Customer Reviews

Orson Welles: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers)

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For any fan of Welles, this is a must-have book, with some great pieces culled from 50 years of published newspaper and magazine articles. Just reading his words as he pontificates on a wide range of subjects, with special attention to his chosen fields of film and theatre, is to be in the presence of a wise, learned, and witty man who comes off as exuberant, vigorous and joyful, despite his physical condition during the later interviews and whatever financial problems he was embroiled in at each of the times he was interviewed. He manages to stimulate and/or revive the reader's interest in history, literature, cinema, theatre and the arts in general. I will not begrudge the editor and his team the honors they deserve for the hard work it took to compile these pieces and prepare them for the book, especially the ones that needed translating from another language.

The issue of translation, however, brings up a major problem I had. Four pieces were originally published in French, including two lengthy interviews co-conducted by the famed critic and theorist, Andre Bazin. All four are credited as being translated for this collection by Alisa Hartz. Nowhere does the editor indicate whether the interviews were conducted in English or French. Bazin's forward to the second of his interviews makes clear that it was conducted in English. Assuming this was so of all four interviews, it would mean the interviews were translated into French for their original publication and then re-translated into English for this volume, taking us two removes away from Welles' original words. Did the editor make an effort to find any original English transcripts or recordings, if they existed? I would like to have known that. Was any special effort made by the translator, when re-translating back into English, to try and capture Welles' particular style of speaking? The editor's failure to address this issue is a sore point for me. (One can, of course, turn to Peter Bogdanovich's collection of Welles interviews, "This is Orson Welles," Da Capo Press/1998, to read how Welles told some of the same stories to yet another interviewer.)

Also, minor problems stem from the constant accumulation of tantalizing hints of Welles projects-in-the-works and varying states of completion. A reference to a completed version of "Moby Dick," which Welles supposedly directed for English television, is left hanging. In more than one interview he insists that "Don Quixote" is almost finished. In one piece it is stated that he bought back "It's All True" from RKO and in the next, nearly two years later, it is stated he is still trying to find money to buy it back. He claims to have written a third of Howard Hawks' famous gender-bending comedy, "I Was a Male War Bride" and also claims that much of Buster Keaton's footage in Charlie Chaplin's "Limelight" was cut out by Chaplin. Were these claims corroborated in any way? Some explanatory footnotes would have been helpful throughout the book. Granted, other books have come along to straighten all this out, and I'm admittedly asking too much of the editor here to add to his own considerable task. But since I don't have the books that might answer the questions raised by these tidbits, I can't help but feel hungry for more.

Even so, there's tons of good material to savor, including an item about H.G. Wells suing Orson Welles over the "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. There are plenty of Welles' thoughts, both positive and negative, on other film directors, including such predecessors as John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, such contemporaries as John Huston and Nicholas Ray, and such successors as Stanley Kubrick. Welles admits he would have sold his soul to play "The Godfather." His passion for Shakespeare got me to wondering what Gore Vidal, another voracious reader of the classics, thought of Welles and if they ever even met. Sure enough, at the end of the book, there's a piece by Vidal called, "Remembering Orson Welles," which answered my questions. So I recommend the book highly, despite my reservations.

These interviews... They overlap and conflict with themselves, they run contrary to what we think we know about Orson. However they do make sense. The man is incredibly well read and so inteligent.

Your reaction to this man and what he says is your own, I highly recomend this to you. From a point of view looking at how the book is compiled and the editor's job this book still maintains a 5-star rating. It is well put together from interviews that span his tumultuous career. Fantastic.

I watched Citizen Kane again just before this arrived from Amazon. I read the book and then I saw one of Welles' later movies F for Fake (criterion and very highly recomended.) and that made the book and movies come to life in new and great ways.

do yourself a favor and check them out! There is nothing like hearing what the artists have to say about their work! University Press of Mississippi has a very broad series of books with interviews of film makers. I recomend, as well, takign a look at them!