My Lunches with Orson (16 page)

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.

*   *   *

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
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?

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
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?

HJ:
Knees.

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.