doing this at the beginning of the fascist era; it only started after the movie came out. They took up Caesarism, because it was the era, in both Italy and America, of big Roman spectacles.

  HJ: And why did Napoleon stand like that?

  OW: A great actor of the time instructed him, “You’re an Italian, and you’re very short. You look ridiculous. And when you talk you wave your arms about. Keep your hand tucked under your tunic.” This was still in the days of the Directory, when it was possible to talk to him like that. And Napoleon added, “Never wear a uniform higher than a corporal.”

  HJ: You’re making this up. Why did he say that?

  OW: You know his saying. “Every French soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.” In other words, they could all rise to this, you see. But what he gave the marshals was everything except final power. And since they had all the gold braid that has ever been put on a uniform, what could this little dago dress up like that would make him stand out? Leave the marshals to have their gold braid. Of course, the French hate that story, because they don’t even like to hear that he’s Italian. Corsican. Straight from Genoa, on both sides of the family. And the behavior—the loyalty to the family, you know? It’s just like the Mafia. With the old woman running the whole thing in the back room, you know?

  HJ: Which old woman?

  OW: The mother.

  HJ: And he puts the brother—

  OW: Sure. Take care of Giuseppe, you know? Makes him King of Naples. It’s a real, real Mafia story.

  Anyway, I told the French, “You have two choices: either accept my proposal, or pay me $5,000 and give me the rights to what I wrote. Because I cannot do your script. I am somebody who is supposed to know something—whether it’s true or not, it’s a certain image—and that is greatly reduced when I become a fool, and in that case, I am done an injury. And furthermore, if I don’t do your show, you won’t be able
to sell it in the English-speaking market.” They might, but I tell ’em that to scare the shit out of ’em. Then I throw in the blackmail: “I will show my tape to the press in Paris, and explain to them what I wanted to do. On the other hand, if you do like it, I’ll give it to you for free, but your director is working for me. And it has to be “Orson Welles Goes to the Louvre.” Half an hour ago they got back to me. I won the point. I said, “You were gonna use Charlotte Rampling with Dirk Bogarde, but it’s going to be me and Oja.”

  HJ: You know, in Jewish history Napoleon is quite a hero.

  OW: Yes. My Dadda Bernstein taught me, as a child, that he was a great man. He had rows of books on Napoleon.

  HJ: He freed the Jews in France. And in all of the French Empire. Took ’em out of the ghettoes. He was the first person to consider the Jews citizens of the country, and treated them accordingly.

  OW: He did all kinds of admirable things. I’m not a mad Napoleon fan, but there’s no denying his genius. A very complicated man. But had he never been born, there are millions of people who wouldn’t have died. There were unnecessary wars that he fought for his own glorification, which makes him a villain in the last analysis.

  HJ: That’s terrible, of course. But, at least, he was good for the Jews.

  OW: It’s like older Hungarian Jews still worshipping Franz Joseph because he was the only king who didn’t make pogroms. He wasn’t a liberal, but at least he didn’t go out and beat the Jews over the head! Did I tell you the story of his visit to the provinces? It’s a great movie story. You can use it on a set almost any day with an assistant director.

  HJ: What is it?

  OW: Franz Joseph is riding in his carriage through this tiny provincial town, plumes and all. The trembling mayor is sitting next to him. He says, “Your Imperial Highness, I have to apologize to you in the profoundest terms for the fact that the bells are not ringing in the steeple. There are three reasons. First, there are no bells in the steeple—” And Franz Joseph interrupts him and says, “Please don’t tell me the other two reasons.” Now, that’s a good answer for every assistant director, everyone in the world that you’ve had working for you in any capacity.