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.

Orson Welles: On Writing ‘Citizen Kane’

Citizen Kane (Directed by Orson Welles)

Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and to reconstruct him. Form of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances... In a story by Chesterton — ‘The Head of Caesar,’ I think — the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.  (Jorge Luis Borges)

Citizen Kane unfolds in a series of flashbacks drawn from those closest to the newspaper publisher, and relentlessly follows the reporter seeking in vain to find the meaning of "Rosebud.” The discovery in the last scene that Rosebud was the name of the sled Kane owned in early childhood “is not the answer,” wrote critic Roger Ebert. “It explains what Rosebud is, but not what Rosebud means. The film’s construction shows how our lives, after we are gone, survive only in the memories of others, and those memories butt up against the walls we erect and the roles we play. There is the Kane who made shadow figures with his fingers, and the Kane who hated the traction trust; the Kane who chose his mistress over his marriage and political career, the Kane who entertained millions, the Kane who died alone.” 

Welles, who had lost his parents at a young age, was a child prodigy. “There just seemed to be no limit as to what I could do. Everybody told me from the time I was old enough to hear that I was absolutely marvelous,” he said in a 1982 interview. “I never heard a discouraging word for years. I didn’t know what was ahead of me.” When he was only 23, Time magazine put him on it’s front cover, calling him the “brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years. Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize.”

Citizen Kane's release on 1 May 1941 was anticipsted with great enthusiasm. Welles had created a major sensation in the New York theatre. He had directed an all-black cast in a staging of Macbeth, which he transposed to Haiti, and set Julius Caesar in the context of Nazi Germany. He had also produced a famous radio broadcast of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds. These triumphs created great anticipation for his debut picture in Hollywood, which had given him unprecedented freedom, which he gleefully seized. 

The picture gained its most passionate audience in France after the Second World War, where future film-makers such as François Truffaut saw it when they were studying experimental film. After years of little attention in the United States, the picture was released in May 1956 and appeared about the same time on TV. In 1962, it came at the top of the poll in Sight & Sound magazine for the greatest film ever made.

The following extracts are taken from an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in which Orson Welles discusses the writing of Citizen Kane:

Peter Bogdanovich: There’s a film written by Preston Sturges called ‘The Power and the Glory’ [1933] which has been said to have influenced you in the flashback style of ‘Kane’. Is that true?

Orson Welles: No. I never saw it. I’ve heard that it has strong similarities; it’s one of those coincidences. I’m a great fan of Sturges and I’m grateful I didn’t see it. He never accused me of it – we were great chums – but I just never saw it. I saw only his comedies. But I would be honored to lift anything from Sturges, because I have very high admiration for him...

PB: The idea for the famous breakfast scene between Kane and his first wife [the nine-year deterioration of their marriage is told through one continuing conversation over five flash-pans] –

OW:  – was stolen from The Long Christmas Dinner of Thornton Wilder! It’s a one-act play, which is a long Christmas dinner that takes you through something like sixty years of a family’s life –

PB: All at dinner –


OW: Yes, they’re all sitting at dinner, and they get old – people wheel baby carriages by, and coffins and everything. That they never leave the table and that life goes on was the idea of this play. I did the breakfast scene thinking I’d invented it. It wasn’t in the script originally. And when I was almost finished with it, I suddenly realized that I’d unconsciously stolen it from Thornton and I called him up and admitted to it.

PB: What was his reaction?


OW: He was pleased...

PB: Just how important was [Herman J.] Mankiewicz in relation to the script?

OW: Mankiewicz’s contribution? It was enormous.


PB: You want to talk about him?


OW: I’d love to. I loved him. People did. He was much admired, you know.


PB: Except for his part in the writing of ‘Kane’... Well, I’ve read the list of his other credits...


OW: Oh, the hell with lists – a lot of bad writers have wonderful credits.


PB: Can you explain that?

OW: Luck. The lucky bad writers got good directors who could write. Some of these, like Hawks and McCarey, wrote very well indeed. Screenwriters didn’t like that at all. Think of those old pros in the film factories. They had to punch in every morning, and sit all day in front of their typewriters in those terrible ‘writers’ buildings.’ The way they saw it, the director was even worse than the producer, because in the end what really mattered in moving pictures, of course, was the man actually making the pictures. The big-studio system often made writers feel like second-class citizens, no matter how good the money was. They laughed it off, of course, and provided a good deal of the best fun – when Hollywood, you understand, was still a funny place. But basically, you know, a lot of them were pretty bitter and miserable. And nobody was more miserable, more bitter, and funnier than Mank,... a perfect monument of self-destruction. But, you know, when the bitterness wasn’t focused straight onto you, he was the best company in the world.

PB: How did the story of ‘Kane’ begin?


OW: I’d been nursing an old notion – the idea of telling the same thing several times – and showing exactly the same scene from wholly different points of view. Basically, the idea Rashomon used later on. Mank liked it, so we started searching for the man it was going to be about. Some big American figure – couldn’t be a politician, because you’d have to pinpoint him. Howard Hughes was the first idea. But we got pretty quickly to the press lords.

PB: The first drafts were in separate versions, so when was the whole construction of the script – the intricate flashback pattern – worked out between you?

OW: The actual writing came only after lots of talk, naturally,...  just the two of us, yelling at each other – not too angrily.

PB: What about the ‘Rashomon’ idea? It’s still there to a degree.

OW: It withered away from what was originally intended. I wanted the man to seem a very different person depending on who was talking about him. ‘Rosebud’ was Mank’s, and the many-sided gimmick was mine. Rosebud remained, because it was the only way we could find to get off, as they used to say in vaudeville. It manages to work, but I’m still not too keen about it, and I don’t think that he was, either. The whole shtick is the sort of thing that can finally date, in some funny way.

PB: Toward the close, you have the reporter say that it doesn’t matter what it means  –

OW: We did everything we could to take the mickey out of it.

PB: The reporter says at the end, ‘Charles Foster Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost, but it wouldn’t have explained anything...’


OW: I guess you might call that a disclaimer – a bit corny, too. More than a bit. And it’s mine, I’m afraid.

PB: I read the script that went into production... There were so many things you changed on the set, or, anyway, after you’d started shooting. From the point of view of Kane’s character, one of the most interesting is the scene where you’re remaking the front page for about the twentieth time. In the script, Kane is arrogant and rather nasty to the typesetter. In the movie, he’s very nice, even rather sweet. How did that evolve?

OW: Well, all he had was charm – besides the money. He was one of those amiable, rather likable monsters who are able to command people’s allegiance for a time without giving too much in return. Certainly not love; he was raised by a bank, remember. He uses charm the way such people often do. So when he changes the first page, of course it’s done on the basis of a sort of charm rather than real conviction... Charlie Kane was a man-eater.

PB: Well, why was it in the script the other way?


OW: I found out more about the character as I went along.


PB: And what were the reactions of Mankiewicz to these changes?

OW: Well, he only came once to the set for a visit. Or, just maybe, it was twice...

PB: Before shooting began, how were differences about the script worked out between you?

OW: That’s why I left him on his own finally, because we’d started to waste too much time haggling. So, after mutual agreements on story line and character, Mank went off with Houseman and did his version, while I stayed in Hollywood and wrote mine. At the end, naturally, I was the one who was making the picture, after all – who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank’s and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own.

PB: As you know, Houseman has repeatedly claimed that the script, including the conception and structure, was essentially Mankiewicz’s.

OW: It’s very funny that he does that, because he deserves some credit himself. It’s very perverse, because actually he was a junior writer on it, and made some very important contributions. But for some curious reason he’s never wanted to take that bow. It gives him more pleasure just to say I didn’t write it...

PB: What was the influence of your guardian, Dr. Bernstein? And why did you give that name to the character in ‘Kane’?

OW: [laughs] That was a family joke. He was nothing like the character in the movie. I used to call people ‘Bernstein’ on the radio all the time, too – just to make him laugh... I sketched out the character in our preliminary sessions – Mank did all the best writing for Bernstein. I’d call that the most valuable thing he gave us...

PB: Yes, that scene with the reporter [William Alland] –

OW: That was all Mank, by the way – it’s my favorite scene.

PB: And the story about the girl: ‘One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry... There was another ferry pulling in, and... a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on... I only saw her for a second... but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl.’

OW: It goes longer than that.

PB: Yes, but who wrote it?

OW: Mankiewicz, and it’s the best thing in the movie. ‘A month hasn’t gone by that I haven’t thought of that girl.’ That’s Mankiewicz. I wish it was me.

PB: Great scene.

OW: If I were in hell and they gave me a day off and said, ‘What part of any movie you ever made do you want to see?’ I’d see that scene of Mank’s about Bernstein. All the rest could have been better, but that was just right...

PB: You once said about the editing of ‘Kane’, ‘There was nothing to cut.’ What did you mean?

OW: When I made Kane, I didn’t know enough about movies, and I was constantly encouraged by [cinematographer Gregg] Toland, who said, under the influence of Ford, ‘Carry everything in one shot – don’t do anything else.’ In other words, play scenes through without cutting, and don’t shoot any alternate version. That was Toland in my ear. And secondly, I didn’t know how to have all kinds of choices. All I could think of to do was what was going to be on the screen in the final version. Also, I had a wonderful cast...

PB: Why did you decide not to have credits at the beginning of ‘Kane’? No one had ever done that before.

OW: The script dictated that. Look at all the other things that go on at the beginning, before the story starts: that strange dreamlike prologue, then ‘News on the March,’ and then the projection-room scene – it’s a long time before anything starts. Now, supposing you’d added titles to all that. It would have been one thing too much to sit through. You wouldn’t have know where you were in the picture.

PB: In that prologue you just mentioned, why does the light in his bedroom suddenly go off – and then come on again after a moment?

OW: To interest the audience. We’d been going on quite a while there with nothing happening. You see a light in the window – you keep coming nearer – and it better go off, or a shadow had better cross, or something had better happen. So I turned the light off – that’s all.

PB: Then you cut inside.


OW: That’s right. Maybe the nurse turned it off because it was getting in his eyes. Who knows? Who cares? The other answer is that it symbolized death. Got that? All right...

PB: What did you mean by the mirrors at the end, when Kane walks by and you see his image reflected many times?

OW: I don’t think a moviemaker should explain what he means. About anything. Leave it to the customers. Why spoil things for people who enjoy finding their own meanings?

PB: But you just explained the light going off –


OW: Next.

PB: The black smoke at the end has been said to symbolize the futility of his life...


OW: I don’t know – I hate symbolism.


PB: Fritz Lang said he dropped the use of symbols when he came to America because somebody at MGM said to him, ‘Americans don’t like symbols.’


OW: I’m one of those Americans. I never use it. If anybody finds it, it’s for them to find. I never sit down and say how we’re going to have a symbol for some character. They happen automatically, because life is full of symbols. So is art. You can’t avoid them; but if you use them, you get into Stanley Kramer Town.

PB: I know you hate to think up titles –

OW: No! I love to think ’em up, but can’t! Citizen Kane came from George Schaefer – the head of the studio, imagine that! It’s a great title. We’d sat around for months trying to think of a name for it. Mankiewicz couldn’t, I couldn’t, none of the actors – we had a contest on. A secretary came up with one that was so bad I’ll never forget it: A Sea of Upturned Faces.

PB: Can we talk about Leland’s betrayal of Kane?

OW: He didn’t betray Kane. Kane betrayed him.


PB: Really?


OW: Because he was not the man he pretended to be.


PB: Yes, but, in a sense, didn’t Leland –


OW: I don’t think so.


PB: I was going to say something else. Didn’t Leland imagine that Kane was one thing and then was disappointed when he wasn’t?


OW: Well, it comes to the same thing. If there was any betrayal, it was on Kane’s part, because he signed a Declaration of Principles which he never kept.


PB: Then why is there a feeling that Leland is petty and mean to Kane in the scene when he gets drunk?


OW: Because there he is – only there, because he’s defensive. It’s not the big moment. The big moment is when he types the bad notice afterward. That’s when he’s faithful to himself and to Kane and to everything.

PB: I wonder if that’s as simple as your answer is now, because if you were put in a position like
that –

OW: I’m not his character. I’m a totally different kind of person from Jed Leland. I’m not a friend of the hero. And he’s a born friend of the hero, and the hero turned out not to be one. He’s the loyal companion of the great man – and Kane wasn’t great; that’s the story. So of course he’s mean and petty when he’s discovered that his great man is empty inside.

PB: Well, maybe one feels that Leland could have afforded to write a good review.

OW: Not and been a man of principle. That Declaration of Principles Kane signed is the key to it. Leland couldn’t – no critic can. He’s an honest man. Kane is corrupt. I don’t think he betrays Kane in any way.

PB: Well, one has an emotional response to Kane in the picture, and I certainly felt that Leland betrays him – I felt that emotionally.

OW: No, he doesn’t. You’re using the word ‘betrayal’ wrong. He’s cruel to him, but he doesn’t betray him.

PB: Well, he betrays their friendship, then.

OW: He doesn’t. It’s Kane who betrayed the friendship. The friendship was based on basic assumptions that Kane hadn’t lived up to. I strongly and violently disagree with that. There is no betrayal of Kane. The betrayal is by Kane.

PB: Then why do I somewhat dislike Leland?


OW: Because he likes principles more than the man, and he doesn’t have the size as a person to love Kane for his faults.

PB: Well, then, there you are.


OW: But that’s not betrayal. ‘Betrayal’ is a dead wrong word. He simply doesn’t have the humanity, the generosity of spirit, to have been able to endure Kane...

PB: Do you think that Thompson, the reporter, is changed by going through the Kane story? Is he altered?


OW: He’s not a person. He’s a piece of machinery –


PB: To lead you through.


OW: Yes.


PB: Was there any mystery before the Rosebud element? I mean, did you try anything else?


OW: Yes. And there was a scene in a mausoleum that I wrote – it was a quotation from a poem or something, I can’t remember – and Mankiewicz made terrible fun of it. So I believed him and just said, ‘All right, it’s no good.’ It might have been good – I don’t remember it, because I was so ashamed from Mankiewicz’s violent attack on it.

PB: Why did you begin and end with the No Trespassing sign?

OW: What do you think? Anybody’s first guess has got to be right.


PB: A man’s life is private.


OW: Is it? That should theoretically be the answer, but it turns out that maybe it is and maybe it isn’t...


PB: Is the name Kane a play on Cain?


OW: No, but Mankiewicz got furious when I used that name, because he said that’s what people will think. We had a big fight about that.


PB: The original name was Craig.


OW: Yes. And I said I thought Kane was a better name –


PB: Just because it was a better name –


OW: Yes. And Mankiewicz made the other point: ‘They’ll think you’re punning on Cain’ and all that, because we had a big murder scene in the original script. And I said they won’t, and he said they will, and so on. I won...

PB: Did you notice an influence on Hollywood films from ‘Kane’?

OW: You couldn’t mistake it. Everybody started having big foreground objects and ceilings and all those kind of compositions. Very few people had ever even used a wide-angle lens except for crowd scenes.

PB: But the effect wasn’t in terms of story construction?


OW: No, the things that I valued didn’t seem to have much effect on anybody. But the most obvious kind of visual things, everybody did right away.

PB: It seemed to me that your memory of your mother is reflected in the scenes with Kane’s mother.

OW: Not at all. She was so different, you know.


PB: I don’t mean the character, but the affection of Kane –

OW: Really no comparison. My mother was very beautiful, very generous, and very tough. She was rather austere with me.

PB: Well, the mother in ‘Kane’ was not a sentimental mother –

OW: It isn’t that. There’s just not any connection.

PB: It’s not so much the mother herself but the emotion of remembering a mother. As in the scene where you meet Dorothy Comingore and tell her you’re on a trip in search of your youth, and she has that line, ‘You know what mothers are like.’ And you say, in a sad, reflective tone, full of memories, ‘Yes.’ It’s one of my favorite moments in the picture.

OW: No, Peter, I have no Rosebuds.


PB: But do you have a sentiment for that part of your past?

OW: No... I have no wish to be back there... Just one part of it, maybe. One place. My father lived sometimes in China, and partly in a tiny country hotel he’d bought in a village called Grand Detour, Illinois. It had a population of 130. Formerly it was ten thousand, but then the railroad didn’t go through. And there was this hotel which had been built to service the covered wagons on their way west through southern Illinois (which is real Mark Twain country, you know, and people like Booth Tarkington). My father spent a few months of his year there, entertaining a few friends. They never got a bill. And any legitimate hotel guests who tried to check in had a tough time even getting anyone to answer that bell you banged on the desk. Our servants were all retired or ‘resting’ from show business. A gentleman called Rattlesnake-Oil Emery was handyman. One of the waitresses had done bird calls in a tent show. My father was very fond of people like that.

Well, where I do see some kind of Rosebud, perhaps, is in that world of Grand Detour. A childhood there was like a childhood back in the 1870s. No electric light, horse-drawn buggies – a completely anachronistic, old-fashioned, early-Tarkington, rural kind of life, with a country store that had above it a ballroom with an old dance floor with springs in it, so that folks would feel light on their feet. When I was little, nobody had danced up there for many years, but I used to sneak up at night and dance by moonlight with the dust rising from the floor... Grand Detour was one of those lost worlds, one of those Edens that you get thrown out of. It really was kind of invented by my father. He’s the one who kept out the cars and the electric lights. It was one of the ‘Merrie Englands.’ Imagine: he smoked his own sausages. You’d wake up in the morning to the sound of the folks in the bake house, and the smells... I feel as though I’ve had a childhood in the last century from those short summers.

PB: It reminds me of ‘Ambersons’. You do have a fondness for things of the past, though –

OW: Oh yes. For that Eden people lose... It’s a theme that interests me. A nostalgia for the garden – it’s a recurring theme in all our civilization.

– From Peter Bogdanovich: Interview with Orson Welles. In Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane:  A Casebook (ed. James Naremore. OUP, 2004)

 

Graham Greene: ‘The Third Man’ as Story and Film

The Third Man (Directed by Carol Reed)

Sometime in 1947 the prolific producer Alexander Korda, a Hungarian émigré and head of London Films, had the idea to make a film set in Vienna, which at the time was divided into zones and occupied by American, British and French forces. It would make a good backdrop, but this wasn't the only reason for Korda’s interest.

London Films had certain reserves of currency in Austria and this was a time when currency exchange was difficult, requiring permission from government and central banks. Korda scouted out various writers but soon settled on Graham Greene, whom he greatly admired. Greene, Korda and director Carol Reed had collaborated on ‘The Fallen Idol’ (1948), adapted by Greene from his own short story (and at the time in the process of being shot), and Korda wanted to do it again.

He pestered Greene and the writer eventually presented him with a fledgling idea in the form of a single sentence:

I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.

Korda was hooked and ‘The Third Man’ was conceived. The writing didn’t come easily for Greene until the end of September 1947 when suddenly his ‘Risen-from-the-dead story’, as he called it, fell into place in his mind.

From Vienna Greene travelled via Prague to Rome, where he met his mistress and, with money he received for the commission, bought a villa in Anacapri, where he finished the short story, which he delivered to Korda.

At the end of April 1948 Korda, with Reed accompanying him, travelled to the United States to meet with the legendary producer David O. Selznick (who had been responsible for ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939) with a view to bringing in American finance. By the middle of May a deal had been signed for four films. In return for the right to release Korda’s films in the US Selznick would provide finance and give Korda access to the stars Selznick had under contract. ‘The Third Man’ would be the film to inaugurate the deal... (Rob White: The Origins of The Third Man).

The following observations on story writing and film were written by Graham Greene as a preface to his novella, ‘The Third Man’, published by Viking Press.

The Third Man was never written to be read but only to be seen. Like many love affairs, it started at a dinner table and continued with many headaches in many places, Vienna, Venice, Ravello, London, Santa Monica.

Most novelists, I suppose, carry round in their heads or in their notebooks the first ideas for stories that have never come to be written. Sometimes one turns them over after many years and thinks regretfully that they would have been good once, in a time now dead. So twenty years back, on the flap of an envelope, I had written an opening paragraph:

I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.

I, no more than my hero, had pursued Harry, so when Sir Alexander Korda asked me to write a film for Carol Reed to follow our Fallen Idol, I had nothing more to offer than this paragraph. Though Korda wanted a film about the four-power occupation of Vienna, he was prepared to let me pursue the tracks of Harry there.

To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere, and these it seems to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script. One can reproduce an effect caught in another medium but one cannot make the first act of creation in script form. One must have the sense of more material than one need to draw on. The Third Man, therefore, though never intended for publication, had to start as a story before it began those apparently interminable transformations from one treatment to another.

On these treatments Carol Reed and I worked closely together, covering so many feet of carpet a day, acting scenes at each other. No third ever joined our conferences: so much value lies in the clear cut-and-thrust of argument between two people. To the novelist, of course, his novel is the best he can do with a particular subject; he cannot help resenting many of the changes necessary for turning it into a film or a play. But The Third Man was never intended to be more than the raw material for a picture. The reader will notice many differences between the story and the film, and he should not imagine these changes were forced on an unwilling author: as likely as not they were suggested by the author. The film, in fact, is better than the story because it is in this case the finished state of the story.

Some of these changes have obvious superficial reasons. The choice of an American instead of an English star involved a number of alterations. For example, Mr. Joseph Cotten quite reasonably objects to the name Rollo. The name had to be an absurd one, and the name Holley occurred to me when I remembered that figure of literary film, the American poet Thomas Holley Chivers. An American, too, could hardly have been mistaken for the great English writer Dexter, whose literary character bore certain echoes of the gentle genius of Mr. E.M. Forster, so that the confusion of identities would have been impossible, even if Carol Reed had not rightly objected to a rather far-fetched situation involving a great deal of explanation that increased the length of a film already far too long.

Another minor point: in deference to American opinion, a Romanian was substituted for Cooler, since Mr. Orson Welles’ engagement had already supplied us with one American villain. (Incidentally, the popular line of dialogue concerning Swiss cuckoo clocks was written into the script by Mr. Welles himself).

One of the very few major disputes between Carol Reed and myself concerned the ending, and he has been proved triumphantly right. I held the view that an entertainment of this kind, which in England we call a thriller, was too light an affair to carry the weight of an unhappy ending. Reed on his side felt that my ending – indeterminate though it was with no words spoken – would strike the audience, who had just seen Harry die, as unpleasantly cynical. I admit I was only half-convinced: I was afraid few people would wait in their seats during the girl’s long walk from the graveside and that they would leave the cinema under the impression of an ending as conventional as mine and more drawn-out. I had not given enough consideration to the mastery of Reed’s direction, and, at that state, of course, we neither of us could have anticipated Reed’s brilliant discovery of Mr. Karas, the zither player.

The episode of the Russians kidnapping Anna (a perfectly possible incident in Vienna) was eliminated at a fairly late stage. It was not satisfactorily tied into the story, and it threatened to turn the film into a propagandist picture. We had no desire to move people’s political emotions: we wanted to entertain them, to frighten them a little, to make them laugh.

Reality, in fact, was only a background to a fairy tale; none the less, the story of the penicillin racket is based on a truth all the more grim because so many of the agents were more innocent than Joseph Harbin. The other day in London a surgeon took two friends to see the film. He was surprised to find them subdued and depressed by a picture he had himself enjoyed. They then told him that at the end of the war when they were with the Royal Air Force they had themselves sold penicillin in Vienna. The possible consequences of their act had never before occurred to them.

– Graham Greene: ‘The Third Man’ as a Story and a Film (Viking Press, 1950).

    

Richard Linklater: Young Mr. Welles

In 1990, the movie, Slacker, was released by Richard Linklater in Austin, Texas, coinciding with a newly developed cultural zeitgeist led by the publication of the major novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland. Suddenly and unwittingly Linklater became one of the foremost voices for a generation, and was rocketed into prominence. However, Linklater quickly played down his role as a cultural observer. 

His later films, though, typically continued to chronicle Slacker's youthful subjects, notably Dazed and Confused, a perennially popular 70s-set coming-of-age comedy about the exploits of several groups of students on the last day of school, as well as the lesser-known SubUrbia (1996), about one night in the life of a group of disaffected teenagers. The latter ranks among Linklater’s best work.

Richard Linklater's films, influenced by literature and philosophy, have a strong predilection for the spoken word, and the filmmaker has confessed to purposefully disregarding the renowned screenwriting precept of "show, don't tell", emphasising delicate characterization rather than traditional narration. 

Me and Orson Welles was set in late-1930s New York, and is a nuanced, entertaining look at Orson Welles’s early career as founder of the Mercury Theater and a charming coming-of-age comedy about a stagestruck teen (played by Zac Efron) who ends up cast in Welles’s groundbreaking production of Julius Caesar. 

Michael Koresky posed some questions to Linklater regarding this somewhat unexpected new film, about his take on the genius at its center and the amazing acting discovery who inhabited him.

What led you to make a film about Orson Welles, and specifically about his early years with the Mercury Theater?

It’s become a fairly obscure moment in his career, given the ephemeral nature of the theater and the more notorious work in radio and film that was just around the corner for him. In that way, I always referred to this as a sort of Young Mr. Welles: everyone knows what’s coming in his future, but it’s interesting to see the seeds of all the greatness, as well as the traits that might cause him some trouble in the future—it’s all there to be reflected on. He’s only twenty-two years old here, and you can feel he is pushing his own boundaries, and maybe discovering he really doesn’t have any, both artistically and personally. More than anything else, though, I saw it as a wonderful story about youthful ambition and creating art in a collaborative environment. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a film about making a film, but making a film about a theatrical production is pretty close to home.

You have a very different filmmaking style from Welles. Your films often have a casual, almost real-time feel, whereas Welles is known for grandness, even ostentation. Yet I feel there are certain shots—during the staging of ‘Caesar’ and the last shot—that go for a certain Wellesian flourish. Were you consciously trying to achieve this?

First off, you’d have to say that almost every filmmaker before or since has a very different style from Welles, not just me. Just watch Othello or Touch of Evil again, and you’ll always be reminded. One of the greatest joys and biggest challenges on this was the reimagining of the production itself. It was a lot of fun to attempt to re-create his very dramatic stage lighting. As I tend to bend toward the realistic, I doubt it will ever be appropriate for me to have such dramatic lighting in a movie of mine, but we were just taking our cues from what Welles had done in this production. There was the upward lighting from a series of holes in the stage, where he was trying to capture the feeling of a fascist rally, like something you might see in Triumph of the Will, or the way he flooded the audience with light from behind the conspirators as they each stabbed Caesar—very cinematic. We had some pictures and descriptions to go off of, but a big rule was to avoid any specific references to shots in any of his films—that was in his future, and wouldn’t have been appropriate. If you think about it, this movie is closer to a screwball comedy in its pacing and banter than a film Welles himself would have made or even appeared in as an actor. I don’t think he saw himself as comedic, but the largeness of his personality and the energy whirlwind around him actually lend themselves quite naturally to a more upbeat tone and tempo. On a historical side note, the story goes that Greg Toland saw this particular Mercury production of Caesar, and when he heard Welles was off to Hollywood to make a movie, he set up a meeting with him. He was so impressed with what Welles had done with his lighting that he said he wanted to work with him, so the greatest director-DP collaboration in film history really starts here.

The actors employed as Welles’s Mercury crew are each note perfect, but Christian McKay as Welles indeed towers over them. His embodiment of Welles is uncanny, even effortless. How did you find him?

It’s ironic that Christian was the actor with the least amount of film experience, and here he is lording over everyone else with such authority. Christian’s performance, when you think of what’s required and the degree of difficulty, is an utter wonder. You mention effortless, which in my book is the ultimate compliment to a performance, but Christian was pulling off a hell of a transformation. First off, if you saw him walking down the street just now, I assure you you wouldn’t say, “There goes Orson Welles.” When you’re looking for it, you see a resemblance, but every cast and crew member can tell you about the first time they witnessed this incredible transformation. Here’s this upbeat British gentleman at one moment; then the voice deepens and changes accent, the eyebrows narrow just a bit, the head turns at a slight angle to make a point, there’s a subtle, all-knowing, self-satisfied smirk. He really becomes this other person, and it goes so much further than mere technical imitation—it’s a full embodiment, which on paper seems nearly impossible when it’s Welles you’re trying to be. I mean, who the hell can believably be like that?

I think the key to Christian’s performance is that he brings himself to it, which any actor would try to do naturally, but what Christian possesses that so few have is the absolute self-confidence and elevated air of someone who has lived their entire life with an extraordinary gift. In Welles’s case, he was famously identified as a genius at a very young age and could never think of himself as anything else. Christian’s gift is musical—he’s a world-class pianist, traveling the globe, playing with various orchestras . . . He’s that good and always has been. He came to acting a little later professionally, and has been primarily a stage actor up until now. He’s an incredible talent, truly one of the most remarkable people you’ll ever meet, and I hope he gets his due for this performance...

Is there a particular film in the Welles catalog you feel the strongest affinity for—and why?

No one particular film, though if I could watch one right this minute, it would have to be Chimes at Midnight. It’s a CRIME that it’s not more readily available. Welles’s daughter Chris talks about how his performance as Falstaff brings tears to her eyes. In Me and Orson Welles, he’s Prince Hal—one wonders if he knew he would age into Falstaff. Anyway, there should be a cinematic mandate that this film be fully restored and available to all.

– Young Mr. Welles: An Interview with Richard Linklater

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