CH (Charlton Heston)
...shooting that shot. Indeed if you look at the printed tape you can see the touches of dawn breaking on the horizon, that was the lost shot you were going to get.
Interviewer
And he used the last take?
CH
Yes.
(Touch of Evil's playing)
CH
The hard thing about that shot was the small part of the man who play the custome-inspector at the end of the shot, kept blowing his line. But one can understand because he see this vast set bearing down on him from two-blocks away. And finally Orson said to him, "Look, I don't care if you forget the line, just move your lips. I'm begging you. Just don't say Oh gee Mr.Welles, I'm sorry!" But it's one of many remarkable strokes in that film.
(Touch of Evil's playing)
OW
Yes. All reviewers know because this is on film, their conversation read between reloading. And somebody said that Touch of Evil seem unreal yet real. I correct that statement that what I was trying to do was to make something which was unreal but true. And I think that's the definition of the highest kind of theatricality, the best kind, and that's the kind of theatricality that can exist in film too, as well as theater. What is more unreal and stylized than Cagney. He was totally stylized unreal performance, no human being ever behave the way he does. And every moment in Cagney, entire life in film is truth. He never had a second that wasn't truth. He certainly was larger than life. He did everything dangerously as the way we were playing in Madison Square Garden, and it was always cinematicaly true but unreal. That's the difference I guess, I think.
LM
They say, for the viewer anyway, that there's a kind of moral ambiguity about the character, the Quinlan, although he ...
OW
Yes. Well, you know what Renoir said? He said everyone have his reasons. And that's really sums it up. There's no villain who doesn't have reason. And the bigger the villain, the more interesting it become if you further explain his habit, not psychiatrycaly, not because Mama didn't love him, but because you humanize him. The more human you make the monster, the more interesting the story must be.
LM
And also Quinlan's instinct turn out to be right, even though the method is wrong.
OW
That's right. His method is totally wrong. And my position in political and moral sense is completely anti-Quinlan. I'm absolutely in Heston's side. Myself personally. But playing Quinlan and having a character like that I had to make him a real person. I've been trapped into a troopers! What I hope is a troopers. A true monster because he was a successful cop using means which do work, which was simply against every good instinct we have in a democratic world. He's everything we hate. But he isn't what we hate. This is method. And yet he would never get those people behind bars if he hadn't done it. And it's that ambiguity that gives tension to the story. That ambivalent.
LM
You also allow him to have this fantastic epitaph at the end of the picture.
OW
Yes. Well, she was pretty good casting for that.
LM
She was some kind of a women.
OW
Yes. (laughing). It's her last great performance. No doubt about that.
(Touch of Evil's playing)
OW
Got another flawed masterpiece?
v.o.
Since 1949 when he created the character Harry Lime in Carol Reed's The Third Man, Welles has always felt at home with European cinema. And for the last 25 years of his life his films he directed were all made outside the Hollywood system. Including one Welles himself regarded as his masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight. Welles spoke to us about these and other films from the European years, about his discovery of the documentary and his unfinished project. But leaving America was also meant the end of one other activity that's close to his heart.
(political clip about Welles)
v.o
Orson Welles always resisted attempt to find autobiographical references in his work. But there's one major theme in Citizen Kane that was a lifelong obsession with Welles himself. During his Hollywood years, he was actively involved in politics. Speaking at anti-fascist rallies, broadcasting political commentary on the radio, writing his own daily column to the New York Post, and actively campaigning for Roosevelt.
OW
I didn't run for the senate for several reasons. The main reason is the fact, see if you run for the senate, everybody who does, in their hearts hopes they might possibly get to the top. I have to admit, if you run for the senate you have your eyes on that big building. I didn't think anybody could get elected for the president who had been divorced and who had been an actor. I made a terrible mistake both directions (laughing). The thing on my conscience is ,Roosevelt was so anxious for me to run, there's a study made in California I had a the southern California, Beverly Hills communist division was against me. I only had the north. And my advisor in California, was Allan(something), who later became the senator so I don't think he was totally disinterested. So we find that the best place I could run was Wisconsin, where I was born. We made a study of that and discovered that the man who I had to fight was so powerful that I'd certainly be beaten unless I was the greatest campaigner ever known. But unsupposing I was...
(end of part11)
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