Someone somewhere will surely think this is "channeling," so allow
me to set the record straight. It isn't. It's fiction. However, as
well all know, fiction often makes more sense than fact. Enough said on
that point.
In this interview with Orson Welles, we consider matters he's been
keeping bottled up for a long time, ever since Hollywood more or less
cast him aside. For some reason, he seems to agree with my views on many
points.
Q (Rappoport): You're a comedian. Would you agree?
A (Welles): Of course. That's not all I am, but yes. Comedy has
effervescence. It spills over the sides of the container. The
container is "things as they are." When you keep pouring new material
into it and let it flood over the sides, you're going to run into
laughter, eventually.
Q: The container itself is a joke.
A: It's a joke that can kill you, but sure. When you've been around
theater as long as I have, you understand that the whole construction
called ordinary reality is just another piece of theater---except it's
posing as the only show in town. That's the joke.
Q: How old were you when you figured this out?
A: I think I've always known it. People take on roles and they act them out.
Q: Why?
A: That's a hell of a question. I guess it's because they don't see an
alternative. There is a psychological fixation on One. One role, one
idea, one answer, one ultimate objective, one cure, one ending. It
represents a hunger for limits. I never liked that.
Q: You never like to come to the end of things.
A: No. My endings were usually tricks. You know, a way of arriving at
the conclusion of a story. But actually, I could have gone on
forever. I could have extended every movie I ever made out to
infinity. Why not? It's more interesting. You just keep inventing.
Q: So reality is infinite?
A: It could be. There's no rule against it. This is another aspect of
comedy. At some point, as you keep extending things, it's funny. Your
characters, in a movie, break out of their confines. The seams split.
You can make that serious and horrible, but if you keep going long
enough, it turns into comedy. Because the roles disintegrate. The
limits crack. You're in new spaces. Freedom takes over.
Q: Immortality.
A: Well, yes. I mean, I'm dead, but I'm not. Death is just one way of
ending the story, but you don't have to tell or live a story that way.
You just go on. You move on.
Q: In your later years, you gained an enormous amount of weight.
A: That was the result of boredom. And the boredom came out of the fact
that I wasn't ingenious enough to assemble everything I needed to make
the films I really wanted to make. You see, after
Citizen Kane,
which I made in my 20s, I saw where it could all go. I saw I could
make movies that no one had ever thought of. This may sound odd, but
Kane
was really a movie about making movies. That's what I discovered. On a
higher level, let's say, it was a movie about shadows and light and
camera angles and the emotion coming out of characters on the screen,
all rolled up into moving paintings. It was quite beautiful to me. I
was struck by it. I loved it. I wanted to take off from there and fly
into the wild blue yonder. The possibilities were endless.
Q: You had the energy---
A: You have no idea. It was titanic. It was radiating out of every cell in my body.
Q: So you make Citizen Kane and you're 24 years old.
A: It was a gargantuan act of ego.
Q: That's why it's endured.
A: Yes, I would say so.
Q: So in your case, it's beneficent ego.
A: Well, not all the time. I once threw a man off a bridge.
Q: That's a new one.
A: He attacked me. He said
The Magnificent Ambersons was a drawing-room drama.
Q: Did he die?
A: Oh no. The bridge was four feet above a narrow river. They fished him
out and we all went and had a drink. People have the wrong idea about
ego. Big is not a problem. Small is the problem. And if you stay in the
middle ground, you experience the worst case. Then you're torn to
pieces. Attrition and gnawing from all quarters. Beyond a certain point,
more ego is a balloon and you float up off the ground. If you can hold
on and allow the ride, you develop spontaneous resources.
Q: Ego is a medium, like paint or film.
A: You can use it if you want to.
Q: But people then assume art means humility.
A: People assume God is waiting for them in a city built on clouds,
where they'll melt like butter into a piece of cosmic toast. Humility is
a delusion. An ideal of sheer pretension. It's an amateur's role in a
doomed play.
Q: Ego as a social behavior is buffoonery.
A: That's why Citizen Kane is a comedy.
Q: And the reason why it's not seen as that?
A: Large looming sets, and camera angles slanted upward from low
positions. You can have a gloomy comedy. I may have invented the form.
Q:
Touch of Evil---they say, every frame is a galvanizing photograph.
A: Why else make a movie? I was like the poet who realizes
language is
the flight from the ground into the air, or the descent below the
surface. In film, you build the architecture to photograph it, and you
choose the angles that make the photo. Frankly, if I can't invent every
frame so it has original architecture, then I'm lazy. I'm letting the
extraordinary
slip by. I may as well be home getting drunk. But you see, I forced the
issue. I didn't sit back and hope. I didn't wait for every marvelous
accident. I was up on the beat, and I stayed there. Well, I didn't
stall. I hit you with image after image. That was the
point.
Q: You were the troll under the bridge.
A: The troll waits for years, for even centuries. But once he starts to move, he doesn't stop.
Q: At what point did you realize the plot of
Citizen Kane was a throwaway?
A: Oh, I knew that from the beginning. Stories are everywhere. Grab one.
Think of one. Don't give it much concern. One understands, of course,
the audience is a sucker for stories, so that's what they'll focus on.
You can't help that. But the Rosebud business, the whole career of Kane,
his whole life, drawn in episodes---who cares? It's just the occasion
for doing what I wanted to do. I never put stock in it. I may have said I
did, but that was a lie or a momentary fascination. I wanted big space,
so I chose a big man. Stories are a rank addiction. How will things
turn out? Who will prove to be the winner? What's the missing clue?
Find the right story that touches all the bases, and you can sell it.
But I was destroying stories. Understand? If my films had a theme, that
was it. Story disintegrates. It has no foundation.
Q: You're supposed to be obligated to telling a story.
A: Drivel. Wisdom is supposedly choosing the right story, but that's
sheer nonsense. Crap. Every story is a lie. You come to the end of it,
and you feel unhappy. I knew that when I was 16. That's why I had a hard
time with studio executives. They're sucking on the teat of their own
religion. They see themselves as priests. They're selling story to the
public. A to B. You begin the fairy tale at A and wind up at B. No
switchbacks. No irony. It's sheer stupidity. I'm not trying to hide
the weapon in the desk drawer until the last scene. I'm injecting
invention in every frame, so it spills over the edges. The foam shooting
over the rim of the glass. That's what I want. It's the same with any
world. You want to bring sheer abundance to it. Even in the desert, you
have an abundance, an over-abundance of space. That's what I'm aiming
for. Over-abundance. On Earth, you have it. Jungles. They just keep on
twisting toward the horizon. They lean over the banks of the rivers,
trying to swallow up the water, and the water won't be stopped, either.
You have black jaguars, some of the greatest hunting machines anyone
could devise. They're bursting at the seams. Look at their modeling. And
lions. And cloudy leopards, pure and sufficient and heartbreaking
beauty. You make many types. Let's not diddle around. The people who
made this place, Earth, do you think they held back? Do you think they
were wearing lab coats and saluting genes?
What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Q: Joseph Calleia in
Touch of Evil.
A: Poor old Joe. He could make that sadness sing. Abundantly. He was
quite good at comedy, you know. But he pulled on the cloak of sadness,
and his elevator would take you down three or four levels, and he would
die at the bottom. You knew he had to. There was a collection of
caricatures in that film. Not exactly caricatures, because I was
inventing, how do I say it, a special kind of type. Not a cartoon. Not
tripping falling farce. Not quite naturalism. Perhaps a mixture. They
call it grim noir, but that was a comedy, too, that film. You had Ray
Collins doing his special brand of flapdoodle. The DA. Coat and hat,
barking like a dog. One second he's three dimensions, the next second
he's flat. And Akim Tamiroff. Farce. But he'll shoot you. Entrances and
exits. The characters appear, flare, flatten out, and disappear.
Cardboard town. Cardboard and oil. A collapsible universe.
Q: With different rules.
A: Yes, the rules of, say, GK Chesterton. Reality as facade. But in
Touch of Evil,
if you put your hand through a wall, you feel you might get bit by
something on the other side. The characters aren't trapped by their
natures. Not really. I trap them. That's part of letting the audience
see I'm doing the inventing. They see it going on. Just enough. Same
with
Citizen Kane.
Q: Reminds me a little of Pablo in
Steppenwolf.
A: Yes. He can fold up the bar and the people in it into a toy and put
it all in his pocket. He doesn't do it. Maybe once, to drive home a
point. But he could. So could I. Obviously, I don't. But the fact that I
could is part of the overall atmosphere.
Q: Collapsible universe.
A: Magic Theater. It's a decision you make, and the earlier the better.
Will you pose yourself in reality and then mingle with it? Is that your
main thrust? Or will you punch holes in it and find velocity and
manufacture the worlds you want? You might discover one or two cultures
in the history of the planet that, at their beginning, opted for the
second alternative. Briefly.
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