(F for Fake's playing)
LM
In F for Fake you appears as Orson Welles and you're the story-teller. I think is it because Don Quixote to appear as the story-teller?
OW
Yes. It's very interesting that Cervantes set out to write a short story. Just by coincidence I set out to make a short film. But the figure of Quixote ceases you, carries you forever, there's no end to it. They have became ghostly, starting to fade like a piece of old movie film. That's why I'll have to make...We were talking about essay-film. I haven't said that I'd like to do take another shot at at this time on the subject of Spain, Spain and the Spanish virtues and vices, especially virtues. Cervantes wrote a figure there about a man who had gone mad reading old romances. And he ended up writing a story about a knight, the real one. When he finished up with Quixote, he's the most knight who ever rode out against the dragon. It has taken tourism in modern-communication, and maybe even democracy to destroy this, if not destroy at least to deemed, this extraordinary Spanish thing. That'd be the subject of my essay on Quixote and Spain when I finish it. I'm going to because it won't cost much money and it'd be very pleasure to do. And you know the title, "When are you going to finish Don Quixote?" that's what it's gotta be called.
LM
Because you've been asked that many times before?
OW
Yes. So many times. Since it's my own little picture where I put my own money on. I don't know why they don't bug authors and say, "When are you gonna finish Nelly the novel you started about 10 years ago?" You know, it's my business.
v.o.
Welles never did finish Don Quixote. And he never allowed anyone to see what he already shot. Sometimes he joke that he wasn't altogether shown with the various bits of it really were.
JM (Jeanne Moreau)
Sometimes I tried to imagine Orson having different bedrooms in different hotels and motels. And the doors to these rooms are locked, and under the bed, maybe because the make-up kit time discovery, hidden boxes and boxes of films, who knows.
v.o.
Jeanne Moreau starred in another Welles film that remained unseen, The Deep, completed in 1969 and never release. And John Huston acted in another unfinished project, this one held up by complicated legal tangles. It's called The Other Side of the Winds, the story of an aging and respected film director, surrounded by admirers, but with the typical Welles's irony unable to find the money for his next picture.
PB (Peter Bogdanovich)
Orson hasn't made half as many movies he wanted to and could have. But Orson of anybody that I've known should have been subsidized, he should have a patron, somebody who just wrote a check. That's never been his 'bag' dealing with getting the money. That's all he has had to do. That why so much of the time he spends his own money, he just don't want to be bothered with having to get it, or he couldn't get it. And he had a tremendous desire and urge to make picture.
OW
I think I made a mistake in staying in movies. It's a mistake I can't regret because it's like saying, "I shouldn't have married to that women but I did because I love her. I would have been more successful if I hadn't been married to her." I would have been more successful I left movies immediately. Stayed in the theatre, gone into politics, written anything. I've wasted greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paid-buck. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making movies. It's about 2% making movies and 98% hustling, that's no way to spent your life.
LM
Do you feel that going to go on?
OW
Oh, I'm gonna go on being faithful to my girl, I love her. I felt so much in love with making-movies that the theatre lost everything for me. I'm just in love with making-movies. Not very fond of movies, I don't go to them much. I think it's very harmful to see a movies for movie-makers because either you are imitating them or you are worried not to imitate them. You should do movies innocently, the way Adam named the animals in the first day in the garden. And I lost my innocence. Every time I see a picture I lose something I don't gain. I never understand what young-directors mean when they compliment me say they've learned from my pictures. I don't believe in learning from other people's pictures. You should learn from your own interior-vision. As though there never been D.W. Griffith or Eisenstein or Howard or Renoir or anybody.
v.o.
Jean-Luc Godard writing about Orson Welles, "May we be a cursed if we ever forget for one second that he, alone with Griffith, one in silent-day one in sound, was able to start-up that marvelous little electric-train. All of us, always, will owe him everything."
JM
To me, Orson is so much like a destitute King. Destitute King not because he was thrown away from the kingdom, but on this earth, the way the world is, there's no kingdom that is good enough for Orson Welles, that's the way I feel.
(end of interview)
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