Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  This initial hostility towards Chiari, not unconnected with his Via Veneto glamour and his egregious reputation as a ladies’ man, was rare; the other actors on the film unanimously reported Welles’s benevolence, energy, sheer sense of fun. ‘Working with him,’ said Margaret Rutherford, ‘is like walking where there’s only sunshine.’6 Alan Webb was astonished that Welles even stuck on his false nose for him. ‘He wanted to do everything,’ reported Michael Aldridge. ‘We re-designed my costume together. He’s the only film director I know who knows how to deal with actors.’7 Amongst other things, Welles knew – he, of all people, knew – the importance of lunch. When the break was due, said Jeremy Rowe, playing Prince John of Lancaster, Welles would always appear, ‘personally and proudly’, with a trolley laden with food for the cast, chosen by him.8 At the end of the longest day he would travel miles on the promise of a good meal. One night the dialogue director, Michael Knox, told him about a restaurant of which he had heard good reports. It was seventy miles from where they were staying in Pamplona, but Welles would not be deterred. Along steep, winding paths they chugged for over four hours; when they finally reached the restaurant, it was closed. Knox miraculously found another, which opened specially for Welles, because they recognised him. They stayed till the small hours of the morning. ‘This restaurant saved your ass, boy,’ growled Welles.9

  His greed for food was identical to his appetite for work; in the famous words of Théophile Gauthier, he was a man for whom the visible world existed. Pierre Billard came to watch the filming and saw how powerfully Welles responded to his surroundings, the ancient buildings, the landscape – and the actors. ‘This verve, and this gluttonous appetite for effects, are characteristic of Welles as he rediscovers the delights of creation. Tireless on the set, he moves about with disconcerting agility, even in the bulky padding which he wears for Falstaff’s girth, and develops his mis-en-scène as changes of lighting bring him new ideas.’10 Norman Rodway remarked that he seemed to carry the whole film in his head. ‘Or he’d say, “Follow me, I’m looking for a shot” and improvise from there.’ But for Welles, directing was by no means a solitary activity. Juan Cobós, his assistant on Chimes, noted that once the actors’ basic positions had been established, he would ask them again and again whether they were comfortable with their movements, ‘and all their ideas about what is more or less natural are listened to and discussed’.11 This combination of freedom and a sense of participation in the final result was particularly liberating for Gielgud, who, with his teeming imagination, had never felt entirely comfortable within the storyboarded confines of most filming. Welles removed any sense of pressure from him, encouraging him in his own ideas, with which he was notoriously fecund. Thirty years later, by which time he was a major film star, Gielgud recollected his time on Chimes at Midnight as the most enjoyable he’d ever spent on a film.12 Welles invited the actors to see the rushes every night after filming: there would be wine, the rushes would be shown and discussion ensued. ‘There was no mystique,’ wrote Keith Baxter. ‘“Film-making is so boring!” he’d cry, “come on, let’s have some fun!”’13

  Above all, Welles created energy on the set, and for that alone, actors – who spend so much of their time on a movie repining in limbo – were deeply grateful. ‘He had a pressing, physical need not to waste time or energy,’ wrote Cobós in Cahiers du Cinéma shortly after filming had come to an end:

  His speed was literally alarming. As they followed Welles on his swift traversal of the woods of Castille, the large team assembled by the producer looked more like people making a documentary than a complex, serious film. No sooner had Welles shouted ‘That’s it! That’s the one!’ than he was moving the camera to the next position.14

  This is what Welles adored: the gallant, the democratic, the all-in-it-together, the romantic way, which he had tried to create in the theatre (with sometimes inspired results) and hoped to be able to bring to film-making, a medium which, because of the large sums of money involved, almost immediately lost its playfulness, its innocence. The idea of innocence is at the heart of Chimes at Midnight, and innocence is what Welles was trying to restore to the process of making movies. For that to happen, everyone had to go along with it, willingly endorsing his assumption of the role of the crazy captain of a mad enterprise. You don’t question the captain, you commit to him, and then he’s the best person on earth. But if you don’t commit, then he’s stranded – it won’t work, he loses confidence, becomes grumpy, difficult and not very good; this is what happened on Mr Arkadin. Believe in him, on the other hand, and Welles is everything you want him to be, and more.

  And he made sure that on Chimes at Midnight he was surrounded by believers: his baby producer, Emiliano Piedra, who sometimes put his foot down – ‘shoot everything you want to shoot on Friday and Saturday, Orson, because on Sunday I’m taking the set down’ – but who had absolute faith in the film; Alessandro Tasca di Cutò, the Sicilian prince who was his executive producer and, in some way mysterious to both men, his blood-brother; Edmond Richard, the director of photography, able effortlessly to translate Welles’s every impulse into practice; Juan Cobós, attentive to his needs and inventive in dealing with them; Jesús Franco, who after Treasure Island had sunk without trace, made his second unit a swift and effective adjunct to Chimes; Mrs Rogers, impeccable, untiring, utterly devoted, typing out the twenty-fifth, the thirty-seventh, the fifty-fifth version of the screenplay; Mickey Knox, the dialogue director, whom Welles had given the job because when they were working together on Marco Polo he had told Welles after a take, ‘You did it better on the first take,’ and explained why; Billy Chappell, veteran of Moby-Dick and The Trial, who could whip a random group of actors into crack movers at a second’s notice.

  ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ – that might have been the epigraph for Welles’s filming; these were the conditions in which he wanted to work; the only ones, indeed, in which he could work: no studio Big Brother peering over your shoulder, no union regulations, no bossy technicians telling you what you can and can’t do, no pompous stars demanding trailers and billing – nobody saying ‘no’. The band of brothers put up with a lot on Chimes at Midnight: there was throughout an absence of lavatories, ‘so one walked into piles of shit on every corner,’ said an uncomplaining Gielgud,15 just as earlier, as reported by Keith Baxter, he had responded with equanimity (quickly developing into positive enthusiasm) to the discovery that the only costumes available had been discarded from other movies: ‘These tights are a bit smelly,’ says Gielgud. ‘Maybe it’s just mildew. Shall I catch something from them? I’ve never had Spanish Fly and I don’t want Spanish Crabs. I’ve always had good legs. Larry’s are spindly, but he has hair. How do I look?’ Baxter convinced Gielgud that the lack of armour was a profound statement on Welles’s part: the King, Baxter reasoned, was an ascetic who had already renounced all the vanities of this world, even armour. For himself he assembled, out of a skip somehow purloined from the Samuel Bronston Company, an ensemble consisting of knitted chain-mail tights and a suede jerkin worn by Jayne Mansfield in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, embroidered with piping from the harness on Stephen Boyd’s horse’s from The Fall of the Roman Empire.16 The weather was bitter, especially when they were filming in the ruined abbey of Cardona. ‘There was no glass in the windows and the November air poured in,’ said Gielgud in an interview. ‘I was wearing tights and a dressing gown and practically nothing else for my death scene. I would sit on my throne with a tiny electric fire to warm my feet while Orson spent his last pesetas sending out to buy brandy to keep me going.’17

  They worked mad hours. Andrew Faulds, playing Westmoreland, was appalled by the clear flouting of Equity rules, but by the end, when they ran out of time, he told Baxter: ‘Tell Orson I’ll come back; I don’t even have to be paid.’ They needed to be on their toes, because if the perfect location and light for a particular sequence suddenly materialised, Welles would seize the moment, abandoni
ng what he was doing. They took the entire wardrobe for the film with them to every location, in case inspiration struck. On one occasion they were in the middle of shooting the Gadshill robbery scene, when Welles suddenly announced that they would shoot the extraordinary scene in which Hal tells his buddy Poins, ‘My heart bleeds inwardly that my father is so sick: and keeping such vile company as thou art hath in reason taken from me all ostentation of sorrow . . . what wouldst thou think of me, if I should weep?’ To which Poins replies, ‘I would think thee a most princely hypocrite.’ Welles had always seen the scene played, he said, on water, but the location they had found had become unavailable at the last moment, so he shot something else. Now, on this early November morning, shooting the immensely complex Gadshill robbery scene in a huge park in the centre of Madrid, inspiration suddenly struck. ‘There is in the middle of the Casa de Campo,’ recalled Keith Baxter:

  a perfectly horrible boating lake and it is only this deep if that, and it’s bounded by a road, a public road which cars flash past, but this was November and it was about nine in the morning and there was a mist and you couldn’t see where the water stopped and the sky began. ‘We have two minutes to shoot this, Keith,’ he said, ‘Sit on that wall.’ I said, ‘I hope I remember it.’ ‘We will have somebody shouting the lines,’ he said.18

  The relevant costumes were swiftly summoned and the actors thrown into them, and in two minutes the scene was done. It betrays no hint of the madness of the circumstances of the shooting: it is an impeccable, idyllic vision against which the bitter, tense scene plays. It is another of Welles’s miraculous conjuring tricks, a perfect demonstration of his conviction that a scene should start with the bare minimum. ‘Poetry suggests things that are absent, it evokes more than what you see,’ he told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1967, apropos of Chimes at Midnight. ‘And the danger in cinema is that, in using a camera, you see everything, everything is there. What one must do is succeed in evoking, in making things emerge that are not, in fact, visible, in bringing about a spell.’19 Not for the first time, he echoes his friend Jean Cocteau – not someone with whose work Welles’s is often compared. Cocteau’s great watchword, ‘I am a lie that tells the truth’, could have been Welles’s own motto. He never took the easy way out, the literal way. He had so few opportunities to make films that he determined to make every moment, every scene he ever shot, creative – poetic – in some measure.

  Welles’s unceasing stimulation of energy and imagination was all the more remarkable in that he was not in good health. Gielgud, ever observant, despite the unstopping cascade of words emerging from his mouth, noted that Welles was suffering from eczema and couldn’t wash his hands; Jeremy Rowe observed that he had a gall-bladder condition, which was deeply uncomfortable. Both of these conditions were associated with, if not caused by, his now monumental girth. Welles was, on and off during the course of shooting, on a diet, but it was a delusory one. Paola would prepare healthy, simple dishes for him for the following day, putting them in the refrigerator at night, but in the small hours of the morning, reported Billy Chappell, whose room was between Welles’s bedroom and the kitchen, Welles would pad back and forth, till by dawn the fridge was empty. At lunchtime Welles’s plate was always piled high, filled with the finest delicacies, and when he had finished, ‘not only would he have seconds,’ reported Jeremy Rowe, ‘but he would routinely push the left-overs from his crew and cast’s plates onto his own’. It is hard to disagree with Rowe’s conclusion that ‘he was trying to feed something which can’t be fed; he ate to stifle his insecurities’.20

  Those insecurities were real enough: Welles was particularly anxious about working with Gielgud. ‘Do you think John will think me a fool?’ he asked Baxter, before Gielgud arrived. ‘No actor can touch him in Shakespeare. I don’t want him to think me just a trickster.’21 But Gielgud adored working with Welles: ‘such wonderful fun,’ he said forty years later. The unprecedented pleasure he took in filming with Welles led him to suggest other projects on which they might work. They tried to buy the rights to Death in Venice, but they had already been taken; next, Gielgud proposed The Tempest to Welles, having for many years been obsessed by trying to film the play. Gielgud would of course have been Prospero, with Welles as Caliban, and Benjamin Britten was to have written the music. ‘I was enormously impressed and fascinated by his talent as a director,’ Gielgud wrote to Britten after Chimes at Midnight, ‘even more in working with him than when I had seen his work on screen.’22 Among Welles’s countless fleeting projects that came to naught, this is one to regret bitterly.

  Such was Welles’s insecurity in front of his fellow-actors that, whenever he could, he avoided being filmed with them, preferring once again – as he had done on all his films since Othello – to shoot as much of his part as possible in single shots after they had all departed. Edmond Richard described to François Thomas how, even then, Welles had to have his lines chalked up on a blackboard. ‘He had a very elegant way of looking into the wings, as it were, to see the line.’23 Jeanne Moreau quickly became aware of Welles’s reluctance to play the part. Having waited two or three days to do a certain scene with him, she eventually asked why they were waiting. ‘My little make-up suitcase is lost,’ he said. ‘I can’t do any scenes till it’s found. We’ll start with the reverse shots of you, the close-ups.’ The next day she spotted the errant make-up kit hidden under a settee. ‘Oh look!’ she shrieked. ‘Don’t say it,’ hissed the make-up assistant. ‘He has stage-fright. He hid it himself.’ When they got to the scene in which Doll jumps up and down on Falstaff in the bed, she rehearsed it with another actor; Welles finally installed himself on the bed for the take, but when Moreau leaped onto him, he shouted, ‘Cut, cut, you’ve destroyed my nose – we can’t shoot this scene today.’24

  As a director, on the other hand, he was absolutely confident and free. His constant improvisations on the set were only possible because he had planned it all so carefully. He decided that the film should have the texture of a woodcut (as it happens, when the film was released in England at the Academy, the leading art-house cinema of the time, the poster consisted of a superb woodcut of Welles); to achieve that texture, he used red and blue filters, and had the wood on the set darkened with a blowtorch. The light source, Thomas observes, is often given prominence, magnified by mirrors, ‘concentrated into a single ray filled with aluminium powder’ – all done, then, quite literally with smoke and mirrors. Welles himself designed and personally supervised the construction of a model of the Boar’s Head Tavern, Falstaff’s centre of operations; Richard and the crew were more than a little sceptical about its usefulness, but it turned out that Welles had calculated every angle, every entrance, for specific effects. ‘He’d visualised the whole thing in his head. And everything was in forced perspective; every entrance and exit was trapezoidal.’25 Like everything in all of Welles’s films, it was a trick; even the height of the tables in the tavern was cheated. The difference is that in Chimes at Midnight Welles takes pains to conceal the trick: there is very little Shazam! about the film, in which – as in The Magnificent Ambersons, but rarely in the rest of his work – he eschews stylisation, not interposing himself between the spectator and the film by conscious distortion. It seems to unfold naturally and humanly, though in fact this naturalness was achieved by an infinity of ingenious devices on the part of Welles and his associates; for once, he chooses to use art to conceal art.

  Of no part of the film was this more true than the great battle sequence, which is a miracle of cutting and pasting, of cheating and faking, but whose effect is of a fierce and sickening verisimilitude, making Olivier’s Agincourt and even Eisenstein’s Battle on the Ice, by which Olivier was so obviously inspired, seem like something of a tea party by comparison, tame and almost balletic. Welles knew he only had the use of the Casa del Campo in the centre of Madrid for a few days, and 150 Spanish cavalrymen for even less – for a single day, in fact – so he planned it in great detail, to make sure
he would have enough material for the four sections of the battle that Thomas says he had identified: slow and tense beginning, brutal and ever-accelerating battle, one-to-one combat, and aftermath. Most unusually for him, Welles storyboarded the whole sequence, to make the framings he wanted clear to the whole camera crew.

  It was deepest November, and the weather was filthy. Welles had already lined up smoke and wind machines; as the rain fell more and more heavily, he had the fire brigade, which was standing by, turn their hoses on the soil to generate even more mud. He used three hand-held cameras to cover the action, plus another on a crane; according to Edmond Richard, they changed the speed of the film as they shot. ‘To give the fake clubs some weight, we slowed the film down; as the horses entered we speeded up.’ The proximity of the horses made it very dangerous. Richard got hit by a flying hoof and was taken to hospital ‘pissing blood’, as he said;26 Welles took over his camera. No time for sentimentality: carpe diem was the motto. Falstaff is of course at the centre of the battle, or rather he does everything he can to absent himself from the centre, comically avoiding engagement whenever possible, weaving in and out of the hurly-burly like a great big ball in the middle of a rugby scrum; needless to say, it was never Welles in the armour, always an extra (rather nimbler than Welles, in fact). Conscious of time and the brief opportunity he had to use the extras playing the rival armies, Welles raged and roared, riling everyone; when the pressure got too great, Richard would get his gaffer to fake a short-circuit, which calmed everyone down for a little while.