Akira Kurosawa: Some Random Notes on Screenwriting

Akira Kurosawa, Japan's most acclaimed filmmaker, created an astounding body of work that stands as a testament to artistic brilliance. Though he is most renowned for his samurai epics like as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, his intimate, contemporary dramas such as Ikuru and High and Low are also as powerful. The director's first significant phase began in the postwar era with Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, two arresting noirs that launched a long partnership with combustible leading man Toshiro Mifune. Kurosawa acquired international prominence in the early 1950s with Rashomin, a seminal work of nonlinear storytelling that sparked international interest in Japanese film. In the years that followed, the auteur maintained a fertile dialogue with the West, gaining inspiration from everything from Shakespeare to Dashiell Hammett and developing cinematic methods that would influence directors as divergent as George Lucas and Sam Peckinpah. 

Kurosawa began filming Dersu Uzala (1976) in 1975, a harrowing survival tale set in the Siberian forest. With substantial financial backing from Soviet and Japanese sources, the director had the time and resources to create on an epic scale once more. The resulting picture was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and received the Moscow Film Festival's Gold Medal. It marked Kurosawa's triumphant return. 

Kurosawa directed Kagemusha (1980) in 1980, with financial backing from American directors George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. The film is a spectacular—but deeply humanistic—Samurai epic about a condemned criminal who assumes the identity of a deceased warlord. The film won the Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palm and a slew of other international accolades. Kurosawa received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director in 1985 for Ran, a Japanese adaptation of King Lear that included some of the most stunning fight sequences ever filmed. The triumph of these two epics cemented Kurosawa's position as one of modern cinema's masterpieces. 

Kurosawa then directed Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), a film adaptation of the director's own midnight hallucinations at the age of 80. Although few could deny the picture's aesthetic magnificence, the highly personal film received mixed critical reviews. Rhapsody in August (1991), a more mainstream production geared at Western audiences and starring American actor Richard Gere, received an even more negative reception. Madadayo (1993) returned to more typically Japanese subject matter, telling the storey of an ex-professor who lives in a hut and refuses to acknowledge his impending death. Several of Kurosawa's screenplays were adapted into films in the mid-1990s, most notably Bruce Willis's Last Man Standing (1996). 

Kurosawa, a subtle innovator, purposefully shunned many of his postwar colleagues' aesthetic tricks and emotional exhibitionism in favour of rational but complex structural development, compositional precision, and meticulous character study. His apathy toward limiting cultural rituals contributed to his becoming the most catholic of his country's film makers. In 1989, the director received an honorary Academy Award for "achievements that have inspired, pleased, enriched, and thrilled audiences worldwide and influenced filmmakers worldwide."

The following comments were originally made by Akira Kurosawa in 1975 as advice to young people considering a career in filmmaking. They were adapted by Audie E. Bock and published as an appendix to Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography.

When I begin to consider a film project, I always have in mind a number of ideas that feel as if they would be the sort of thing I’d like to film. From among these one will suddenly germinate and begin to sprout; this will be the one I grasp and develop. I have never taken on a project offered to me by a producer or a production company. My films emerge from my own desire to say a particular thing at a particular time. The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this. 

A good structure for a screenplay is that of the symphony, with its three or four movements and differing tempos. Or one can use the Noh play with its three-part structure: jo (introduction), ha (destruction) and kya (haste). If you devote yourself fully to Noh and gain something good from this, it will emerge naturally in your films. The Noh is a truly unique art form that exists nowhere else in the world. I think the Kabuki, which imitates it, is a sterile flower. But in a screenplay, I think the symphonic structure is the easiest for people of today to understand.

In order to write scripts, you must first study the great novels and dramas of the world. You must consider why they are great. Where does the emotion come from that you feel as you read them? What degree of passion did the author have to have, what level of meticulousness did he have to command, in order to portray the characters and events as he did? You must read thoroughly, to the point where you can grasp all these things. You must also see the great films. You must read the great screenplays and study the film theories of the great directors. If your goal is to become a film director, you must master screenwriting.

I’ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.

I began writing scripts with two other people around 1940. Up until then I wrote alone, and found that I had no difficulties. But in writing alone there is a danger that your interpretation of another human being will suffer from one-sidedness. If you write with two other people about that human being, you get at least three different viewpoints on him, and you can discuss the points on which you disagree. Also, the director has a natural tendency to nudge the hero and the plot along into a pattern that is the easiest one for him to direct. By writing with about two other people, you can avoid this danger also.

Something that you should take particular notice of is the fact that the best scripts have very few explanatory passages. Adding explanation to the descriptive passages of a screenplay is the most dangerous trap you can fall into. It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible. A great deal about this can be learned from the study of the great plays, and I believe the ‘hard-boiled’ detective novels can also be very instructive.

Andrei Tarkovsky: Dialogue on Science Fiction

Solaris (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Where 2001 examined the technological progress of man through a notably distant lens from its characters, Solaris devastatingly explores the inner psychology of its protagonist (scientist Kris Kelvin), who is tortured by phantom images of his dead wife aboard a spaceship hovering the Solaris ocean, which is argued to have the special ability to accommodate the most desperate human desires.

Where 2001 can be argued as having a relatively positive view towards progressing space travel and thus forwarding the Apollo agenda, Solaris is quite pessimistic towards human space travel. Where technology in 2001 is intended an awe-inspiring display of choreographed beauty, the technology of Solaris is decrepit and useless, and the halls of the spaceship act as largely abandoned canals of depression and defeat rather than a locale for progressive innovation... Space travel is viewed in Solaris as a largely futile, lonely, and unattractive venture. Human space exploration has not led to a final accomplishment here as much as it has simply come to a standstill...
                             – Landon Palmer:  Kubrick’s ‘2001’ vs. Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’

Solaris (1972) is arguably Tarkovsky’s most approachable film. While it is far from conventional in its story and structure, it stands centrally in relation to his other films: behind him were his impressive debut, Ivan's Childhood (1962), and his first epic masterpiece, Andrei Rublev (1966); ahead of him were the experimental, personal, Mirror (1975), Stalker, a philosophical, bleak work, and finally, two difficult, contemplative films made in exile, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). 

Tarkovsky had seen Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and reportedly thought it unemotional and cold. Reports at the time suggested Tarkovsky’s film was a direct response to 2001. Tarkovsky undoubtedly uses more individual characters and the human drama is more central than in Kubrick’s film. Nonetheless, Tarkovsky’s film, while a reaction to Kubrick’s cannot hide its influence. Both films establish their narratives in a leisurely manner, with considerable time spent tracking around the space sets; both films employ a widescreen mise-en-scene approach that benefits from superior art direction; and both films generate an aura of mystery that begs for countless explanations. 

Unlike 2001, Solaris, on the other hand, is permeated with sadness, which grips the picture even before it departs from Earth. We watch the protagonist, a space psychologist called Kris Kelvin, gaze at underwater reeds as if they were a drowned woman's tresses in the sombre prologue. Kris, as played by Donatas Banionis, seems perpetually scarred, delayed by some unfathomable sadness. He will depart on a trip to the space station Solaris, a once-thriving experiment that has gone awry; it will be up to him to decide whether or not to shut down the research station. He prepares by watching a video from a scientific symposium regarding Solaris's problems.

Humans seem to be enslaved to equipment and television pictures, disconnected from the natural world around. At Solaris, Kris discovers a dilapidated space station that is empty save for two obsessed scientists while Kris's colleague has already committed suicide, leaving him a recorded warning about hallucinated visitors having "something to do with conscience." Kris's deceased wife, Hari, constantly materialises by his side. Whether she is a doppelganger, the embodiment of a decade's worth of grief-stricken memories, or a delusion, she is real to Kelvin. He has the ability to hold her and talk to her, and hence is the author of her existence. Tarkovsky expands this concept to all of our connections, both past and present, and questions their very existence. Do we adore the people around us, or do we adore our perceptions of them? How much access do we really have about someone, apart from our own mental colouring of their character? 

Tarkovsky often confronts us with such profoundly disturbing concepts, arguing that we may not be the centre of everything after all. Solaris is a picture that not only dazzles and confounds with its visual splendour and remarkable set design, but also with the thoughts that underpin each frame, exhibiting harrowing human concepts into a lifeless environment. 

Tarkovsky's experiments with pace, attempting to "discover Time inside Time," have his camera track up to the sleeping Kris, distorting the moment until we join his dream. In the film's beautiful closing scene, Kelvin returns to his parents in the picturesque country house home shown in the opening scenes – but this reassuring mirage is a huge duplicate manufactured by Solaris's planet-sized brain. Although it seems to be home, Kelvin will never be able to return. 

“The protagonists in Solaris were tormented by disappointments, and the path out we presented them was sufficiently illusory,” Tarkovsky subsequently wrote in his film biography Sculpting in Time. “It was in dreams that they discovered their own roots - those roots that permanently connect man to the Earth that gave birth to him. However, even such connections had become imaginary to them.”

The following conversation is from an interview by Naum Abramov with Andrei Tarkovsky that took place in 1970 while the great Russian director was working on his adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. Initially billed in America as the Soviet Union’s reply to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), at first glance, both films share similar concerns in exploring mankind’s unsettled role in the universe and the consequences of detachment from his natural habitat. However, it’s evident that each film’s view on space, and mankind’s role within it, are quite different:

ABRAMOV: You’re working on a film adaptation of the science-fiction novel ‘Solaris’, by Stanislaw Lem. Lately, the science-fiction genre has attracted the interest of many prominent filmmakers. This seems to be an indication of how the genre answers some sort of inner need for contemporary viewers and filmmakers alike. Complex, intellectual-artistic content can be combined in one film with aspects of a purely entertaining spectacle directed toward the widest possible audience. I think this is especially true for the genre of science-fiction in cinema. Viewers of different levels of sophistication would appreciate different elements of these films; in some cases the philosophical content, in other cases, the strictly superficial, dramatic, exciting aspects of the plot.

In your opinion, what needs are satisfied in our time by the genre of science-fiction in cinema? Is it a desire to see the scientific and technological progress of humanity, incarnated in the vivid imagery of a contemporary film? Is it the expression of philosophical thought within the strange and thrilling context of a flight into space; the future of our planet; or the story of some brave, new invention? Maybe it’s the striving of the writer and filmmaker to study people’s character, our contemporary character, with the dramatic events dictated by the genre?

And finally, why have you turned to science-fiction, a genre which is so new to you?

TARKOVSKY: The questions you’re asking, as far as I understand, are connected on one hand with filmmaking and on the other hand with the viewer. But first, I want to explain why I decided to adapt Lem’s novel, Solaris. Whether or not my first two films are good or bad, they are, in the final analysis, both about the same thing. They are about the extreme manifestation of loyalty to a moral debt, the struggle for it, and faith in it – even to the extent of a personality crisis. They are about an individual armed with conviction, an individual with a sense of personal destiny, for whom catastrophe is an unbroken human souI.

I’m interested in a hero that goes on to the end despite everything. Because only such a person can claim victory. The dramatic form of my films is a token of my desire to express the struggle and the greatness of the human spirit. I think you can easily connect this concept with my previous films. Both Ivan and Andrei do everything against their own safety. The first physically, the second in a spiritual sense. Both of them in a search for an ideal, moral way of living.

As for Solaris, my decision to adapt it to the screen is not at all a result of some fondness for the genre. The main thing is that in Solaris, Lem presents a problem that is close to me: the problem of overcoming, of convictions, of moral transformation on the path of struggle within the limits of one’s own destiny. The depth and meaning of Lem’s novel are not at all dependent on the science-fiction genre, and it’s not enough to appreciate his novel simply for the genre.

The novel is not only about the human mind encountering the unknown, but it is also about the moral leap of a human being in relation to new discoveries in scientific knowledge. And overcoming the obstacles on this path leads to the painful birth of a new morality. This is the ‘price of progress’ that Kelvin pays in Solaris. And Kelvin’s price is the face to face encounter with the materializatron of his own conscience. But Kelvin doesn’t betray his moral position. Because betrayal in this situation means to remain at the former level, not even attempting to rise to a higher moral level. And Kelvin pays a tragic price for this step forward. The science-fiction genre creates the necessary premise for this connection between moral problems and the physiology of the human mind.

ABRAMOV: And nevertheless, even though you emphasize your indifference to the genre, you are resolving this philosophical problem which concerns you within the genre of science-fiction. lt seems to me that science-fiction creates such special conditions of cinematic representation for itself that it’s impossible just to shrug them off. The filmmaker encounters different intellectual and artistic capacities in a novel and a film. He deals with the cinematic incarnation on screen of what was created by the imagination of the author of a literary work, with the need to provide the fantastic with a plastic specificity.

These questions must have presented themselves to you.


TARKOVSKY: The complexity in adapting Solaris is an issue of film adaptations in general and secondarily an issue of science-fiction adaptations. These are the two fundamental issues of my current work. The first issue relates to the principles of a work of literature in general. Prose possesses the special characteristic that its imagery depends on the sensory experience of the reader. So, no matter how detailed this or that scene is developed, the reader, to the degree of his own experience, sees that which his own experience, character, bias, and tastes have prepared him to see. Even the most detailed descriptions in prose, in a way, will elude the control of the writer and the reader will perceive them subjectively.

In the literal, superficial sense, War and Peace is read and envisioned by thousands of readers; this makes it a thousand different books as a result of the differences in experience between the writer and the reader. In this significantly important aspect is the special relevance and ubiquity of literature – its democracy, if you will. In this is the guarantee of the reader’s co-creation. A writer subconsciously depends on an imaginative reader to see more and to see more clearly than the presented, laconic description. A reader can perceive even the most ruthless, naturalistic details with omission through his subjective, aesthetic filter. I would call this peculiarity of prosaic description to influence the reader ‘aesthetic adaptation’. Principally, it governs perception and the prose author invades the soul of the reader within the belly of this Trojan horse.

This is in literature. But what about cinema? Where in cinema does a viewer have this freedom of choice? Each and every frame, every scene and episode, outwardly doesn’t even describe, but literally records actions, landscapes, character’s faces. And in this is the terrifying danger of not being accepted by the viewer. Because on film there is a very unambiguous designation of the concrete, against which the viewer’s personal, sensory experience rebels.

Some may argue that cinema is attractive because it’s really a source of what is exotic and unusual for a viewer. That isn’t quite right. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Cinema, in contrast to literature, is the filmmaker’s experience caught on film. And if this personal experience is really sincerely expressed then the viewer accepts the film.

I’ve noticed, from my own experience, if the external, emotional construction of images in a film are based on the filmmaker’s own memory, on the kinship of one’s personal experience with the fabric of the film, then the film will have the power to affect those who see it. If the director follows only the superficial, literal base of the film, for example the screenplay, even if in the most convincing, realistic, and conscientious manner, the viewer will be left unaffected.

Therefore, if you’re objectively incapable of influencing a viewer with his own experience, as in literature as I mentioned earlier, and you’re unable to achieve that in principle, then in cinema, you should sincerely tell about your own experience. That’s why even now when all half-literate people have learned to make movies, cinema remains an art form, which only a small number of directors have actually mastered, and they can be counted with the fingers of one hand. To remould a literary work into the frames of a film means to tell your version of the literary source, filtering it through yourself.

ABRAMOV: Where do you draw the line between a filmmaker’s interpretation and the original work? Isn’t there a danger of remoulding the literary work to the point of losing its original stylistics and visual structure?

TARKOVSKY: Working in science-fiction demands great subtlety and sincerity, especially if you’re talking about the issue of perspective. That’s why Lem is such a great science-fiction writer. You would understand what I mean if you read Solaris, Eden, and Return from the Stars.

In Eden, Lem tells about an expedition to a planet where the members of the expedition encounter a reality, the developmental laws of which they cannot comprehend. These laws slip away from understanding, like thoughts just forgotten. The air is filled with guesses and analogies, seen by the naked eye, but they can’t be caught. It’s a very specific, unnerving, and frustrating condition. And Lem does a brilliant job of expressing this condition. He describes in detail everything that the expedition encounters. But more than the detail, he describes what it is the people see, while not understanding what it means.

The same thing is in Return from the Stars. The protagonist returns from a flight to different galaxies. On earth, because of the differences in time (he has traveled at the speed of light), life has progressed through several generations. The returned astronaut walks through the city and doesn’t understand anything. Lem describes everything the astronaut encounters in extreme detail and despite this detailed description, we don’t understand anything either, along with the protagonist. These emotionally tense pieces express, for me, the quintessence of the author’s personal experience projected into the future.

ABRAMOV: The majority of directors of science-fiction movies think it necessary to impress the viewer’s imagination with the concrete details of everyday life on other worlds or the details of a spacecraft’s construction, which often crowd out the central idea of the film. I think Kubrick’s ‘Space Odyssey’ is guilty of that.

TARKOVSKY: For some reason, in all the science-fiction films I’ve seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future. More than that, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their own films premonitions. It’s unbelievable! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is phoney on many points even for specialists.

For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated. I would like to shoot Solaris in a way that the viewer would be unaware of any exoticism. Of course, I’m referring to the exoticism of technology.

For example, if one shoots a scene of passengers boarding a trolley, which, let’s say, we’d never seen before or known anything about, then we’d get something like Kubrick’s moon-landing scene. On the other hand, if one were to shoot a moon landing like a common trolley stop in a modern film, then everything would be as it should. That means to create psychologically, not an exotic but a real, everyday environment that would be conveyed to the viewer through the perception of the film’s characters. That’s why a detailed ‘examination’ of the technological processes of the future transforms the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth.

Design is design. Painting is painting. And a film is a film. One should ‘separate the firmament from the waters’ and not engage in making comic books.

When cinema moves out from under the power of money, namely, the costs of production, when there will be a method for the author of a work of art to record reality as with a pen and paper, paints and canvas, chisel and marble, ‘X’ and the filmmaker, then we’ll see. Then cinema will be the foremost art and its muse the queen of all the others.

– Naum Abramov: Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen. From Ekran, 1970-1971, 162-165. Translated from Russian by Jake Mahaffy and Yulia Mahaffy. In Tarkovsky Interviews. Edited by John Gianvito. University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

   

Jean-Luc Godard: Let’s Talk About Pierrot

Pierrot le Fou (Directed by Jean-Luc Godard)

Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), dissatisfied with his marriage and life, goes on the road with his baby sitter, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and abandons the bourgeois lifestyle. Yet this is no ordinary road trip: Jean-Luc Godard's ninth film is a dazzling blend of anti-consumerist satire, contemporary politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, jarring story about, as Godard put it, "the last romantic couple." Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, with cinematographer Raoul Coutard's sumptuous colour photography and Belmondo and Karina at their most energetic. It was Godard's last youthful turn before moving even farther into radical film.

In 1964, while directing Bande à Part, Jean-Luc Godard stated in an interview his aim to make a film based on the American author Lionel White's pulp crime novel Obsession. Godard defined it as "the tale of a gentleman who abandons his family to pursue a lady considerably younger than he is. She is in collusion with a couple of rather dodgy characters, which results in a series of adventures.” 

When Godard later revealed that his wife Anna Karina would co-star with Jean Paul Belmondo, he essentially created a more 'regular' relationship and permanently altered the tone of the film, as he later described in Cahiers du cinéma: ‘In the end, the casting of Anna and Belmondo altered the whole situation. I pondered You Only Live Once and concluded that, rather than portraying the Lolita kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the ultimate romantic couple.’

The addition changed the trajectory of the film – but not quite as much as Godard's emotional engagement in the storyline. As hinted by the title, White's novel was about obsessive desire – specifically, the longing of a middle-aged advertising executive and failing writer for a teenage girl who worked as his children's babysitter. When he abandons his family for her, gets engaged in a murder with her, and leaves with her, she exploits, betrays, and abandons him. He seeks her down and kills both her long-term lover (whom she said was her brother) and the girl herself, desperate and humiliated. Godard – who had said to Belmondo that the picture would be 'completely different' from the text – recast the male protagonist as a failing scholar who rediscovers his artistic ambitions via his passionate love. While travelling with a young girl named Marianne Renoir, this person, Ferdinand Griffon, begins to carry out his lofty artistic goals. Marianne's connections — to a secretive and hazardous network of weapons traffickers and political conspirators – seem doubtful, yet she proves to be Ferdinand's soul mate in his creative endeavour, at least temporarily. 

Although Godard's leading lady uses and betrays the man in the same manner as White's did, Godard's result is more severe: in Pierrot le Fou, Marianne not only breaks Ferdinand's heart, but also destroys the work that was to be his life's labour. Godard's romantic exaltation, which he thought was substituted for the narrative of betrayal and destruction by the casting of Karina and Belmondo, became a personal anguish, for after the film was made, he and Karina had parted.

Godard's earliest films depended on established frameworks to guide his spontaneous innovation, whether they were Hollywood genres (as in Breathless, Band of Outsiders, and Alphaville) or intellectual modernism (as in Vivre sa vie and A Married Woman). However, by the time he began filming Pierrot le fou, the cinema noir traditions upon which it was based had ceased to interest him, and his theoretical references had shifted in response to his political outrage as the Vietnam War worsened. 

Godard's psychological, cinematic, and philosophical upheaval resulted in a creativity that reached new heights of spontaneity and invention. He told Cahiers du cinéma shortly after finishing the film: "In my past works, whenever I encountered a difficulty, I questioned myself what Hitchcock would have done in my shoes." While creating Pierrot, I got the idea that he would have been unable to respond with anything other than, 'Work it out for yourself.' 

Pierrot le fou is replete with references to art, to French literature, Beethoven. Indeed, the many comical allusions and techniques convey what Godard must have felt of the standard-issue story he employed. The film is replete with contradictions: sublime, powerful images of nature juxtaposed with acrid gasoline haze; the Vietnam War is repeatedly mentioned, implied, and viewed as newsreel footage, there are references to earlier Godard films.

The self-destructive romanticism, creative self-consciousness, the energetically dislocated structure, characteristic of Godard’s cinematic world up to this point, had reached their peak. Pierrot le Fou was Godard's last youthful work, anticipating the approach of later more overtly radical rejections and interrogations of cinematic form.

The following interview with Jean-Luc Godard on the making of Pierrot le Fou was first published by Cahiers du Cinema shortly after the film’s release:

Cahiers: What exactly was the starting-point for ‘Pierrot le Fou’?

Godard: A Lolita-style novel whose rights I had bought two years earlier. The film was to have been made with Sylvie Vartan. She refused. Instead I made Bande à part. Then I tried to set the film up again with Anna Karina and Richard Burton. Burton, alas, had become too Hollywood. In the end the whole thing was changed by the casting of Anna and Belmondo. I thought about You Only Live Once; and instead of the Lolita or La Chienne kind of couple, I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple, the last descendants of La Nouvelle Heloise, Werther and Hermann and Dorothea.

Cahiers: This sort of romanticism is disconcerting today, just as the romanti­cism of ‘La Regie du Jeu’ was at the time.

Godard: One is always disconcerted by something or other. One Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago I saw October again at the Cinematheque. The audience was composed entirely of children, going to the cinema for the first time, so they reacted as if it was the first film they had seen. They may have been disconcerted by the cinema, but not by the film. For instance, they were not at all put out by the rapid, synthetic montage. When they now see a Verneuil film they will be disconcerted because they will think, ‘But there are fewer shots than in October.’ Let’s take another example from America, where television is much more cut up and fragmented than it is in France. There one doesn’t just watch a film from beginning to end; one sees fifteen shows at the same time while doing something else, not to mention the commercials (if they were missing, that would disconcert). Hiroshima and Lola Montes went down much better on TV in America than in the cinemas.

Cahiers: ‘Pierrot’, in any case, will please children. They can dream while watching it.


Godard: The film, alas, is banned to children under eighteen. Reason? Intellectual and moral anarchy [sic].

Cahiers: There is a good deal of blood in ‘Pierrot’.

Godard: Not blood, red. At any rate, I find it difficult to talk about the film. I can’t say I didn’t work it out, but I didn’t pre-think it. Everything happened at once: it is a film in which there was no writing, editing or mixing – well, one day! Bonfanti knew nothing of the film and he mixed the soundtrack without preparation. He reacted with his knobs like a pilot faced by air­ pockets. This was very much in key with the spirit of the film. So the con­struction came at the same time as the detail. It was a series of structures which immediately dovetailed one with another.

Cahiers: Did ‘Bande à part’ and ‘Alphaville’ happen in the same way?

Godard: Ever since my first film, I have always said I am going to prepare the script more carefully, and each time I see yet another chance to improvise, to do it all in the shooting, without applying the cinema to something. My impression is that when someone like Demy or Bresson shoots a film, he has an idea of the world he is trying to apply to the cinema, or else – which comes to the same thing – an idea of cinema which he applies to the world. The cinema and the world are moulds for matter, but in Pierrot there is neither mould nor matter.

Cahiers: There seems at times to be an interaction between certain situations which existed at the moment of shooting and the film itself. For instance, when Anna Karina walks along the beach saying ‘What is there to do? I don’t know what to do’ . . . as if, at this moment, she hadn’t known what to do, had said so, and you had filmed her.

Godard: It didn’t happen that way, but maybe it comes to the same thing. If I had seen a girl walking along the shore saying ‘I don’t know what to do’... I might well have thought this was a good scene; and, starting from there, imagined what came before and after. Instead of speaking of the sky, speaking of the sea, which isn’t the same thing ; instead of being sad, being gay, instead of dancing, having a scene with people eating, which again isn’t the same thing; but the final effect would have been the same. In fact it happened like that not for this scene, but another in which Anna says to Belmondo ‘Hi ! old man.’ and he imitates Michel Simon. That came about the way you suggest.

Cahiers: One feels that the subject emerges only when the film is over. During the screening one thinks this is it, or that, but at the end one realizes there was a real subject.

Godard: But that’s cinema. Life arranges itself. One is never quite sure what one is going to do tomorrow, but at the end of the week one can say, after the event, ‘I have lived’ like Musset’s Camille. Then one realizes one cannot trifle with the cinema either. You see someone in the street; out of ten passers-by there is one you look at more closely for one reason or another. If it’s a girl, because she has eyes like so, a man because he has a particular air about him, and then you film their life. A subject will emerge which will be the person himself, his idea of the world, and the world created by this idea of it, the overall idea which this conjures. In the preface to one of his books, Antonioni says precisely this.

Cahiers: One feels that ‘Pierrot’ takes place in two periods. In the first, Karina and Belmondo make their way to the Cote d’Azur, no cinema, because this is their life; and then, on arrival, they met a director and told him their story, and he made them begin all over again.

Godard: To a certain extent, yes, because the whole last part was invented on the spot, unlike the beginning which was planned. It is a kind of happening, but one that was controlled and dominated. This said, it is a completely spontaneous film. I have never been so worried as I was two days before shooting began. I had nothing, nothing at all. Oh well, I had the book. And a certain number of locations. I knew it would take place by the sea. The whole thing was shot, let’s say, like in the days of Mack Sennett. Maybe I am growing more and more apart from one section of current film-making.

Watching old films, one never gets the impression that they were bored working, probably because the cinema was something new in those days, whereas today people tend to look on it as very old. They say ‘I saw an old Chaplin film, an old Griffith film,’ whereas no one says ‘I read an old Stendhal, an old Madame de La Fayette.’

Cahiers: Do you feel you work more like a painter than a novelist?

Godard: Jean Renoir explains this very well in the book he wrote about his father. Auguste would go away, feeling a need for the country. He went there. He walked in the forest. He slept in the nearest inn. After a couple of weeks he would come back, his painting finished.

Cahiers: Early films tell us a good deal about the period in which they were made. This is no longer true of 75 per cent of current productions. In ‘Pierrot le Fou’, do contemporary life and the fact that Belmondo is writing his journal give the film its real dimension?

Godard: Anna represents the active life and Belmondo the contemplative. This is by way of contrasting them. As they are never analysed, there are no analytical scenes or dialogue. I wanted, indirectly through the journal, to give the feeling of reflection.

Cahiers: Your characters allow themselves to be guided by events.

Godard: They are abandoned to their own devices. They are inside both their adventure and themselves.


Cahiers: The only real act Belmondo accomplishes is when he tries to extinguish the fuse.


Godard: If he had put it out, he would have become different afterwards. He is like Piccoli in Le Mepris.


Cahiers: The adventure is sufficiently total for one not to be able to know what comes next.


Godard: This is because it is a film about the adventure rather than about the adventurers. A film about adventurers is Anthony Mann’s The Far Country, where you think about the adventure because they are adventurers ; whereas in Pierrot le Fou, one thinks it is about adventurers because it describes an adventure. Anyway it is difficult to separate one from the other. We know from Sartre that the free choice which the individual himself makes is mingled with what is usually called his destiny.

Cahiers: Even more than in ‘Le Mepris’, the poetic presence of the sea . . .

Godard: This was deliberate, much more so than in Le Mepris. This is the theme.


Cahiers: Exactly as if the gods were in the sea.

Godard: No, nature; the presence of nature, which is neither romantic nor tragic.

Cahiers: Adventure seems to have vanished today, to be no longer welcome; hence the element of provocation now in adventure and in ‘Pierrot le Fou’.

Godard: People pigeon-hole adventure. ‘We’re off on holiday,’ they say,‘the adventure will begin as soon as we are at the seaside.’ They don’t think of themselves as living the adventure when they buy their train tickets, whereas in the film everything is on the same level: buying train tickets is as exciting as swimming in the sea.

Cahiers: Do you feel that all your films, irrespective of the way they are handled, are about the spirit of adventure?

Godard: Certainly. The important thing is to be aware one exists. For three­ quarters of the time during the day one forgets this truth, which surges up again as you look at houses or a red light, and you have the sensation of existing in that moment. This was how Sartre began writing his novels. La Nausee, of course, was written during the great period when Simenon was publishing Touristes de Bananes, Les Suicides. To me there is nothing very new about the idea, which is really a very classical one.

Cahiers: ‘Pierrot’ is both classical – no trickery with montage – and modern, by virtue of its narrative.

Godard: What is modern by virtue of its narrative? I prefer to say its greater freedom. By comparjson with my previous film, one gets an immediate response. Although I ask myself fewer and fewer questions now, one still remains: isn’t no longer asking questions a serious thing? The thing that reassures me is that the Russians, at the time of October and Enthusiasm didn’t ask themselves questions. They didn’t ask themselves what cinema should be. They didn’t wonder if they should take up where the German cinema left off or repudiate films like L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise. No, there was a more natural way of asking questions. This is what one feels with Picasso. Posing problems is not a critical attitude but a natural function. When a motorist deals with traffic problems, one simply says he is driving; and Picasso paints.

Cahiers: Don’t you think that most great films have been directed by men who had no taste for questions?

Godard: To think that would be a mistake. When one sees an early King Vidor film, for instance, one realizes how far in advance he was of Hollywood even today. Truffaut compared The Crowd to The Apartment. Well, Vidor had already used the famous office shot – which Wilder got from Lubitsch anyway. But great films like that could no longer be made today, or at least not in the same way. So the silent cinema was more revolutionary than the sound cinema, and people understood better, even though it was a more abstract way of talking. Today, if one imitated Chaplin’s method of direction, people wouldn’t understand so well. They would think it a peculiar way of telling a story. It’s even more true of Eisenstein’s films.

Cahiers: For the majority of spectators, cinema exists only in terms of the Hollywood structures which have become convention, whereas all the great films are free in their inspiration.

Godard: The great traditional cinema means Visconti as opposed to Fellini or Rossellini. It is a way of selecting certain scenes rather than others. The Bible is also a traditional book since it effects a choice in what it describes. If I were ever to film the life of Christ, I would film the scenes which are left out of the Bible. In Senso, which I quite like, it was the scenes which Visconti concealed that I wanted to see. Each time I wanted to know what Farley Granger said to Alida Valli, bang! – a fade out. Pierrot le Fou, from this standpoint, is the antithesis of Senso: the moments you do not see in Senso are shown in Pierrot.

Cahiers: Perhaps the beauty of the film springs from the fact that one senses this liberty more.

Godard: The trouble with the cinema is that it imposes a certain length of film. If my films reveal some feeling of freedom it is because I never think about length. I never know if what I am shooting will run twenty minutes or twice that, but it usually turns out that the result fits the commercial norm. I never have any time scheme. I shoot what I need, stopping when I think I have it all, continuing when I think there is more. This is full length dependent only on itself.

Cahiers: In a classical film, one would query the thriller framework.

Godard: On the narrative level, classical films can no longer rival even Serie Noire thrillers, not to mention born storytellers like Giono who can hold you in suspense for days on end. The Americans are good at story­ telling, the French are not. Flaubert and Proust can’t tell stories. They do something else. So does the cinema, though starting from their point of arrival, from a totality. Any great modem film which is successful is so because of a misunderstanding. Audiences like Psycho because they think Hitchcock is telling them a story. Vertigo baffles them for the same reason.

Cahiers: So freedom has moved from the cinema to the ‘Serie Noire’. Do you remember ‘The Glass Key’? The end?

Godard: Not very clearly. I’d like to re-read it.

Cahiers: At the end a woman who has hardly featured in the story suddenly recounts a dream.

Godard: The Americans are marvellous like that.

Cahiers: In the dream, there is a glass key. Just that, and the novel is called ‘The Glass Key’. And the book ends with this dream. If one did something like this in the cinema, people would say it was provocation. This sort of reaction is typical of a public which has a cinematographic pseudo-culture but nevertheless indulges in terrorist tactics.

Godard: This is why the Cinematheque is so good, because there one sees films pell-mell, a 1939 Cukor alongside a 1918 documentary.

Cahiers: There is no clash between ancient and modern?


Godard: None at all. There may be technical progress, but no revolution in style, or at least not yet.

Cahiers: With ‘Pierrot le Fou’, one feels one is watching the birth of cinema.

Godard: I felt this with Rossellini’s film about steel, because it captured life at source. Television, in theory, should have the same effect. Thanks to the cultural alibi, there is no such thing as noble or plebeian subjects. Every­ thing is possible on television. Very different from the cinema, where it would be impossible to film the building of the Boulevard Haussmann because to a distributor this isn’t a noble subject.

Cahiers: Why do you think certain scenes are filmed rather than others? Does this choice define liberty or lead to convention?

Godard: The problem which has long preoccupied me, but which I don’t worry about while shooting, is: why do one shot rather than another? Take a story, for example. A character enters a room – one shot. He sits down – another shot. He lights a cigarette, etc. If, instead of treating it this way, one . . . would the film be better or less good?


What is it ultimately that makes one run a shot on or change to another? A director like Delbert Mann probably doesn’t think this way. He follows a pattern. Shot – the character speaks; reverse angle, someone answers. Maybe this is why Pierrot le Fou is not a film, but an attempt at film.

Cahiers: And what Fuller says at the beginning?

Godard: I had wanted to say it for a long time. I asked him to. But it was Fuller himself who found the word ‘emotion’. The comparison between film and a commando operation is from every point of view – financial, economic, artistic – a perfect image, a perfect symbol for a film in its totality.

Cahiers: Who is the enemy?

Godard: There are two things to consider. On the one hand the enemy who harries you; on the other, the goal to be reached, where the enemy may be. The goal to be reached is the film, but once it is finished one realizes it was only a passage, a path to the goal. What I mean is that when the war is won, life continues. And maybe the film really begins then.

Cahiers: Isn’t this sort of liberty in the cinema rather frightening?

Godard: No more than crossing a road either using a crossing or not. Pierrot seems to me both free and confined at the same time. What worries me most about this apparent liberty is something else. I read something by Borges where he spoke of a man who wanted to create a world. So he created houses, provinces, valleys, rivers, tools, fish, lovers, and then at the end of his life he notices that this ‘patient labyrinth is none other than his own portrait’. I had this same feeling in the middle of Pierrot.

Cahiers: Why the quotation about Velazquez?


Godard: This is the theme. Its definition. Velazquez at the end of his life no longer painted precise forms, he painted what lay between the precise forms, and this is restated by Belmondo when he imitates Michel Simon: one should not describe people, but what lies between them.

Cahiers: If ‘Pierrot le Fou’ is an instinctive film, one might wonder why there are connections with life and actuality.

Godard: It is inevitable, since making Pierrot le Fou consisted of living through an event. An event is made up of other events which one eventually discovers. In general, I repeat, making a film is an adventure comparable to that of an army advancing through a country and living off the inhabitants. So one is led to talk about those inhabitants. That is what actuality is: it is both what one calls actuality in the cinematographic and journalistic sense, and casual encounters, what one reads, conversations, the business of living in other words.

– ‘Let’s Talk About Pierrot’. Interview with Cahiers du Cinema. In Godard on Godard. Edited by Tom Milne. p 215-224.

 

Peter Bogdanovich on The Searchers

The Searchers (Directed by John Ford)

The Searchers is a 1956 American western film that is largely regarded as filmmaker John Ford's magnum opus. It stars John Wayne in one of his most illustrious performances, portraying possibly his most ethically complex role to date. 

Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is a mystery drifter who arrives at his brother Aaron's (Walter Coy) Texas ranch following the American Civil War. Aaron and his family extend a cordial welcome to him, including his wife, Martha (Dorothy Jordan), and their daughters Lucy (Pippa Scott) and Debbie (played by both Lana Wood and Natalie Wood). Ethan is unquestionably a controversial personality, and there are indications that he has committed illegal acts. When Ethan and other local men are enticed to go after Native Americans who have stolen livestock, Scar (Henry Brandon), a fearsome Comanche leader, attacks Aaron's property, murdering Aaron and Martha and kidnapping their daughters. Enraged, Ethan begins an obsessive search for Scar and the girls. He is first aided by a local posse and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a young guy regarded as the Edwards’ adopted son. Ethan's hard-nosed actions eventually alienate the majority of his allies, but he and Martin continue their search even after discovering Lucy's death. The search continues for years, with Ethan's reasons increasingly questioned as his racist rage toward Native Americans suggests he might murder the girl he is trying to save in the first place. 

Ford referred to The Searchers as a ‘psychological epic,’ and the complexity of its characters and their motivations has prompted considerable examination. Particular focus was paid to the film's examination of racism and intolerance. Although it is now considered a classic, The Searchers received no Academy Award nominations when it was released. The cinematography of Winton C. Hoch captures the splendour of Monument Valley, Utah, and Ethan's final scenes are justifiably eerie and famous. Max Steiner's score received critical acclaim as well. The Searchers was based on Alan Le May's 1954 novel of the same name, and it shared parallels with the true storey of Cynthia Ann Parker, a child who was kidnapped by Comanches in the early nineteenth century and became the mother of the warrior Quanah Parker. The film had a profound effect on succeeding filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.

One of the key figures leading the renaissance of American cinema in the 1970s, Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939) began his career as an actor, taking classes with Stella Adler, before distinguishing himself as a writer and film curator. After one of his articles drew the attention of producer Roger Corman, Bogdanovich took the opportunity to direct his first film, Targets, a stylised tale of a serial killer starring Boris Karloff in one of his final roles. Bogdanovich’s three subsequent films, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, were successful reinventions of studio-era genres – the Western, the screwball and small-town comedy.

An important film historian, Bogdanovich has made a significant contribution to cinematic history with his writing and interviews with the great directors of the studio era including Fritz Lang, Leo McCarey, Joseph H. Lewis and most notably Orson Welles and John Ford, of whom Bogdanovich became a respected authority. Indeed Bogdanovich’s documentary, Directed by John Ford, ranks as one of the most influential portraits of the veteran director. In a post on his blog at indiewire, Bogdanovich outlined his thoughts on John Ford’s masterpiece The Searchers in which he suggests that the key to the undiminished power of the film lies in the archaic and mythical power of its narrative:

The picture begins with the classiest Western opening of all, a black screen becoming a door that opens from within a home to the red desert outside this settlers’ house as the whole family – father, mother, three children (two daughters, one son) and a dog – walk onto the porch while a lone horseman rides up from the gigantic red buttes in the far distance. The rider is the father’s long-absent brother, Ethan Edwards (Wayne), returned for the first time since the end of the Civil War, three years previous, during which Ethan was on the side of the Confederacy, a loner who has spent the bitter years since then fighting as a hired gun in Mexico. What is conveyed in a few small private moments is that Ethan is chastely in love with his brother’s wife, and she with him, though neither would think of showing it in any overt way.

There is the alarm of a Comanche uprising, and Ethan rides off with the sheriff’s posse to check on a nearby ranch. While he and the others are gone, Comanches attack Ethan’s brother’s house, brutally murdering the man and his young son, raping and killing the beloved wife and teenage daughter, abducting the eight-year-old little girl, burning down the house from which we have emerged so recently to begin this story of Ethan’s subsequent ten-year search. He and an adopted ‘quarter-breed‘ (Jeffrey Hunter) become the searchers not only to find the kidnapped young niece but also to avenge the terrible deaths by executing the destroyer, a proud and virile Comanche chief, who will become the child’s husband. The search is both love-and-vengeance ridden and racial.

The saga that ensues is remarkably vivid, filled with incident, superbly composed, emotionally complicated, often darkly funny, deeply moving. That Ethan’s obsessive fury and hatred in some way turns against the young victim as well is among the most troubling aspects of the story, resolved by Ford (at odds with the novel) in one of the most profoundly touching moments in picture history. The ironic theme of the work, spoken by settler Olive Carey, is that all the sufferings these ‘Texicans’ (read Americans) must endure will make it possible for future generations to live in harmony and peace. Although Ethan succeeds in his quest, at the end another settler’s door closes on him walking away toward horse and desert as alone as ever; thus concluding John Ford’s penultimate poetic landmark of the West that has shaped us, that haunts us still as both history and myth.

– Extract from ‘Peter Bogdanovich: The Searchers’ at indiewire 

Welles and Kafka: On Filming The Trial

The Trial (Directed by Orson Welles)

In discussing his 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s literary classic The Trial, Orson Welles confided to Peter Bogdanovich, that ‘what made it possible for me to make the picture is that I’ve had recurring nightmares of guilt all my life: I’m in prison and I don’t know why – going to be tried and I don’t know why. It’s very personal for me. A very personal expression, and it’s not all true that I’m off in some foreign world that has no application to myself; it’s the most autobiographical movie that I’ve ever made, the only one that’s really close to me. And just because it doesn’t speak in a Middle Western accent doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s much closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I’ve ever made.’

Welles was 15 when his alcoholic father died and Welles later admitted to his biographer Barbara Leaming that he always felt guilt at refusing to see his father until he sobered up, and ‘that was the last I ever saw of him… I’ve always thought I killed him… I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it.’

The Trial was produced by Alexander Salkind, best known today for his Superman films. Welles hadn’t directed a movie since A Touch of Evil in 1958 and chose The Trial from a list of classic titles offered to him. The film was shot on a modest budget in France, Italy and Yugoslavia with a cast led by Anthony Perkins as Josef K, the guilt-ridden everyman arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime by a remote inaccessible authority.

On release the film was acclaimed in France, but poorly received in the United States. Now acknowledged as one of Welles’s finest achievements, it’s an imaginative adaptation that captures the novel’s dark humour and nightmarish atmosphere, using harsh eastern European cityscapes and the abandoned Gare d’Orsay, the belle époque station that later became the Musée d’Orsay. Welles himself plays the sinister advocate Hastler and dubbed most of the other characters in the English version. Welles spent five months on the meticulous editing and the result is a highly personal reading of a classic novel adapted to Welles’ own sensibility.

Speaking in 1981 Welles said, ‘in my reading of the book – and my reading is probably more wrong than a lot of people’s – I see the monstrous bureaucracy which is the villain of the piece as not only Kafka’s clairvoyant view of the future, but his racial and cultural background of being occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire… [So] I wanted a 19th century look for a great deal of what would be, in fact, expressionistic.’ 

After its release The Trial would go on to influence various films ranging from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) to Stephen Soderbergh’s 1992 arthouse thriller Kafka which integrates aspects of Kafka’s biography and fiction with a markedly noir visual style. 

In the following interview with the BBC in 1962, Orson Welles discusses his approach to filming The Trial with the broadcaster Huw Wheldon:

HUW WHELDON: Your film, The Trial, is based upon Franz Kafka’s stunning novel.

ORSON WELLES: Yes, I suppose you could say that, although you wouldn’t necessarily be correct. I’ve generally tried to be faithful to Kafka’s novel in my film but there are a couple of major points in my film that don’t correspond when reading the novel. First of all the character of Joseph K. in the film doesn’t really deteriorate, certainly doesn’t surrender at the end.

HW: He certainly does in the book, he’s murdered in the book.

OW: Yes, he is murdered in the end. He’s murdered in our film, but because I fear that K may be taken to be a sort of everyman by the audience, I have been bold enough to change the end to the extent that he doesn’t surrender. He is murdered as anyone is murdered when they’re executed, but where in the book he screams, ‘like a dog, like a dog you’re killing me!,’ in my version he laughs in their faces because they’re unable to kill him.

HW: That’s a big change.

OW: Not so big, because in fact, in Kafka they are unable to kill K. When the two out of work tenors are sent away to a field to murder K, they can’t really do it. They keep passing the knife back and forth to one another. K refuses to collaborate in his own death in the novel, it’s left like that and he dies with a sort of whimper. Now in the film, I’ve simply replaced that whimper with a bang.

HW: Did you ever think about ending the film with the two executioners stabbing K with the knife?

OW: No. To me that ending is a ballet written by a Jewish intellectual before the advent of Hitler. Kafka wouldn’t have put that in after the death of six million Jews. It all seems very much pre-Auschwitz to me. I don’t mean that my ending was a particularly good one, but it was the only possible solution. I had to step up the pace, if only for a few moments.

HW: Do you have any compunction about changing a masterpiece?

OW: Not at all, because film is quite a different medium. Film should not be a fully illustrated, all talking, all moving version of a printed work, but should be itself, a thing of itself. In that way it uses a novel in the same way that a playwright might use a novel – as a jumping off point from which he will create a completely new work. So no, I have no compunction about changing a book. If you take a serious view of filmmaking, you have to consider that films are not an illustration or an interpretation of a work, but quite as worthwhile as the original.

HW: So it’s not a film of the book, it’s a film based on the book?

OW: Not even based on. It’s a film inspired by the book, in which my collaborator and partner is Kafka. That may sound like a pompous thing to say, but I’m afraid that it does remain a Welles’ film and although I have tried to be faithful to what I take to be the spirit of Kafka, the novel was written in the early twenties, and this is now 1962, and we’ve made the film in 1962, and I’ve tried to make it my film because I think that it will have more validity if it’s mine.

HW: There have been many different readings of The Trial. Many people say that it’s an allegory of the individual against authority, others say that it’s symbolic of man fighting against implacable evil, and so on. Have you gone along with any such interpretations in your film?

OW: I think that a film ought to be, or a good film ought to be as capable of as many interpretations as a good book, and I think that it is for the creative artist to hold his tongue on that sort of question, so you’ll forgive me if I refuse to reply to you. I’d rather that you go and see the film, which should speak for itself and must speak for itself. I’d prefer that you make your own interpretation of what you think!

HW: I wasn’t surprised when I heard that you were making The Trial, because it seems that the process of investing ordinary events, with intonations and overtones, is very much part of your armory as a filmmaker. Do you think that Welles and Kafka go well together in this respect?

OW: It’s funny that you should say that because I was surprised when I heard that I was making The Trial. In fact, what surprised me was that it was done at all. It’s a very expensive film, it’s a big film. Certainly five years ago there is nobody who could have made it, nobody who could have persuaded distributors or backers or anybody else to make it. But the globe has changed recently. There is a new moment in filmmaking and I don’t mean by that, that we’re better filmmakers, but that the distribution system has broken down a little and the public is more open, more ready for difficult subjects. So what’s remarkable is that The Trial is being made by anybody! It’s such an avant-garde sort of thing.

HW: Is it significant that films such as The Trial can now be produced on large budgets, for commercial cinema audiences?

OW: Oh it’s wonderful, and it’s very hopeful. I mean there are all sorts of difficult subjects being made into mainstream pictures nowadays and they are doing well. People are going to see them. Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. I mean, I don’t like them, but I’m so glad that they were made. It doesn’t matter that I don’t like them. Resnais would probably hate The Trial, but what matters is that a difficult and on the face of it, an experimental, film got made, and is being shown and is competing commercially! In other words what is dying is the purely commercial film, at least that is the great hope!

HW: What would The Trial have been like if it had been made, say, five years ago?

OW: I don’t think it would have been made five years ago, but if it had, it would only have gone to the art theaters and would have been made as a slender, difficult, experimental sort of film. Instead of being made as this is with Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider – you know, a big star cast, big picture! Imagine what that means, what it means for me to have had the chance to make it, indeed to have had the chance to work. This is the first job that I’ve gotten as a director in four years!

HW: The fact is, you’re in love with the movies, aren’t you?

OW: That’s my trouble! You see, if I’d only stayed in the theater, I could have worked steadily, without stopping for all these years. But, having made one film, I decided that it was the best and most beautiful form that I knew and one that I wanted to continue with. I was in love with it as you say, really tremendously so.

HW: There exists a scene of a computer scientist, played by Katina Paxinou, that is no longer in the film. She tells K his most likely fate is that he will commit suicide.

OW: Yes, that was a long scene that lasted ten minutes, which I cut on the eve of the Paris premiere. Joseph K has his fortune told by a computer – that’s what the scene amounted to. It was my invention. The computer tells him his fate. I only saw the film as a whole once. We were still in the process of doing the mixing, and then the premiere fell on us. At the last moment I abridged the scene. It should have been the best in the film and it wasn’t. Something went wrong, I don’t know why, but it didn’t succeed. The subject of that scene was free will. It was tinged with black humor; that was my main weapon. As you know, it is always directed against the machine and in favor of freedom.

HW: Why did you shoot so much of the film in Yugoslavia?

OW: It seems to me that the story we’re dealing with is said to take place ‘anywhere’. But of course there is no ‘anywhere’. When people say that this story can happen anywhere, you must know what part of the globe it really began in. Now Kafka is central European and so to find a middle Europe, some place that had inherited something of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Kafka reacted, I went to Zagreb. I couldn’t go to Czechoslovakia because his books aren’t even printed there. His writing is still banished there.

HW: Would you have gone to Czechoslovakia, were you able?

OW: Yes, I never stopped thinking that we were in Czechoslovakia. As in all of Kafka, it’s supposed to be Czechoslovakia. The last shot was in Zagreb, which has old streets that look very much like Prague. But you see, capturing that flavor of a modern European city, yet with its roots in the Austro-Hungarian empire wasn’t the only reason why we shot in Yugoslavia. The other reason was that we had a big industrial fair to shoot in. We used enormous buildings, much bigger than any film studio. There was one scene in the film where we needed to fit fifteen hundred desks into a single building space and there was no film studio in France or Britain that could hold fifteen hundred desks. The big industrial fair grounds that we found in Zagreb made that possible. So we had both that rather sleazy modern, which is a part of the style of the film, and these curious decayed roots that ran right down into the dark heart of the 19th century.

HW: You shot a lot of the film in Paris, at an abandoned railway station, the Gare d’Orsay.

OW: Yes, there’s a very strange story about that. We shot for two weeks in Paris with the plan of going immediately to Yugoslavia where our sets would be ready. On Saturday evening at six o’clock, the news came that the sets not only weren’t ready, but the construction on them hadn’t even begun. Now, there were no sets, nor were there any studios available to build sets in Paris. It was Saturday and on Monday we we’re to be shooting in Zagreb! We had to cancel everything, and apparently to close down the picture. I was living at the Hotel Meurice on the Tuilleries, pacing up and down in my bedroom, looking out of the window. Now I’m not such a fool as to not take the moon very seriously, and I saw the moon from my window, very large, what we call in America a harvest moon. Then, miraculously there were two of them. Two moons, like a sign from heaven! On each of the moons there were numbers and I realized that they were the clock faces of the Gare d’Orsay. I remembered that the Gare d’Orsay was empty, so at five in the morning I went downstairs, got in a cab, crossed the city and entered this empty railway station where I discovered the world of Kafka.

The offices of the advocate, the law court offices, the corridors – a kind of Jules Verne modernism that seems to me quite in the taste of Kafka. There it all was, and by eight in the morning I was able to announce that we could shoot for seven weeks there. If you look at many of the scenes in the movie that were shot there, you will notice that not only is it a very beautiful location, but it is full of sorrow, the kind of sorrow that only accumulates in a railway station where people wait. I know this sounds terribly mystical, but really a railway station is a haunted place. And the story 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. Of course, my film has a lot of sorrow too, so the location infused a lot of realism into the film.

HW: Did using the Gare d’Orsay change your conception of the film?

OW: Yes, I had planned a completely different film that was based on the absence of sets. The production, as I had sketched it, comprised sets that gradually disappeared. The number of realistic elements were to become fewer and fewer and the public would become aware of it, to the point where the scene would be reduced to free space as if everything had dissolved. The gigantic nature of the sets I used is, in part, due to the fact that we used this vast abandoned railway station. It was an immense set.

HW: How do you feel about The Trial? Have you pulled it off?

OW: You know, this morning when I arrived on the train, I ran into Peter Ustinov and his new film, Billy Budd has just opened. I said to him, ‘how do you feel about your film, do you like it?’ He said, ‘I don’t like it, I’m proud of it!’ I wish that I had his assurance and his reason for assurance, for I’m sure that is the right spirit in which to reply. I feel an immense gratitude for the opportunity to make it, and I can tell you that during the making of it, not with the cutting, because that’s a terrible chore, but with the actual shooting of it, that was the happiest period of my entire life. So say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I have ever made.

HW: How do you react to the question of your audience?

OW: Ah, that’s an interesting thing. It seems to me that the great gift of the film form, to the director, is that we are not forced to think of the audience. In fact, it is impossible to think of our audience. If I write a play, I must inevitably be thinking in terms of Broadway or the West End. In other words, I must visualize the audience that will come in; its social class, its prejudices and so on. But with a film, we never think of the public at all, we simply make the film the same way you sit down and write a book, and hope that they will like it. I have no idea what the public will make of The Trial. Imagine the freedom of that! I just make The Trial and then we’ll see what they think of it. The Trial is made for no public, for every public, not for this year, for as long as the film may happen to be shown. That is the gift of gifts.

HW: Thank you, Orson Welles. I hope that we enjoy watching it, as much as you enjoyed making it.

OW: Oh, so do I. Thank you.

– ‘Orson Welles on The Trial’. Interviewed on the BBC in 1962 By Huw Wheldon.