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.

John Michael Hayes: On Writing Rear Window

Rear Window (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

John Michael Hayes wrote the screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, the screenplay for Rear Window was Hayes’ first project with a major director. A keen writer of dialogue, Hayes quickly understood that because Hitchcock grew up in silent films, he had a tendency to rely on the camera as much as possible. He later recalled: ‘I caught some of that spirit. Hitchcock taught me about how to tell a story with the camera and tell it silently.’

Rear Window (1954) is an enthralling Hitchcockian filmic study of human obsession and voyeurism. This cinematic masterpiece was shot entirely on a single set constructed at Paramount Studios - a realistic courtyard comprised of 32 apartments at a fictitious Manhattan address. Each of the other tenants provides an astute commentary on marriage and a comprehensive survey of male/female relations, while the protagonist observes them via his'rear window.' The camera angles are mostly from the protagonist's apartment, which means that the film spectator (in a dark theatre) sees the tenants of the other flats almost exclusively via his eyes - sharing in his voyeuristic surveillance. 

Parallel to the crime-thriller theme of mysterious apartment neighbours is the struggle of the passively observant and immobile protagonist (James Stewart), a magazine photographer who is impotently confined to a wheelchair while recuperating in his Greenwich Village apartment and fearful of marriage's imprisoning effects. Confined by his plaster cast, he fights to overcome his ambivalence and unwillingness to marry his high-fashion model fiancee-girlfriend (Grace Kelly).

Rear Window grows into an immersive universe, and Alfred Hitchcock brilliantly places us in it to the point that we are compelled to participate in the film’s narrative. We are, in a sense, accomplices in the protagonist’s voyeurism. 

Working with his long-time collaborator, cinematographer Robert Burks, Hitchcock moves the camera gracefully and purposefully through the play area he has created. The camera catches items with intent and a clarity that goes beyond merely creating the sense of being in the area; it creates the sensation of being right there with Stewart, staring out into the courtyard. 

You also get a sense of the genuine core of visual filmmaking, as his ability to suggest and even persuade the audience is imprinted on us by what he thinks vital. Hitchcock establishes practically all of Stewart's biography in a wordless tour of his room as our protagonist sleeps.

Hitchcock builds suspense incrementally via various changes in perspective, time of day, and persons entering and exiting the building. Our one point of contact is Stewart, who is confined to a wheelchair.

The primary focus of Rear Window is a horrific mystery thriller that unfolds in a methodical manner that is unsettling in part because Hitchcock has condensed everything into a limited area. Additionally, he has disabled his protagonist, and the outsiders continuously urge us to second guess or reconsider our preconceptions, whether it's Stella (Thelma Ritter), Jefferies' police officer pal (Wendell Corey), or his best friend Lisa. Each character stands in opposition to Jefferies at various points while also serving as a sounding board for his implausible notions that begin to show some resemblance to reality. We have the opportunity to be a part of it all. 

As with Vertigo four years later, there is an unsettling sensation that Hitchcock is tapping into some of humanity's fundamental urges to watch and spy on others for pleasure without consequence or vulnerability.

The critic Chris Wehner takes up this idea in a 2002 interview with John Michael Hayes in which he discusses the writing of Rear Window. It provides a fascinating insight into Hayes’ working methods and his relationship with the great director:

Rear Window is considered to be Hitchcock’s most ‘cinematic‘ picture. At times it had to communicate a lot to the audience without a word ever being spoken. This isn’t surprising as Hitchcock started directing in 1922, during the silent era, making several silent films. By 1954, the year Rear Window was released he had clearly mastered the art of directing. However, before he could unleash his visual brilliance there had to be a great script from which to allow such a great movie to be made.

Think of the drawbacks to the story. First, the protagonist is bound to a wheelchair and is most of the time a reactive participant who is essentially isolated. Second, the antagonist doesn’t say more than a dozen words (at least that we hear), and isn’t confrontational with the protagonist until the very end. Hitchcock often said, ‘the better the villain, the better the picture.’ The obstacles placed in the protagonist’s way were rooted in circumstance and happenstance – nothing placed by the antagonist. Thirdly, the entire movie takes place in an apartment and what is seen from the window. What might at first be seen as limitations were most likely viewed as cinematic possibilities and challenges that Hitchcock could not refuse.

John Michael Hayes’ screenplay was based on Cornell Woolrich’s original 1942 short story ‘It Had to Be Murder’. He was assigned to write the script after one meeting with Hitchcock.

Hitchcock didn’t sign on to direct the picture until after reading a thirteen page treatment by playwright Joshua Logan. Logan’s work laid the foundation from which Hayes wrote his treatment.

The short story lacked several important details which were added to the screenplay. It did not have a strong female character, or love interest, and Logan keenly injected that into the narrative. But, for the most part, it stuck closely to the source material. Logan’s treatment opens with New York City and Jefferies (the name is spelled ‘Jeffries‘ in Woolrich’s story and Logan’s treatment), who’s isolated in his apartment due to a broken leg in a cast. Logan created Trink, a love interest for Jeff, who is later renamed Lisa by Hayes. Also, in Logan’s treatment, Jeff is a sports writer, which is later changed to a photographer by Hayes. As in the final movie, Logan’s treatment has Jeff’s love interest go into the killer’s (Thorwald) apartment where she is discovered. The killer later comes after Jefferies when he is alone. But before he can kill Jefferies he is himself killed. Which, of course, was changed by Hayes.

Logan’s treatment clearly laid the foundation for Hayes to build on, but it had several problems and lacked numerous elements that Hitchcock and Hayes would add to strengthen the story: story elements, richer characters, more conflict, and better visuals.

Hayes constructed a convincing narrative with richly drawn characters and keenly raised the emotion and drama by injecting well placed conflict. Hayes knew that everything hinged on Jefferies’ character. He had to build a sympathetic protagonist the audience would absolutely love spending time with in order for the movie to work. He fleshed out Jefferies’ background, his relationship with Lisa, and his own internal conflict and emotional resolve. The result is a classic Thriller.

Tell me about your first meeting with Hitchcock.
I was given a copy of the Woolrich story by my agent, and was told to meet with Hitchcock later that week for dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My job was simple: Read the Woolrich piece, and be prepared to discuss it in great detail and length. It was not unlike preparing for the most important book report of one’s life.

The meeting itself was a near fiasco. It felt much more like a personal test of endurance than anything resembling a story conference. Hitchcock arrived late and, with time to sit and worry over his arrival, I had a couple of drinks, which I wasn’t entirely used to. Upon his arrival, we had a feast for the ages, along with copious amounts of alcohol.

Plied by the liquor, I rambled on for much too long about Hitchcock’s prior films. And I wasn’t entirely complimentary. Hitchcock appeared to listen, but once the meal itself was finished he abruptly left. And we had never even spoken about Rear Window at all. Later, after returning home, my wife asked how the meeting went. I told her we’d better start packing our bags, as I felt quite strongly that my opportunity with Hitchcock had vanished along with any future career I had envisioned in the industry.

Amazingly, upon reporting for work on Monday, I was told that Hitchcock immensely enjoyed our dinner and that I was to be hired immediately.

When you started working on a story in outline or treatment form, did you start with characterizations, plot, situations, structure, or what?
In crafting any story, you need to go into it holding dearly a clear understanding of where it is you want to end up. If you delve into a script with no clear concept of how you want it to end, you’ll flounder while looking for ways out of the problems you’ve brought upon your own script. In other words, any lack of direction in regards to your ending directly affects the entire script itself. You’ll spend days trying to re-vamp problems you’ve created by not having a clear direction from the get-go.

In Rear Window there isn’t your typical strong villain and the protagonist is bound to a wheelchair, so how difficult was it to maintain a level of tension and suspense? 
Having non-typical characters was of no real hindrance to the establishment of tension and suspense. In reality, there was a lot to work with. With a non-typical villain, you had the built-in opportunity to engage the characters in a ‘It couldn’t be him. Could it? He’s just a regular fellow’ form of banter, just as much as having the protagonist limited in his physical actions helped the suspense of, ‘How in the world is he going to defend himself, if need be?’ Writers sometimes habitually overdo it in how their characters move, act, and depict themselves. Grand flourish in a villain works for Bond movies, I suppose, but, in the world you and I live in, true villains don’t act as such. At least not on any level you or I may have experienced. There’s a form of everyday villainy that is largely forgotten now in cinema. And that’s what audiences can align best with –what it is they see and know in everyday life.

You really fleshed out Cornell Woolrich’s short story by adding the love story and fully developing Jefferies’ character, among other things, which were not in the book. Was this your idea or Hitchcock’s? 
The idea of adding the Fremont character was mine, and it was based upon my wife, Mel, who was in fact a high fashion model herself. The love interest is a requirement, or at least it was at the time and place in which the story was crafted. My opinion was, and still is, that we all fall very hard in love sooner or later, and can clearly relate to the concept of peril brought upon those that we strongly care about. As well as the simple fact that having a headstrong, yet imperiled, female character could add a great bounty to the story. As for Jefferies, it was necessary simply due to the relative brevity of the original work. That much was clearly visible by all from the beginning of the project.

While you were writing the treatment and script for Rear Window, how involved was Hitchcock? 
Early on he was still working on Dial M for Murder. One of the greatest assets of working with Hitchcock was that he essentially left you, the writer, alone to do your work. Once I completed the work expected of me, Hitchcock and I would then literally pore over the material almost shot by shot. That was primarily his biggest involvement at that stage of development – after I had completed the first expectations of my task. Unlike a lot of other directors and producers, he didn’t bother you constantly for pages in order to summarily reject them.

What were the best and worst things about working with Hitchcock? 
The best part of working with Hitchcock was the autonomy to do the job you were hired to do without interference, as I’ve mentioned above. The worst part was his distinct stinginess in being able to offer credit where credit was due. It was of paramount importance for him to be seen as a one-man show, but that just simply wasn’t the truth, at least not in my experience.

Looking back on how the two of you parted ways, what do you suppose it was? 
What it was is exceptionally simple: He wasn’t for a moment willing to allow anyone to believe he couldn’t do it all on his own. I believe in application of credit where credit is due – if you’ve earned it, you need to be respected, regarded, and properly credited for it. At times in our work together, Hitchcock wasn’t willing to allow that...

– From ‘Chris Wehner: Interview with Rear Window scribe John Michael Hayes’ (Screenwriter’s Monthly, Dec. 2002)