by Simon Callow
He introduced another startling change, he told Clay: in the novel, the two policemen who are responsible for executing him seem reluctant to kill him, hoping that he will seize their knife and do it himself. But K. lies there, unmoving. Finally, they twist the knife into his heart, twice, ‘like a dog,’ thinks K. to himself. ‘It was as if,’ says Kafka – it is the last line of the novel – ‘the shame would outlive him.’ Welles found this end to the book unacceptable. ‘The murder seems to have the sanction of the victim. After the death of six million Jews, Kafka would not have written that. It seemed to me to be pre-Auschwitz.’17 Moreover, it smacks of despair. ‘I absolutely disagree with those works of art, those novels, those films that, these days, speak about despair,’ Welles told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1964. ‘I do not think that an artist may take total despair as a subject; we are too close to it in daily life. This genre of subject can be utilized only when life is less dangerous and more clearly affective.’18 So in the screenplay he turns the tables on K.’s executioners. His K. dies with great spirit, laughing in their faces, as he says over and over again, ‘You’ll have to do it, you’ll have to do it.’ Welles refused to put his name, he said, ‘to a work that implies man’s ultimate surrender. Being on the side of man, I had to show him, in his final hour, undefeated.’19 His changes are profoundly subversive: first, he makes K. guilty, an oppressor; then, at the end, he turns him into a hero. Kafka’s purposes have been hijacked.
In addition, there is the question of casting. Giving a role to a particular actor can be a subversion all of its own. Antony Perkins’s performance is a central part of Welles’s reinvention of The Trial. The Josef K. of the novel is uptight, anxious, correct and prissy, obsessively compulsive and occasionally possessed of erotic eruptions, which only alarm him. Perkins’s performance – inherently neurotic, though not notably anxious – does indeed suggest a man with a secret (not much acting called for there), but he has the soul of a poet. With his pale, haunted features, he has something of Pierrot Lunaire about him; he is almost balletic in his movements, elfin, occasionally skittish, voluptuously amorous when opportunity presents itself. As he races gracefully towards justice and then away from execution, he could be Orestes pursued by the Furies or Orpheus escaping the Thracian women; in his well-cut suit and floppy white shirt he is almost a figure from Tennessee Williams. It is a far cry from the novel’s distressed and exasperated bank official.
The rest of the casting and the rest of the screenplay are straightforward and closely related to the novel; Welles invented only one scene, a sequence concerning K.’s encounter with a computer and the scientist who runs it, but at the eleventh hour, just before the premiere, he cut the scene, thus depriving the film of Katina Paxinou as the scientist, which can only be a source of regret.
As he worked on the script at home in Fregene, Welles had been in constant contact with the film’s art department in Paris: he sent them fifty-four sketches he had drawn himself for sets, said one of the scenic artists. ‘He never stopped saying, “Give me ten times as much.”’ They had to find hundreds of desks for K.’s office. ‘I want it to run to the end of the world,’ said Welles; for a corridor in a government office, he demanded a ceiling a mile and a half long.20 The film would mostly be filmed in Yugoslavia, where the Salkinds had shot the bulk of Austerlitz; the interiors would be shot in Paris, at the Boulogne Studios. During pre-production in Zagreb, in response to Welles’s request for a technician, Salkind sent Edmond Richard, who had supervised the special effects on Gance’s film. When he arrived, the recce had reached a standstill in the search for a large enough space to shoot Welles’s office space, which would ‘run to the end of the world’. Richard suggested a vast exhibition hall where he had worked on a film about Paganini. The hall was locked up, but with the aid of a bottle of slivovice and a roll of banknotes, all doors were opened to them: surveying the vast spaces of the Swedish and American Pavilions, Welles was enraptured; his eyes filled with tears. Richard had saved the day. Welles was delighted to discover that his saviour had been one of the team that had developed his favourite camera, the Caméflex: portable, easy to operate and simple to load. At the production meeting that night, Welles, without troubling to consult him, announced that Richard would be the director of photography for the film. ‘I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach,’ said Richard.21 He was thirty-four and had never shot a feature before. Welles had found his collaborator, his partner in crime; together they devised the visual language of the film.
Welles had three rules: first, the black-and-white should have maximum contrast: he had no interest in the fifty shades of grey offered by low-contrast negative; second, the light sources must never be identifiable in the shot; and finally, it must be possible to cut any two shots together, since their order in the film would only be decided at the editing stage. They used red filters, with high gamma, so that the contrast would be uniform throughout the movie. Using his felt-tip pen, Welles – who had, said Richard, ‘a sense of synthesis rare among directors’ – would sketch the shots, ‘sculpting in light and shadow’. After rehearsing with the actors, he would break down their moves, using his hand-held Caméflex as a viewfinder, marking it all out methodically: ‘first position here, plumb line, cross on the ground; second position, plumb line, cross on the ground’. Camera moves were invariably dictated by actors’ moves. Their needs were always paramount; he would never allow them to be confined in any way because of the lighting. ‘We need broad lighting,’ he told Richard. ‘We can’t bother the actors with light.’
They started filming in Zagreb in March 1962, shooting the streets, the sewers, the brutalist architecture of the suburbs, the scene in the opera house, the church, the cathedral, the tribunal scene. Welles worked at high speed, constantly energising the unit. He was in his element, surrounded by collaborators, including the actors, whose work delighted him and who delighted in him. The producers kept a respectful distance, which was exactly how he liked it. They had their own problems to worry about: a tranche of the Yugoslavian funding fell through just as they were about to start shooting interiors in the Zagreb studios, so they had to go back to Paris to regroup. But there was no studio space available there, nor could they have afforded it, if there had been. Welles had a notion that a train-cleaning shed might be suitable; the producers approached SNCF, who were desolate to say that they were all in use, but wondered whether M. Welles might perhaps consider the Gare d’Orsay on the rue de la Légion d’Honneur? It was more or less abandoned, but perhaps something could be done with it? Welles’s assistant, Marc Maurette, who had not been to the station since he was a little boy, went along to sound it out and saw some potential among the rats and the rubbish, noting with interest and admiration two enormous phalluses, one in blue and one in green, which had been drawn on the walls by one of the station’s temporary residents; they later had them photographed for posterity.
This rather wonderful story of the discovery of the Gare d’Orsay as a location was too prosaic for Welles; he quickly invented a more romantic one, which his friend and colleague William Chappell (summoned out of the blue, never having acted in his life before, to play the painter Titorelli in the film) duly relayed to the readers of the London Sunday Times:
Welles is a poor sleeper, and standing sleepless at five in the morning at the window of his hotel in Paris he became half-hypnotized by the twin moons of the two great clocks that decorate the deserted and crumbling Gare d’Orsay, that triumphantly florid example of the Belle Époque that looms so splendidly across the trees of the Tuileries gardens. He remembered that he had once been offered an empty station as a location, and his curiosity was aroused. By 7:30 he had explored the lunatic edifice, vast as a cathedral: the great vulgar corpse of a building in a shroud of dust and damp, surrounded and held together by a maze of ruined rooms, stairways and corridors. He had discovered Kafka’s world.22
Whether lured by the twin moons or tipped off by Maurette, Welles
certainly knew that this found space had everything he could ask for, and more. They took it for seven weeks. It possessed, he told Huw Wheldon, ‘a kind of Jules Verne modernism that seems to me quite in the taste of Kafka.’ It was also suffused with melancholy – filled, said Welles, with sorrow, ‘the kind of sorrow that only accumulates in a railway station where people wait’. Kafka’s story, he declared:
is all about people waiting, waiting, waiting for their papers to be filled. It is full of the hopelessness of the struggle against bureaucracy. Waiting for a paper to be filled is like waiting for a train, and it’s also a place of refugees. People were sent to Nazi prisons from there, Algerians were gathered there, so it’s a place of great sorrow.23
Welles immediately determined to absorb as much of the station as possible, though it meant entirely redesigning the interior sequences. It meant, in fact, abandoning his cherished design concept for the film: he had envisaged the settings becoming less and less present, until by the end the story would have been played out in empty space. But he now had something much better, and he and his art director, Jean Mandaroux (the third; he had already sacked the first two), set to work liberating the building’s manifold possibilities. They built a few sets within the shell of the station, but for the most part they preferred to use what was there: this ‘Victorian nightmare of passageways and grillwork, dust, dirt, decay’, as Perkins described it.24 Once again, and this time definitively, Welles set out to create the massive, dank, dungeon world of Piranesi, but now within an M.C. Escher framework, where stairways lead upwards to landings on a lower level, where doors open onto other worlds. It is as if Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s had strayed into the dark underworld of the industrial revolution.
For Welles it became home, quite literally. He moved out of the Meurice and into the Hôtel d’Orsay, on the corner of the building; and everything to do with the film was located in the old station. It became his personal studio, a kind of medieval village filled with craftsmen and technicians and artists, all focused on one goal: the film, with Welles at the centre of it all, a sort of feudal overlord with a pot of paint in his hand. Whenever he could, he involved himself in creating the physical world of the film. One of the most striking features of the Gare d’Orsay was its magnificent glass roof, which it was impossible to cover up. This meant night shooting – and only night shooting – which suited Welles admirably: he would work in the cutting room (set up in a remote corner of the station behind great black drapes) from nine-thirty in the morning till eight at night, after which they would shoot until three. Perkins, who was in every single shot of the film, struggled to stay awake. Welles would wear himself out, doing sleight-of-hand conjuring tricks to keep the actor conscious; once he hired a couple of guitarists to keep Perkins amused.
Welles was deeply solicitous of the actors’ well-being. Most of them had no more than two or three days’ shooting. He would happily rehearse a scene for as long as he and they thought necessary; shooting was once suspended for an entire day while he, Perkins and Romy Schneider worked on their difficult long scene in the Advocate’s office. His patience with them was endless – which was all the more remarkable because, as Chappell wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘in private life he is not patient, but often melancholy, moody, sometimes irritable. At work he is funny, apt, kind, coarse, didactic, generous, intolerant, sweeping, thoughtful: violently American and violently European by turns.’ When the actors were ready, and only when they were ready, Welles would finalise the physical moves and show them to Richard and his crew, whom he would then allow as long as they needed to light it. Then, the preparatory work done, everything moved at high speed; he never did more than three takes, generally settling for one, plus one for good luck. The sound department’s function was limited to providing guide tracks: the acoustics in the station were of course atrocious, so every single line in the film had to be redubbed, which was Welles’s favoured practice anyway. In this manner the film proceeded apace; shooting finished four days ahead of time (though the bill for overtime accounted for any savings there might have been). ‘Genius is not always ruinous,’ noted Film and Filming’s Enrique Martinez, in his report on the shoot.25
To mark the end of this blissful period, Welles threw a party. There were still pickup shots to be done – in Madrid, in Rome – but he wanted to celebrate while everyone was together. There had been no such celebrations at the end of Touch of Evil, much less Mr Arkadin or Othello. But this had to be marked. Time magazine came to the party: ‘when Welles stood, everyone stood,’ it reported, starry-eyed. ‘When he sat, cross-legged, like a giant Buddha on the floor, all eyes in the luxurious Paris apartment turned towards him. Through the whole long evening, he laughed, he talked, puffed on a cigar, listened to the gypsy singers, and downed endless jiggers of vodka.’ At three in the morning, when two or three couples started for the door, he bellowed, ‘You’re not leaving already, my friends. The night is young. Play, gypsies, play, play, play!’ The gypsies played, the guests stayed. ‘Once again, and at long last,’ said Time, ‘Orson Welles was front and center . . . at forty-seven, the Boy Wonder was a boy again.’26 There was an inordinate amount of interest in this film, a sense that something very special was in the offing. Whole waves of journalists were despatched to find out what was up. Was Welles back on form? Reports from the editing suite were breathless: Jules Dassin and Anatole Litvak had seen some rushes and declared that they were witnessing ‘the birth of a classic’. The conjunction of Welles and Kafka was part of the excitement: ‘two shockers’, as one paper put it.
Welles was unusually communicative with his interviewers. After a meal consisting of five copious courses, two bottles of red wine and many glasses of fifty-year-old cognac, Welles, obviously feeling he had turned a corner, confided to Jack Kobler of the New York Saturday Evening Post: ‘It’s rough to be thought of as the fellow who had it – once. I could easily have gone on the sauce. Then I found a solution. For years I’d been telling people they were wrong about Welles. Then I took a new tack. I’d give ’em a steely look and say, “You were right. Only I’ve changed.” I haven’t, of course. I’m just as good or as lousy as I ever was. But it worked. Hardly a day passes now that someone doesn’t offer me a script.’27 As for The Trial, in his mind it had become the film he had been dreaming about for years. It is acutely enjoyable to watch Welles in the process of working up his version of his own history, trying on the variants for size, until he settles on the most colourful one. For Jack Kobler he spins a tale about the genesis of the film, which he never repeated anywhere else: Alexander Salkind, in this variation, came to Welles to ask him to play a cameo in a planned film of Taras Bulba. The producer’s eye lighted on the screenplay of The Trial, over which Welles had, he said, been toiling for fifteen years, and immediately asked him to direct it. So much for poor Laplanche (who is actually credited on the film as ‘promoter’). ‘What keeps you away from the States?’ asks Kobler. Welles answers with some emotion: ‘Don’t get me wrong about me and my country. I’d give my eyeteeth to be there this minute. But I’m respected less there than anywhere else.’ He quotes from memory Walter Kerr’s ten-year-old dismissal of him as ‘the world’s youngest has-been’. ‘Over here serious critics take me seriously.’ Shrugging this off, Welles now really hits his inventive stride, telling a happily credulous Kobler that the year before, ‘for a lark’, he and Paola had toured Italy with a gypsy circus; Welles earned his keep as a clown. A beguiling thought. ‘On such jaunts, he films documentaries, part family album, part travelogue, which England’s BBC televises.’ If only. And there is, it appears, a new film in the pipeline: King of Paris, about the Dumas dynasty, in which, says Welles, he will be playing both the grandfather, a mulatto general in Napoleon’s army, and the son, author of The Count of Monte Cristo. ‘Couldn’t you play the grandson, too?’ asks Kobler, getting into the swing of things and noting, through a haze of fifty-year-old cognac, that in some lights Welles looks awfully young. ‘I might give
it a shot,’ says Welles, playfully.
Vintage Welles, with him at his most bonhomous, playing the much-loved role of Orson Welles to the hilt. At about the same time he gave another interview, to Jean Clay, noted author of innumerable elegant tomes on painters and painting; it counts as among the most revealing he ever gave to anyone. It could only have been because of his post-shooting euphoria that Welles allowed Clay to get under his skin in a way that almost no one else had ever done – not Tynan, with whom he was always understandably guarded; and certainly not the Cahiers team, who were often as obtuse as they were inaccurate. In their interview with him about The Trial, for example, they ask Welles whether the long travelling shot of Katina Paxinou dragging the trunk while Anthony Perkins talks to her is an hommage to Brecht.28 Paxinou, it is true, was a famous Mother Courage, but the character who drags the trunk is Miss Pittl, played by Suzanne Flon, who never played anything by Brecht. Why, anyway, would Welles want to introduce such an hommage at such a time in his film? He doesn’t even bother to correct them; it’s not serious. But here in Paris, in June of 1962 at the end of his shoot, he took Jean Clay very seriously, and Clay returned the compliment. When Welles says he sees K. as guilty, Clay replies, ‘If K. is guilty and you also depict him as the image of man, then your film fits into the Christian tradition of guilt and original sin.’ Welles is unaccustomed to theological analyses from journalists and he rises to the bait, though not without bluster: ‘There’s no way today – perhaps there will be three centuries from now – to do anything that does not talk about innocence and sin or good and evil. I know that ever since the 19th century there has been writing in which God has been absent. But it has no literary value at all.’ Clay brushes this enormity aside (farewell Dickens, goodbye Flaubert) and cuts to the chase: ‘Are you a Christian?’ Welles replies that he has great love and respect for religion, and great love and respect for atheism. ‘What I hate are the agnostics: the people who refuse to make a choice.’
