Monday, 24 October 2011

Orson Welles interview oleh Leslie Megahy - Stories of His Life - part3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwKPra45UwE&feature=related
(catatan: Maaf sekali, tapi khusus video ini user-nya mem-block video embedding) Tapi interview tetap bisa dinikmati di halaman ini dalam bentuk tulisan.)

v.o
The next morning, the name of Orson Welles was headlines all over America.

OW
The thing that gave me the idea for it was that we have a lot of real radio nuts commentators on this period. People want to keep us out of European entanglements and Fascist priest called Father Coglin...people believe everything they heard on the radio. And I said let's do something impossible! Make them believe it, and then show them that it's only a radio.That was what started it. Now of course they've passed a lot of law so they can't do it. You can't give a news broadcast says this is the news without...all that. But the people who've tried in another country were all put in jail, and I got a contract in Hollywood.

v.o.
Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1940 at the age of 25. And on his own terms, a contract with RKO. It gave him a limited budget, but total artistic control.

LM
Because you are 25 and you have this amazing contract, did you sense an enormous amount of resentment from others in Hollywood?

OW
Oh, yes of course, there was a big resentment. Somebody cut my tie off in the middle of a restaurant. We went out to the parking lot and had it out, ... tremendous resentment, of course, because, nowadays every star has directed a movie. Even the TV star direct some of their segments. It's perfectly normal for actors to direct themselves. But nobody had done that since Von Stroheim, it was unheard of. Event that I should be the author and absolute producer, now of course the producer would hate me most because if I could do all those things, then what is the need for a producer.

v.o.
A year after he arrived in Hollywood, Welles began to shoot a picture called Citizen Kane. His cameramen was one of Hollywood's best, Gregg Toland.

OW
He came to me, you know. I didn't ask for him. One day in the office they said a man called Toland waiting to see you. He was one of the leading cameramen. He said 'I wanna make your picture.' I said, 'That's wonderful! Why? I don't know anything about movies' He said, 'That's exactly why I wanna do it. Because I think if you are left as alone as much as possible, we're gonna have a movie that looks different. I'm tired working with people who know too much about it.' He was the one who said that...we came to a moment in the second week of shooting, where I suddenly was told by somebody that it was not the job of a director to do all the lighting. After that I've been doing all the lighting. With Toland behind me balancing, and I'd say 'Don't tell anybody.' Then I had to apologize and everything to him.
Then another awful moment came when I didn't understand directions. That was because I had learned how to make movies by running Stagecoach every night for a month. Because if you look at Stagecoach you will see that the Indians attack left-to-right, and then they attack right-to-left, there's no directions followed, every rules is broken in the picture. And I sat watch it 45 times. Then of course when I was suddenly told in an over-shoulder's shot that I had to look camera left, instead of right, I said no standing my argument with the movies I watched. So we closed the picture down. And then about 2 in the afternoon I went back to my house and Toland showed me how that works. I said, 'Toland, there's a lot of stuffs here that I don't know. He said, 'There's nothing I can't teach you in 3 hours.' That's when I said that, which has been taken as a very pompous statement that I learned everything in 3 hours. It was Toland's idea that anybody can learn it in 3 hours. Then he taught it to me in 3 hours. Everything else is if you are any good or not.

v.o.
Welles and Toland never claimed to have invented new techniques. All they did was to combined existing ones into a virtuoso catalog of effects. Film sets with complete ceilings, overlapping sound, deep-focus photography, expressionist lighting. And if you doubt Welles own contribution to the look of Kane as some critics have, looks first at the lighting design for his 1937 theaterical production, Julius Caesar, this is 3 years before he went to Hollywood. And here's the sequence from Thatcher Library in Citizen Kane.


(Citizen Kane's played)

The story's told in dense and complicated array of technique. It's an investigation into a man's life. And Kane is seen in different stages of his life, from youth to old age, a great acting by the 25 years old Welles.

(Citizen Kane's played)

LM
You've said that Kane seem to you to be quite really close to parody as a character. You said once he was quite close to ....(somebody). I don't what you meant, is the way you played him, or the way he was seen?

OW
I don't know what I meant by that. Maybe that comes from one of those foreign languages interview where I pretend I understand the question and say, yes. There's a whole lot of things I'm supposed to say that really came to me from not hearing very well, or not as good being a linguist as I pretended to be. And there's a kind of interview, and you're not one of them, who tends to make a statement and says 'isn't that true?' and if I get very bored i'd say 'absolutely,yes!' That maybe how come the parody because I can't imagine what I had in mind.

v.o.
What most people thought what he had in his mind was a real life newspaper tycoon. The biggest of them all, William Randolph Hearst, the baron of the yellow-press, and one of the most powerful man in America.
Look first at the description of Citizen Kane's fictional palace, Xanadu, from the march of time sequence.

(Citizen Kane's played)

v.o.
And now look at these shots. This is a home-movie made at the William Randolph Hearst real-life palace, 8 years before Kane.

(end of part3)

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