HJ: So, you’re not really beating your breast in F for Fake?
OW: I don’t get anything off my chest. That’s a kind of romanticism that I don’t like. The personal aspect of romanticism. I don’t want to know about the hang-ups of the writers or movie people, either. I’m not interested in the artist; I’m interested in his work. And the more he reveals, the less I like it. Proust holds me by his enormous skill. But the subject matter is not that interesting. He wants us—It’s not—he’s being— I don’t know how to explain it. Here’s a way to put it: I do not mind seeing the artist naked, but I hate to see him undressing. Show me your cock. That’s all right with me. But don’t striptease.
HJ: So in real life, how can we trust you when you say favorable things? Or unfavorable things, for that matter.
OW: You can’t. You have to ask me to repeat it. I never lie twice about the same thing. What I hate is when filmmakers ask my opinion, saying to me, “We know that you wouldn’t say anything but the truth. That’s why we’re asking.” At that moment, I’m preparing the biggest lie in the world, you know. They’re going to ask about some piece of merde—always. I’ve come up with one good answer, at least, which is this: “There are no words…”
HJ: And your other one, that I’ve heard you say, is, “You’ve done it again.”
OW: I never lie with a laugh. It’s much easier to lie about an intense tragedy than about a comedy. It’s very hard to sit and go, “Ha ha ha ha.” It’s easier to say, “It’s too touching, isn’t it?”
HJ: I’ll never understand why F for Fake didn’t do better here.
OW: The tragedy of my life is that I can’t get the Americans to like it. Outside of New York, the critics hated it. In Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis—they were furious with it. They seemed to think I was attacking critics. Which I wasn’t, but why not? It did make fools of them. In France, for instance, all the art critics denounced it. That’s what happens when you show a [Kees] Van Dongen that Van Dongen didn’t paint, and the critics say that he did. The great Andre Malraux, with tears coursing down his face in the Museum of Tokyo where there were five Modiglianis, came up to one of them and said, “At last the true essence of Modigliani has been revealed to me.” All five of them were fakes, painted by de Hory. Who should go down in art history as a serious forger. But you can’t say that to critics, you know. Anyway, I think, F for Fake is the only really original movie I’ve made since Kane. You see, everything else is only carrying movies a little further along the same path. I believe that the movies—I’ll say a terrible thing—have never gone beyond Kane. That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been good movies, or great movies. But everything has been done now in movies, to the point of fatigue. You can do it better, but it’s always gonna be the same grammar, you know? Every artistic form—the blank-verse drama, the Greek plays, the novel—has only so many possibilities and only so long a life. And I have a feeling that in movies, until we break completely, we are only increasing the library of good works. I know that as a director of movie actors in front of the camera, I have nowhere to move forward. I can only make another good work.
HJ: F for Fake is a new form, film in the form of an essay, which is one of the things that appeals to me. You created a new language.
OW: I hoped F for Fake would be the beginning of a new language that other people would take up.
HJ: I wish you had done more films in that format.
OW: I wish so, too.
HJ: Maybe the critics’ scorn for Clifford Irving damaged the film itself.
OW: He’s the unsympathetic fellow in this film. But he’s kind of fascinating, sitting there and talking about what makes a poseur.
HJ: And what makes something art.
OW: And, really, what is art? It’s a very interesting question, you know? One that has never been sufficiently answered. I’m deeply suspicious of the unanimity that people have about the whole range of art and music. Because I don’t think it’s humanly possible for everybody to have the right opinion about something. Therefore, some of it must be wrong. I wish some critics would say, “You know, this is all trash!” But nobody has.
HJ: Do you mean that the reputations of Beethoven or Picasso should be challenged?
OW: Yes. Why are we admiring some painters now, like [Bartolome] Morillo, who are going to disappear? Conversely, nobody took El Greco seriously until seventy-five years ago. Why is there this absolute unanimity and certainty that everybody has not only about painting, but about everything—movies; anything you want to name. Everyone agrees on what is classic and what is not.
HJ: But don’t you think there are some works that transcend—
OW: That’s the question. Are there? I’d like to think so, but I’m not—
HJ: You’ve made one, arguably two. The fact is that everyone agrees about Kane. It’s on everybody’s list.
OW: Who knows how it will fare in thirty years?
HJ: It’s already withstood the test of time. I don’t know why, because I don’t think Kane is better than F for Fake.
OW: I think we can’t pursue this conversation if we do it around my work. Because I get coy.
HJ: I don’t think we can question a Beethoven symphony as being anything less than—
OW: One would think not. And I would personally die for Bach and Mozart, Bartók, Beethoven. I’m sure I’m right about them—and about Velázquez, too—but what troubles me is when people accept the whole edifice—the movies, the books, the paintings, what’s in, what’s out—just because it’s already been accepted. That arouses my suspicion. Even if it’s right. I also don’t believe, in literature, that anybody can have taste so catholic that he genuinely likes Joyce and Eliot—and Céline. And yet, many people accept all of them. I say there’s a point where somebody can’t really dig that other fellow if they dig this one. Our eyes, our sensibilities, are only so wide.
HJ: But I wonder if you and I are defining art in the same way. Because, for instance, Beckett, for me, who I consider a great—
OW: I agree that he probably is. But I don’t understand it—the greatness. I believe that people are right when they say he’s great. But I cannot find it, and I—
HJ: Why do you believe it, then?
OW: Because I suspect that I’m tone-deaf to it. Just like I think there is music that I don’t understand. I know when I sense something is wrong. I know when I think something is a fake. I know when the emperor has no clothes. But I don’t see a naked emperor with Beckett. He’s just opaque to me. I think [Francis] Bacon is a great painter, but I hate his paintings. I don’t really question his reputation; I just keep walking, rather than stopping and staring, you know. I believe that there is no law, and should be no law under the heavens that tells an artist what he ought to be. But my point of view, my idea of art—which I do not propose to be universal—is that it must be affirmative.
HJ: Really?
OW: Life-affirming. I reject everything that is negative. You know, I just don’t like Dostoevsky. Tolstoy is my writer. Gogol is my writer. I’m not a Joyce guy, though I see that he’s one of the great writers of this century.
HJ: God knows, he’s not affirmative.
OW: No, and that’s why I don’t like him.
HJ: But, wait a minute, Orson, what are you talking about? This is a stupid conversation. Touch of Evil is not affirmative.
OW: Listen, none of my reactions about art have anything to do with what I do. I’m the exception!
HJ: Oh, my God.
OW: It doesn’t bother me, because it comes out of me. I’m dark as hell. My films are as black as the black hole. Ambersons. Oh, boy, was that dark. I break all my rules.
HJ: What about film versus theater?
OW: Films are either superior to or inferior to the theater. The battle between the two will always exist. The lack of live actors will always be to the advantage of movies and to its disadvantage. There are things you can do in movies that require the absence of live actors. Therefore, it’s a more
versatile medium. But theater, which requires live actors, can achieve things that films can never reach, because what’s up on the screen is dead. It’s only an image—there are no people there. Nobody who didn’t see him in the theater will ever know how great W. C. Fields was. He was a shadow of himself in films. A shadow! A tenth as funny as he was on the stage. [Al] Jolson, too.
HJ: But that’s performance you’re talking about. Not filmmaking.
OW: Yes. Well, that’s all that’s important. The making of a film is secondary to the performance.
HJ: Oh, how can you say that? You, the man who made F for Fake! Your own work belies that.
OW: Basically, when you speak about the performing arts, the most important thing is the performer, even if he is the result of the director. What you are looking at is a performance. That’s my point.
HJ: Wait a minute. In F for Fake, it’s not the performance—it’s the form you create.
OW: The hell it’s not the performance.
HJ: You center it on the performance, but it’s the form! The best indication of it is that whole section where you use a still photograph of Picasso’s eyes behind the images, where Oja is walking in the streets while his eyes flick up. It’s you, the filmmaker, who created that!
OW: I don’t argue with this at all. I don’t say that the filmmaker can’t be the most important thing. But, basically, in the great mass of films, it is the performance in the film as photographed that we see. That performance may be the result of the director or may not! And when it’s at its best, it’s both.
HJ: But I think film is more analogous to music than to theater.
OW: I do, too. But I wasn’t talking about analogous. I was talking about the battle, the curious tension between the two performing media. I agree that film is more musical than theater—and more literary. It’s more narrative than drama. A real movie is a narrative—it’s a story. For [Sergei] Eisenstein, on the other hand, montage is the essence of cinema. But he is the most overrated great, great director of them all.
HJ: He doesn’t value actors or performance. He’s the exact opposite of you. I’m not surprised that you gave Ivan the Terrible an unflattering review in your New York Post column.
OW: Yeah. It didn’t bring the hands together. And he then wrote me letters month after month. Hundreds and hundreds of words each time. Until he went into hiding.
HJ: What happened to those letters?
OW: They burnt up. I felt badly about that review. It was a stupid thing to do. I published it when I was in San Francisco where the charter of the United Nations was being written. But I was spending so much time with Yugoslav partisans who were there, in San Francisco, that I felt—and with Harry Bridges, and other known card-carrying members of the Communist Party—that I thought I could attack Soviet art with a good conscience, you see?
HJ: Stalin didn’t dare touch Eisenstein, did he?
OW: He apparently was touched. He was hiding in phone booths at the end, and he was very badly off. He was not allowed to release the third part of Ivan the Terrible. Because it suddenly occurred to Stalin, who thought he was going to be glorified, that in Ivan the Terrible you couldn’t help but see that he was terrible. So, of course, Stalin’s displeasure then moved to Eisenstein. Who should have anticipated that at the beginning. If he was so good at dialectical materialism, he should have looked around him and said, “I think I’m going to do a pastoral story of a happy collective farm,” you know?
HJ: He died in forty-eight. The time of the Doctors’ Trials. All the Jews were being purged.
OW: The theater suffered much more than film. All the good theater people got it. You know, Meyerhold—
HJ: Meyerhold was shot in an earlier purge in 1940 …
OW: I don’t know why they were persecuted more severely. Maybe because all these terrible functionaries had the habit of going to the theater as a sort of official event. So they saw all the plays. The Russians have terrible taste. I saw it at its worst when they came here to buy films while the war was still on in the Pacific. I was talking to them about Eisenstein and all that. So certain was I that my work would be taken back to Russia that I took the commissar, who’d been given the job, to all the Hollywood parties, and to Romanoff’s, and poured champagne down his throat. And he went home with a list that began with Sun Valley Serenade, a bunch of pictures like that, mostly with Don Ameche. Crummy musicals. Not even the good ones. Just dumb. Peasant dumb. Idiots that I wasted my time on. You know, not one movie of mine has ever been shown in any theater in the Soviet Union.
HJ: You would think they would love Kane, because they could interpret it as a big attack on capitalism.
OW: But they don’t have enough sense to understand it. The critics frothed at the mouth, because it shows the good side of the oppressor.
HJ: They thought you admired Kane? And his opulence?
OW: The truth is, if any of them got to be the premier of Russia, they would be living in Xanadu themselves. The one they really couldn’t stand was Touch of Evil, because that showed the final decadence of the capitalist world.
HJ: That’s why they should love it!
OW: But they thought it was my decadence. The Russians are a people of genius, you know, in every department. But instead of it flowering under this great revolution, it all withered. And they’re very literal. What we used to think the German mind was like. People who don’t really understand German culture always think Germans are very literal. But they’re not literal at all. They’re mystics—you know, hysterics. The Russians are “machine-made,” “tractor-made.” Poor people.
None of this is true of the satellite countries. In Yugoslavia, for example, F for Fake has run three times on prime-time television with Yugoslav subtitles. Here, the film is almost unknown. It just broke my heart that it never caught on. Because that would have solved my old age. I could have made an essay movie—two of ’em a year, you see? On different subjects. Various variations of that form.
HJ: Weren’t you thinking of making Don Quixote as an essay film?
OW: That was the way I wanted to finally get it done, with the title When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote? That would be the name of the movie. And it would be all about Spain, a country I’ve known since I was a boy. What’s happened to it, and why Quixote is still important. That film would be much more expensive than F for Fake, because I’d need to shoot footage in modern Spain. You know, de-Francoed Spain. But how to sell Quixote without having sold F for Fake? It’s hard if you haven’t got in the door with your first Fuller brush.
10. “The Cannes people are my slaves.”
In which Orson perks up when he hears there is interest in Lear and The Dreamers. He plans to “come out” at Cannes, where he always traveled under a foreign flag because the French hated to give Americans the Palme d’Or.
* * *
HENRY JAGLOM: Speaking of unfinished and new films, did you read that article about you that Mary Blume wrote in the International Herald Tribune I gave you?
ORSON WELLES: Yeah, sort of. You know, I don’t read those things very carefully. I read the end to see how they sum it up. I’m always afraid of reading something bad along the way. It’s not arrogance on my part, but cowardice, sheer funk that keeps me from reading the articles. I should, but I don’t. I will.
HJ: That one’s significant, because I’ve gotten a great many calls from Europe. They all want to be your hero. As if Hollywood didn’t understand, or appreciate you, and they want to show them up. Germany, now, is back in the picture. They were mad, because they hadn’t heard directly from me since The Dreamers, which I had offered them, and they had proposed, remember, good partial financing.
OW: Yes.
HJ: And we ended up thinking it wasn’t enough. I don’t recall what it was. Now they’re saying, “The Dreamers, is that still available?” And they said, “Why didn’t you come to us about Lear? Welles and Lear.”
OW: Yes, I do remember.
HJ: I have reason to
believe that, for the German-speaking countries, I could get a million dollars. And now they’re not demanding stars.
OW: In other words, the game has changed since what’s-his-name told us, “Without stars, nothing doing”? We don’t need A-list actors? That’s progress. Lear must be done. I work on it all the time. I would feel very unfulfilled if I couldn’t bring this one off. And I think it is a dream tax-shelter thing.
HJ: So let’s talk about Lear.
OW: If God gives me basic health, I can go on to make several pictures over the upcoming few years. But because I’m increasingly arthritic, I must play Lear in the next year. I’m worried about doing it after that. Just sheer getting around.
HJ: The energy of that part.
OW: Not so much the energy of the part, but the physical moving around. Which is fine for me to do and use as the old man. But I must be able to. And who knows, with arthritis, when the moment comes when I really can’t get around? You see? I have to be realistic about that.
HJ: So if you can’t do Lear—
OW: I can do The Dreamers, for which I almost have a new script. Which I don’t want to show you, because you’ll love it, and then you won’t want to do anything else, it’s so good. I’ve rewritten it and completely sharpened it and made it—
HJ: You can’t do this! You’re not allowed to do this to me! You say that I’ll love it, I won’t want to do anything else, so you won’t show it to me?
OW: No, I will, I will. I’ll send it to you today. And when you get it, be sure you have time to read it. Try to read it as though you never read it before. Oja thinks that it should be the second picture, because even if the knee should get worse and I can’t move around in that part, I don’t have to. I can do The Dreamers even if I can’t move.
HJ: I want to talk about your knees, also, though, because I have an idea.
OW: My knees?
My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles Page 11
