Dear Orson Welles,
look where we are, one of the wonders of the world.
missing in this skyline.
The Twin Towers are no more.
All things come to an end, don't they?
People, buildings, cities.
That was one of the big themes in your movies.
You died more than 30 years ago.
Since then,
some things haven't changed.
But quite a lot has changed since you died.
Life has become far more visual.
Something called the internet has come along.
It's hard to explain, but see those two guys at the bottom of this shot?
They're using mobile phones to send pictures,
not just words.
Or order pizza, or book a flight, or watch Citizen Kane.
Phones are televisions and travel agents now.
The internet is like black magic.
The addict in you, the adrenaline junkie, would love it.
What you would have done with the internet.
There've been other big changes since you died.
We've had an African-American president in the Oval Office.
Oh, and a guy who thinks he's Charles Foster Kane.
The world has become more Wellesian, Orson.
The despots that you were fascinated by are gaining ground.
Things seem exaggerated, but what is Wellesian?
Who were you?
When I told a waitress recently that I was making a film about you,
she said, "Oh, that big creepy actor. He gave me the willies."
You did act creeps, didn't you?
And bullies.
In the Third Man, the camera whooshed into Harry Lime,
your most famous character.
A monster, a smirker in the limelight.
So, the waitress was partly right.
Can we look at you anew, Orson?
Can we tell your story anew?
Can we?
I went to this secure storage unit in New York...
..and found this box.
What's in the box?
An aspect of you, Orson.
You left no autobiography but you left something else.
I took the box in a taxi.
That's me, 40 years after I saw your film Touch Of Evil on TV as a boy.
I didn't understand it, but I swooned.
I felt the whoosh of love.
You threw a rope to me when I watched it, Orson.
When I'm nervous now, anywhere in the world,
I hum the tune that plays on Touch Of Evil's pianola.
It's a sultry lullaby of sorts.
I took the box on a plane and now it's in my flat.
What's in the box, Orson?
Not words or films, but drawings.
Many have never been seen before.
What's in the box, Orson?
Visual thinking.
What's in the box, Orson?
A sketchbook of your life.
Look how freely your quill moves across the page
of this BBC TV documentary.
Scratch and scribble.
Lines faster than you can think
for the back of the head and the lapel.
Then more careful for the nose.
You were obsessed by noses.
Old school technique, dipping into an ink well.
Where would you start the story of your drawing life, Orson?
You said that, "At nine I started to paint.
"That's what I loved the most, always."
And then, later,
"I've never been excited by movies as movies,
"as the way I've been excited by magic, or bull-fighting,
"or painting."
Your guardian, Dada Bernstein, encouraged you to study art
in the Windy City.
What a transit lounge.
Was it a visual treat?
Did it affect your looking life?
We could look at Chicago square on, like this,
but surely the city of the first-grade skyscrapers
made you look upwards.
And you became the greatest ever film-maker of looking upwards.
Whether it's by craning...
..shooting below people's feet...
Mr Arkadin is waiting for you.
Thanks.
20,000 tonnes of marble...
..to suggest power...
So you wouldn't have to request...
..to miniaturize a character...
Not so loud! You want to bring all the officials down on us?
Suppose they ask who you are?
You lived here and had a drawing studio, here, on Rush Street.
It was just big enough for your bed and a large drawing board.
Your teacher said that you did thousands of sketches here,
but threw most of them away.
But you studied drawing here, didn't you,
The Art Institute of Chicago,
in your early teens?
Do you remember, as a boy, sitting on the tail of its famous lions?
And, inside, what did you see?
Europe?
Myths?
Bodies?
Selfhood?
Pointers to your future?
Translucent ceilings lit from above?
A technique you'd use in The Trial...
A piece of work, a little bit to the right.
Who are you? My name is Bluck.
Are you employed here? Oh no, I'm one of them... ..and Citizen Kane.
You talk about the people as though you own them.
Years later, if you knew someone who was going to the Art Institute,
you told them to go and see these miniature rooms.
Did their look, their wideness, influence any of the visuals
in your films?
You're supposed to train her voice, Senor Matiste. But, Mr Kane...
Nothing more.
If you could be here now your eyes would be darting, Orson.
Chicago's got new ways of seeing.
So, your drawing and painting life had begun.
It continued for 60 years.
You drew everywhere you went, so there are at least a thousand
of your artworks.
Where are they now?
Many are in Michigan, in Ann Arbor, which was named
after its trees.
Here, in the University of Michigan's archive,
they have your relics.
Your beloved nose putty.
A coat you wore as Rochester in Jane Eyre.
Letters from you and to you.
This one's from Vivien Leigh.
And then, there are your drawings themselves.
Another place where I found your artworks was here.
Can you guess where I am?
And who lives here?
Brace yourself, Orson.
It's Beatrice.
Your third daughter.
She's in her 60s now but is still a rocker chick,
and sometimes drives with no hands.
So, what am I doing first? Getting these? So, those.
All of those should be his paintings, if I remember right.
That is gorgeous, that, isn't it? What, this...?
Oh, isn't that fabulous? That was a Christmas card.
That was a Christmas card.
That's sort of what I saw this morning when I got up.
That's what... I call it Broadway Blues. Mm-hm, got it.
And that's, you know, about a producer saying,
"So sorry, Mr Welles, we haven't got around to reading it yet."
You know, it's just like the usual.
And he's saying, "How about my play?" Is that...? Yes, exactly.
That's him, that's him.
You see? "And where did the money go to?"
You see? It's just...it's the life of my father, almost.
Some...and he put here, some Broadway Blues.
This is in Munich.
This is when he was travelling with his father around the world.
This was before he got to Ireland, wasn't it? Oh, yes.
This was probably when he was about, I think, 12.
And that's in Munich, and then here he is...
I don't know... "Dearest family."
This... So, he'd been to Shanghai at this point, hadn't she? Yes.
Yes. So, hence this particular one.
And then these look like German... Mm-hm. ..caricatures.
He's on his way to Germany, obviously.
A drawing of your painting, Orson,
and look how many kisses you put on this letter.
And I just went, "Wow, look at this picture!"
Then I remembered that this was the day...
..the painting he drew when they threw him out of Touch Of Evil.
When they said, "You can't come back, you can't touch your movie."
Which is this one? Yeah.
And if you can see the anger in it, I mean, you can just...
Can't you?
Wow.
You took a line for a walk.
Portraits, sketches and letters, costume designs, stage layouts,
backdrop plans, Christmas cards,
pictures of your loves, and travels.
You drew compulsively.
A lifetime of lines.
Were you in the zone when you drew, Orson, like sports people
are in the zone?
Do your sketches show us your unconscious?
Can we glimpse in them the story of your life,
its politics, love and power?
Ordinary people, Orson, the 20th century was theirs.
Many got to vote for the first time.
Old elites lost power.
Was the extraordinary Welles ever ordinary?
Did you know many working class people?
My own allegiance is stronger
to the idea of citizenship
and my own loyalty is greater to the idea of myself as a member
of the human family, than it is to a...as a member of any profession.
I don't take art as seriously as politics.
The Hotel Marais in Paris, 1960, a TV interview.
How solid you are in the frame.
And then your laugh and that trademark cigar.
But where did your belief in citizenship start?
With your mother, Beatrice.
She co-founded the Women's Alliance to help Chicago's poor.
Her activism was inspired by this Unitarian Church,
which was open to all races and classes.
The Women's Alliance hosted speeches on the persecution
of Jews in Russia.
Your mother was the first woman in your hometown of Kenosha ever
to be elected to public office.
She had a community tree planted.
I think it's this one.
To raise money so that every Kenosha child between two and 14
would receive a Christmas gift.
One of the reasons you painted and drew Christmas trees so often, Orson?
In impasto...
..snow white paint on black card...
..a black line helix daubed with green and red...
..a Gothic black ink tree in the sunshine...
..an eight second felt-tip pine...
..a tree encased...
..magenta and sage...
..a pine branch and ink in brush wash.
The helix in white, now, reduced to a hieroglyph.
All distant reminders of your mother, perhaps?
What a woman she was.
This film should be about her.
She laid the foundation of your political beliefs
but she died when you were just nine.
And then the Wall Street crash came.
The Depression brought new realism in American art
but something more personal happened to you, Orson,
that further shaped your politics.
FOGHORN BLARES
You took a boat, the SS Baltic, to Ireland.
Explicitly to draw and paint.
We can feel your 16-year-old eyes darting about on the Baltic, Orson.
There are four lookers alone in this small section
of one of your drawings.
They're befuddled, suspicious, or glowing.
What you saw on the boat was people.
Real people, like you'd seldom seen before.
What about this woman's twisty jawline and pursed lips?
And these two profiles?
Did they know you were drawing them?
Did this guy?
Your background was privileged but on the Baltic you met migrants
and really looked at them.
You later became fascinated by ageing, sagging faces.
Aged just 23 in the play Heartbreak House,
you were like the man you drew
on the Baltic. Were you in a hurry to get old, Orson?
Did youth bore you?
Or maybe, in the months in Ireland, your youth ended?
And then you set foot on Ireland.
You wrote, "Our very landing was dramatic.
"Men and women got on their knees, weeping for joy.
"It's almost beyond belief that two day's journeying
"from the world's greatest metropolis brings one to a land
"where an intelligent and aristocratic people lives
"in archaic simplicity."
Intelligent, aristocratic, archaic...
The words you used about the Irish were rich indeed.
You wrote, "In 16 short years of living, nothing comparable
"with Galway on the west of Ireland has loomed so unexpectedly,
"or breathtakingly, on my horizon."
You bought a donkey, Sioheog, and cart and roughed it.
You wrote, "I curled up under the cart and fell asleep.
"There were nights, too, spent in cottages,
"wakes, weddings and matchmakings.
"My week with a band of Gypsies, my mountain climbs,
"my night in the quagmire."
You really encountered the old world.
You spoke of these people who produced and flourished
in Tutankhamun's time.
You painted hundreds of landscapes here
but destroyed them.
It was the people and faces that you preferred.
You went to the Aran Islands and came across a visual world
as exciting as Chicago.
PENCIL SCRATCHES
More profiles, pencil and then ink wash.
Same for Mr Costello, a Galway shopkeeper.
"This man has sold himself to the black one," your note says,
and so you have devils winking around the edge of the page.
And ski slope noses, your most geometric Irish sketches.
It's like you were using a protractor.
And then you were for Dublin...
..where you famously blagged your way into the Gate Theatre.
You claim to be famous and then, in Ireland, became so.
You drew make-up sketches for the performance
at the Gate that made headlines.
Karl Alexander.
But again, your eyes darted to new types of faces.
In the three on the right, your hand was getting freer.
Looking at Irish people was training you to look, to draw.
Talk about taking a line for a walk!
So, to your mother's politics and Ireland's,
now let's add a third encounter with working people.
Two years after Ireland, you went here, Morocco.
Another new visual world for you.
A faster place, was it?
No pose in your Irish drawings is as confidently done
as this guy's on the left, his left elbow and his raised knee.
Less than a dozen pencil lines give us the shape of his body
under his djellaba.
And this is better still, the diagonal of the long pipe
of the big guy on the left sets the line for the shadows
on his face, djellaba and legs and the wall on the left.
You were seeing real people better than ever, Orson...
..and these three women are haunting.
From left to right...a dark face, what looks like glasses,
and then that beautiful single eye.
And a drawing like this is echoed, 22 years later, in a moment
like this in your film, Mr Arkadin.
You walk towards us,
and then one of your frames within frames.
Also in the summer of 1933, you went here, Spain,
to the Gypsy Quarter of Seville.
Working people again.
Traditional culture again.
The non-Anglo world, the non-Protestant world.
Catholics and Arabs were more expressive than Protestants,
more visual.
In the beginning was not the word.
Your life experience was broadening.
And also in 1933, of course, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
Italy was a police state by then.
Within a year, you were in New York doing radio, a pawn medium,
intimate and personal.
Dictators and democrats were devoted to it.
It let you get into the minds of the people.
It let you whisper to them or boom that big voice of yours.
You wanted to be the listener's griot, their consigliere,
their consciousness-raiser...
..and so you acted as the announcer in a radio play
by Archibald MacLeish.
It's set in a central square in a city.
A conqueror, like Hitler, is coming.
He's getting closer, and your clipped, English accented voice
as the announcer describing what he sees.
He's coming.
He's clear of the shadow.
The sun takes him.
They cover their faces with fingers, they cower before and they fall, they sprawl on the stone.
He's alone where he's walking. He marches with rattle of metal.
He tramples his shadow.
He mounts by the pyramid,
stamps on the stairway,
turns.
His arm rises, his visor is opening...
..there's no-one.
There's no-one at all.
No-one.
The helmet is hollow.
The metal is empty. The armour is empty.
I tell you, there's no-one at all there.
The people invent their oppressors, they wish to believe in them.
They wish to be free of their freedom.
Look, it's his arm.
It is rising, his arm's rising.
They're watching his arm as it rises.
They stir, they cry, they cry out, they are shouting.
CHEERING
They're shouting with happiness.
Listen! They're shouting like troops in a victory.
Listen!
The city of masterless men has found a master.
You'd say it was they were the conquerors,
they that had conquered.
CHEERING AND SHOUTING
The city is fallen.
Fascism as a beast.
In Ireland, you drew mostly faces.
Quite a few of your later paintings and drawings are faceless,
like the conqueror was faceless, Orson.
And in films, you usually tried to hide your face under whiskers,
a false nose or thick make-up.
And look, Orson, at how your wife Paola,
Beatrice's mother, painted you.
We'll come to your love life later.
Bet you can't wait for that.
If your mum seeded your political life, Orson,
then your trips abroad peopled it.
The rise of fascism made it ramrod and so you came here,
to Harlem in New York.
The year was 1936.
Your progressive politics were taking on a new dimension.
The depression had led the US Government to launch,
the previous year,
a nationwide theatre project to give jobs to unemployed theatre
and entertainment workers.
The Harlem renaissance had been a big story in the 1920s
but, a decade later, 80% of Harlemites had no work...
..and you and your team decided to mount an African-American theatre
production of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
You were fascinated by Macbeth.
You built a plasticine model of the stage.
The stylised jungle backcloth was painted.
The production was conceived visually as a series of pictures
in chromatic ascension.
The setting would be Haiti.
The witches would be voodoo.
10,000 people showed up at the opening.
Searchlights. Roads were blocked.
The excitement of something new, a new way of seeing and being seen.
Black intellectuals in ermine and jewels.
Inside, what were they about to see?
Their own people classicised.
At the centre of culture...
..and acclaim.
APPLAUSE
Want to see the Lafayette now, Orson,
80 summers after your triumph?
Are you sure?
OK.
Look.
It's no more.
It's apartments instead.
100,000 people saw your Voodoo Macbeth.
The company and the crew of 110 African-Americans
went on tour with it around the country.
The wind of change blew through the 1930s.
Your 1930s.
In 1937, you made your anti-fascism more explicit.
You ripped into another Shakespeare play,
the one that stimulated your visual imagination most,
and your political imagination, too.
Julius Caesar.
As a teenager, you drew Mark Antony's speech
to the people like this...
..he casts a vast shadow.
Already, you were thinking of Julius Caesar in terms of lighting.
And look what I found in the box, Orson,
drawings from about 1950.
You were planning a film of Julius Caesar.
You imagine a camera above a light.
A pink and black sky, maybe the stormy night in Rome
after the plot to kill Caesar is hatched,
and, look, you plan to shoot it in Rome's EUR...
..the chilly monumental district built by Mussolini's fascists.
You saw Caesar as an ancient Mussolini, didn't you?
And the ancient crowd didn't resist, like they didn't resist
the conqueror in MacLeish's play.
You wanted to use a hanging miniature in front of the camera,
an old Hollywood technique.
You thought of the capital as a kind of beehive.
But back in 1937, your visual ideas were even bolder.
You'd seen images of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies.
The vertical torchlights made columns like a Roman temple,
so, you had your stage production look the same.
And guess what, Orson?
They recreated your production
in the film, Me And Orson Welles.
Square-on shot, that graphic white lighting,
the camera glides in as the audience gets engrossed.
Caesar! Caesar!
FANFARE OF TRUMPETS
Peace.
Bid every noise be still.
And all this before Hitler invaded Poland.
We've come a long way from your mother's Unitarian good deeds.
But the story of your social ideas isn't over yet,
far from it.
You were only 22 when you did Caesar on the stage.
After radio and theatre, you found a new medium of the people.
Movies.
Your first feature, of course, was Citizen Kane,
it changed cinema and is known for its expressionism
and critique of vainglory.
But it's most touching moment is related to your mother's ideas,
or your time in Ireland.
Why don't you try laughing at me, again?
Charles Foster Kane is in the rented room of a working-class woman,
Susan Alexander, who offered him a place to clean up
after he got covered in mud by a passing car.
I'm wiggling both my ears at the same time, see?
And at the top right here, photos of a woman who looks a bit
like your mother.
It took me two solid years and the best boys' school
in the world to learn that trick.
Fellow who taught it to me is now the President of Venezuela.
THEY LAUGH TOGETHER
That's it!
They play a kids' shadow game.
He's famous but she doesn't know it.
She's probably one of the most ordinary people he's met
in his life.
It's supposed to be a rooster.
The camera drifts in. The look of love, perhaps?
Some of the softest lighting in the film.
Your small tribute to a powerless but sincere woman.
I'm awful ignorant, but I guess you caught on to that.
You know, I bet it turns out I've heard your name a million times.
And It's All True, the film that you shot in Brazil in the early
1940s but didn't complete...there's a similar sincerity.
It's the sameness I'm talking about, now.
Sameness in spite of difference,
different sounds for the words,
but the same idea. Different colours, but the same spirit.
Different churches, but the same faith.
Different liquor, but the same hangover.
Different joke, but the same laughter.
Different nation, the same humanity.
Thank God for the differences, because it's out of those
differences that culture grows and grows big,
in all directions at once.
It's like a Soviet film by Eisenstein.
Brilliant close-ups of un-Hollywood-y faces
and this soundtrack is one of your radio broadcasts,
about South and Central America.
And look, Orson!
Low angle, a girl crying,
and is that your hand reaching up to console her?
In 1947, Joseph McCarthy was elected senator in your home state,
Wisconsin.
You made political speeches now.
One said, "In this shrinking world, adult education must first enlist
"in the war against provincialism.
"Educators are sworn to the tremendous task of telling
"people about each other."
You received hate mail.
Hundreds of letters.
One asked if you would "allow your daughters
"to be touched by negroes?"
Another said, "If you and the other Jews of your class and the negroes
"want us to love you, why not better yourself?"
J Edgar Hoover had your named added to the security register.
Were you scared, Orson?
If so, you didn't show it.
Especially in the case of the African-American soldier,
Isaac Woodard.
Here's your drawing of him.
In your BBC TV show, Orson Welles' Sketchbook,
you told his story square-on, straight to camera,
underplaying your rage.
He was on a bus, on the way felt ill, and he asked the bus driver
to let him off. The bus driver refused, abusively.
There was an argument,
at the end of which a policeman was called in, who dragged the boy
out of the bus, took him behind a building and beat him viciously.
And when he was unconscious, poured gin over him,
put him in jail, charged him with drunkenness and assault.
When the boy regained consciousness, he discovered that he was blind.
The policeman had literally beaten out his eyes.
A terrible crime in itself, but the fact that Woodard ended
up blind seemed to dig deep into you, such a visual person.
And so, on radio, you tried to hunt
down the cop who blinded him.
The policeman's name wasn't known, so you called him Officer X.
You said that he brought the justice of Dachau and Auschwitz to America.
You went on,
"Officer X, I'm talking to you.
"Where stands the sun of common fellowship?
"When will it rise in your dark country?
"I must know, Officer X, because I must know where the rest
"of us are going in our American experiment."
You continued, Orson.
"We will blast out your name, Officer X. I will find means
"to remove from you all refuge, Officer X.
"You can't get rid of me.
"God judge me if this isn't the most pressing business I have.
"The blind soldier fought for me during the war.
"I have eyes, he hasn't.
"I have a voice on radio."
Orson, the research carried out by you and your associates did help
find the officer.
He was Chief of Police Lynwood Lanier Shull.
He was tried, found not guilty, and returned to his job.
Which brings us to here, Orson, and another story about the law.
Do you recognise this place?
One of your favourite cities.
The City of Light.
He drew and painted it.
You've seen the Eiffel Tower a hundred times, of course.
But wait till you see this.
From the year 2000, it has...
..sparkled.
We're here, Orson, to end the story of your political evolution.
You made a film, mostly here.
The Trial, from the novel by Kafka.
In the box I found this.
I think it's one of your early drawings for the film.
Josef K, who is accused of a non-specified crime,
is in the middle, casting a shadow.
On either side are the two agents who arrest him on his 30th birthday.
In the novel, K's helped by a painter, hence the paintings
on the wall, is that right?
And above, a light exactly like the one you sketched
for your abandoned film on Julius Caesar.
You have such lights in The Trial.
They're totalitarian for you.
Who are they?
I can't expect you to know where the interrogation
commission is sitting.
That's right, I don't.
But then, in Paris, you decided to film in the abandoned
Gare d'Orsay.
Low angle.
Plunging perspective.
And your drawing comes to life.
And one of your crane shots - a rise, like an aeroplane taking off.
The drawing has that facelessness again.
The Trial is about facelessness.
The law has no name.
Officer X.
Very well, then.
Just go ahead with your work, my boy.
The Trial was your portrait of the 20th century.
Its desk-bound armies of salary men.
He's ill! You can't talk business to him now!
It was a Rene Magritte painting in which the law,
played by you, is faceless at times.
We can discuss anything.
Mummified and steaming like a racehorse.
And you famously changed the ending of the novel.
Kafka had Josef K lead the henchmen to the place of his execution.
He acquiesces.
You.
Anthony Perkins whispers, at first...
You.
..and then yells the yell of the century.
Yo-o-ou!
Yo-o-ou! Yo-o-ou!
Yo-o-ou! Yo-o-ou! Yo-o-ou!
You dummies! You'll have to do it!
You'll have to kill me!
Come on. Come on!
A salary man and the Final Solution.
K LAUGHS MANIACALLY
K was a pawn in the game of the century.
In this unedited hand-held shot, which captures the atmosphere
of a Q&A after a screening of The Trial, you explain your change.
One of the changes you made in the story
was at the very end when Josef K is killed.
He's killed in a very alarmingly different way than in the book,
and I was really curious as to why you changed both the way
he was killed and the way he was acting when he died.
Because the book was written before the Holocaust.
And I couldn't bear the defeat of K in the book, after the Holocaust.
I'm not Jewish, but we are all Jewish since the Holocaust.
And I couldn't bear for him to submit to death as he does in Kafka.
Masochistically submit to death.
It...it, er...it stank of the old Prague ghetto to me.
Your politics had come a long way from Kenosha and the community tree
of your mother.
You'd travelled the world, fallen for Irish islanders
and Moroccan merchants, and been outraged by racism.
You'd felt at home in Harlem, become an idealist, and used three
art forms - radio, theatre and film, to dramatise and visualise
your ideas.
But the Europe you so admired disgraced itself in the 1930s
and '40s, and it's hard not to see that disgrace in some
of your drawings.
PENCIL SCRATCHES
Even in a scribble on a menu in Rio de Janeiro.
What political smoke signals you sent. What a trail you left.
We've tried to follow that trail, Orson, to see where it leads.
Eight years after you died, there was a movie called
Groundhog Day in which the same elements were relived over and over.
It's sometimes good to rewind the clock, isn't it?
It's good to look at a life again, through another lens.
What's the story of your love life, Orson?
You'd probably prefer me to talk about politics than love
but you're not here to stop me.
You travelled the world and fell in love everywhere.
What, and who, and how did you love?
I think there are four answers.
You loved places, you loved visually,
you believed in the chivalry of love, like it was a waltz,
and you felt the guilt and end of love.
Let's start with your love of places and this place,
Arizona.
When you lived here, you didn't go for walks but you seem
to have loved the sunshine.
Crayon on watercolour paper.
The opposite of that totalitarian spotlight.
Chalk and paint and felt-tip pen to conjure a storm
over the red rocks.
The first place you loved was Grand Detour, Illinois.
Your father, Dick, who took you travelling,
owned this hotel there.
Dick built a ballroom on the first floor and you recalled sneaking
up there at night, in the moonlight, and dancing.
And you had a hut across from it, that was your art studio
when you were a boy.
Is that it in the bottom left of this picture, Orson?
As you know, the hotel burnt down.
Look what's there now.
You called Grand Detour "one of those lost worlds,
"one of those Edens that you get thrown out of."
Look, Orson, it's still a kind of Eden.
Your first love.
GEESE CALL
For the rest of your life, you talked about places
of preindustrial innocence.
"Merry Englands," you often called them.
Timeless places of joy, unspoilt nature and love.
I hate do this to you, Orson, but here's another Eden,
a snowy Eden, in Citizen Kane.
A building like the Sheffield hotel.
Come on, boys!
The union's forever! Be careful, Charles.
Mrs Kane? Pull your muffler round your neck, Charles.
Mrs Kane, I think we shall have to tell him now.
Yes.
I'll sign those papers now, Mr Thatcher.
You people seem to forget that I'm the boy's father.
Parents arguing, as yours did in the Sheffield.
Ain't nothing wrong with Colorado.
I don't see why we can't raise our own son, just because we come
in to some money.
Glad he met with some mischance.
Your film, Chimes At Midnight, was part set in such an Eden,
The Boar's Head Tavern.
You loved to have actors swirl, women and laughter.
It was a labyrinth, this pleasure dome.
This playpen.
And you designed and oversaw the painting of it yourself.
The place from your unconscious in which you wake up as Falstaff.
Here's where you shot some of the Boar's Head Tavern scenes, in Spain,
another one of your beloved places.
This guy was in the film and still lives here.
What other places did you love?
319 West 14th Street, Manhattan, where you lived
with your first wife, Virginia.
It's Gothic in your drawing but, guess what, Orson?
It's still here.
You said that it had "space, charm, electric ice box,
"garden, and all for $55 a month.
"Virginia's having the time of her life here.
"A real home, and all the rest of it."
With Virginia, you had your first daughter, Chris.
The second aspect of your love life is how visual it was.
When you were 17, you saw this film.
Dolores del Rio swims naked.
You fell in love with her visually, and later became her lover
in real life.
The man in this scene is Joel McCrea, but the imagery
sums up your love life.
Staring, obsessive, love at first glance.
Moonlit and flickering to capture the look of love,
what looking feels like.
You and Dolores.
Beatrice says that she was the true love of your life.
In The Lady From Shanghai, the camera glided towards another
of your loves, Rita Hayworth.
It was your eyes, Orson.
You saw her on the cover of Life magazine and immediately pledged
to marry her. Good evening.
"Dearest little loved one," you wrote.
"I love you more tonight than ever.
"Really, really.
"Even more!"
And how's this for the look of love?
You move in again.
The point of view of a kiss...
# ..don't...
..framed along one of your famed diagonals.
# ..away...
Then you seem summoned from below,
drawn by her tractor beam.
# ..comes a change of...
Your make-up artist wanted to put beads of sweat on her brow,
but you said, "Horses sweat! Rita glows."
# ..rain will start. #
She kept your love letters and notes in her make-up box for years.
With Rita, of course, you had your second daughter, Rebecca.
You cast your third wife, Paola, as your daughter
in Mr Arkadin, Orson, a film about a powerful man with a mysterious past.
My daughter! I want to speak to my daughter!
Yes, father. Have you...
And you gave Paola these concerned close-ups,
as she hears that her father was less than he seemed.
Tell him it's too late, too late.
It's too late.
His relationship with your mother, did he woo her?
Oh, he wooed her. Yes, I mean how they met!
They were in Fregenae and she was walking on the beach
and he was with Visconti and he saw her and he said,
"I've got to meet her." So she was a young starlet and the next day
she got a phone call and it was Visconti's assistant.
Answered - you know, "Mr Visconti would like for you to do a trial,"
and she was so excited,
and, of course, she went rushing over there
and instead she met Orson Welles.
In 1961, while filming The Trial, you met Oja Kodar.
She became your long-term lover and companion.
Look how you introduced her in F For Fake.
Glimpsed, glanced, ogled, long lens.
The centre of a network of men's looks.
A head-turner.
An eye-opener.
No scene in your films is more about looking,
it splinters in seductions.
The look of love as a mosaic.
So, you loved places, Orson, and you loved visually.
The third aspect of your love life is its attraction to chivalry.
The millennium-old idea of the chivalrous knight in love
is so archaic now, so like a faded pencil line.
Lancelot and Guinevere, Arthurian legend, the Middle Ages,
but more than most artists of the 20th century,
you filled-in the line drawings.
You believed in these Samurai, these courtiers, who behaved
with honour, who played by the rules of love and courtship,
from the era of the Magna Carta, the myths held true for centuries.
One of the best interviews you gave, to Bernard Levin, takes this further.
You're leaning forward again,
close-up and in profile at first.
And I'm rather fond of chivalry and honour,
and I...I...
..to use a hackneyed, drug store psychiatry word,
I identify with Quixote to the extent that I am interested
in outmoded virtues.
The virtues of chivalry?
Yes, honour, personal honour and courage, and things like that.
Well, you're clearly a romantic, whatever else you are.
Very much so. Well, I suppose so. That is one way of putting it.
But is... Aren't you a romantic in a very unromantic time?
Yes.
Do you feel out of your time?
Oh, yes.
I think every self-respecting artist ought to.
Which brings us, Orson, to the most out-of-time knight in your art.
An absurd but glorious man who rails against everything and doesn't seem
to realise that chivalry is long dead.
He was one of your obsessions, this man.
He made what you called a home movie about Don Quixote and his sidekick
squire, Sancho Panza.
And others will cheer you from the windows.
You filmed the Don against the sky, his head in the clouds.
The monster has kidnapped the Princess,
but I shall free her, Sancho.
Wait, sir, don't let the devil deceive you.
And here's a moment which tells us something about the Don and love.
He thinks the woman...look, it's Paola...has been kidnapped
by the Vespa.
Who is this lunatic?
Don Quixote de la Mancha. Knight errant...
Ever the gallant knight, he wants to rescue her.
This isn't your editing, of course, you never finished the film.
But does the moment capture some of the energy you wanted?
The absurdity?
But also the Don's desire to do the right thing?
How can you treat your liberator like that?!
What a nut!
Now, promise you'll go to El Toboso and inform my Dulcinea...
Imbecile! ..or I'll run you through!
And in your painting, the Don's head is against the sun.
Like Icarus, such a delicate man in your painting.
He'll be burnt.
The Don doesn't look at Sancho Panza.
And, in the book and film, they bicker.
But you have them joined at the hip.
They're on the road of life together.
Opposites but indivisible.
Yin and yang.
Your Sancho Panza is thick smears at the Don's elbow...
..a blur to him, in some ways...
..in love, in other ways.
You relished this.
The thickness of their story.
Their themes, their history.
The novel's author, Cervantes, set out to mock chivalry,
but ended up celebrating it.
Maybe Laurel and Hardy were the knights of your time?
And your one painting of a bullfighter is knight-like.
He's a slayer in a swirl of light, like your St George with his dragon
against the sun, like Don Quixote.
His head lowered as if in prayer at his own violence.
The figure in your art that you loved most was another knight,
but a penniless one who lived in The Boar's Head.
One of your Edens.
On The Dean Martin Show, you painted him in a way,
but the canvas was your own face.
He was what you might call a swinger.
MUSIC: Greensleeves
Only 15th century.
They didn't call them swingers, but they swung.
AUDIENCE TITTER
And nobody more so than Sir John.
Your intensity.
You forget to speak, as if you're lost in the transformation.
He was a funny man, he was a fat man.
But he was a great man.
Then, Shakespearian language.
He was a wit,
and, as he said himself, he was not only witty in himself,
but the cause that wit was in other men.
This huge hill of fat, this ton of man.
This reverend vice.
This grey iniquity.
Then Eden again?
He was a spokesman, you might say, for merry England,
the old merry England of May mornings and midsummer eves.
When even villainy was innocent.
And, of course, you filmed Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight.
Your drawings for the Battle of Shrewsbury sequence are a gallery
of horsemen, of chevalier...
..in pen...
..coloured brush and pen.
And this, the swiftest and the best, in brush only.
In pose and concision, it's as good as this.
This bed scene in Chimes At Midnight - with you,
Doll Tearsheet, Prince Hal and his friend, Ned Poins - is remarkable.
You get up and move left, and then a swirl of movement,
like a '60s love-in.
I owe her money and whether she be damned for that, I don't know.
But, Hal, am I not fallen away?
Like a Tintoretto painting.
Like you, he liked to have people almost roll in the foreground.
He looked up at the world.
Everybody in bed, the camaraderie of love.
The bed scene is another Eden.
There's Beatrice.
The water itself was a good water, but for the party who owned it...
But the loving world of Chimes At Midnight will come to an end.
Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me, the brain of this...
Which brings us to the last aspect of your love life.
Do you believe in love at all, Mrs Bannister?
Give me the wheel.
The Lady From Shanghai, again.
You and Rita look purposefully ahead but she steers.
I was taught to think about love in Chinese.
The way a Frenchman thinks about laughter in French?
The Chinese say it is difficult for love to last long,
therefore, one who loves passionately is cured of love
in the end.
Well, that's a hard way of thinking.
But it seems borne out by your love life, Orson.
It was full of guilt and sadness.
Your relationship with Hayworth quickly waned.
You draw yourself crying and, in one of your most surprising images,
also for Hayworth, you have a devil
visit you in her absence.
You had affairs. Is the devil your guilt?
Or your guilt and sadness combined?
You called this pencil and watercolour sketch,
with its miserable sun, Another Self-Portrait Of Self-Pity.
And how about this?
You're far from Eden here. The smoke from the factories gathers
to show your mood.
And then there is this drawing of Paola.
Very pregnant and she had a horrible pregnancy,
she must have been a bitch, and...
Pregnant with you?
Yeah.
I Feel Lousy is one of your most
ambiguous drawings, Orson.
Are you just recording Paola's feeling bad or empathising with it?
Or mirroring it?
Is it you that feels bad?
You showed the death of love, the perversion of love,
most visually, Orson, in Morocco.
And Venice.
You know what I'm going to say, don't you?
Othello.
Strumpet!
Weep'st thou for him to my face?
Oh, banish me, my lord, but kill me not!
Down, strumpet!
Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight!
Othello kills Desdemona, facelessness now is murder.
And when she's dead...
..this.
This circle in the ceiling was inspired by this Mantegne painting
in Mantua, wasn't it?
You had a ceiling built to echo it visually
and, before James Bond films, you liked a circular ceiling.
Your camera's low enough
to show it well, to halo him,
to anti-halo him.
Sophie, what was her last name again?
She married years ago.
Well, what's her married name?
Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.
Love as hell, not Eden.
You had the camera on a scaffold, here.
Not wisely, but too well.
Is that how you loved?
Not wisely, but too well?
The death of love, the back of love, they're not much fun to talk about,
are they, Orson?
I wonder, am I losing you here?
We're getting on to kingship in a moment, but before we do,
one more chord about passion dying.
It's in Chimes At Midnight again and you know what's coming, don't you?
The most resonant line in your art.
Here it is, in your screenplay in Michigan.
Are you ready to be heartbroken?
"I know thee not, old man.
"The prince, the boy, says to the man
"that the dream is over."
Their friendship is over.
Vertical spears like the Nuremberg searchlights,
then you break through.
God save thee, my sweet boy!
And the back of the new king, your old drinking and cavorting pal.
My king.
My Jove.
I speak to thee, my heart.
I know thee not, old man, fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.
I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,
so surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane,
but, being awak'd, I do despise my dream.
Despise.
Wouldn't "reject" have been enough?
Shakespeare's pen was a dagger here.
Not only an end of love but a rewrite of its history.
Till then, I banish thee on pain of death,
as I have done the rest of my misleaders, not to come near
our person by ten mile.
And Falstaff falls to his knees, like John Houseman did,
as he realises who has the power and who can control the love.
Hal's exclusion order.
You wanted to be Falstaff, Orson, but let's face it,
you were Hal.
The prince, the knight, loving a lot but, in your exhilaration,
moving on to other loves.
Other worlds.
So, we move on to our next world.
All the decent people in your life and work, Orson,
your mother, your head teacher, Michael O'Hara in The Lady From Shanghai,
Joseph Cotton's character Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane,
Don Quixote, Charlton Heston's character in Touch Of Evil,
Sir John Falstaff.
These knights and pawns are often exemplary and right.
But there's another type of person who excited you more.
Dive deeper into your unconscious and you find him there.
This creature from the black lagoon. He is, of course, the king.
You mocked the king in Chimes At Midnight.
He can't even get up onto his throne.
He has a pot for a crown and speaks like John Gielgud.
Harry.
I do not only marvel where thou spendst thy time,
but also how thou art accomplished.
But you were attracted to the grandeur of kingship.
Admit it, Orson, your tastes were regal.
Is it true that the director Richard Fleischer once accused
you of treating a lowly photographer as if you were royalty?
"I am royalty!" you barked back.
You used to say that you're a king actor.
You were fascinated by a Latvian gun-runner and friend
of Nazis Himmler and Goering.
His name was Michael Oliend.
You visited him in this mansion, designed by Raphael.
You should have played Napoleon, Orson, or Henry VIII.
Actor Geraldine Fitzgerald said that you were like a lighthouse.
"When you were caught in his beam, he was utterly dazzling.
"When the beam moves on, you're plunged into darkness."
Kingship in your work is visual about lawmaking.
Suffocating, isolating and about ambition.
Totalitarianism, corruption and madness.
Let's take visual first, Orson.
Most aspects of your visual style were extravagant.
As we saw in the pawn section, you had moments of realism
in your work, but you mostly rejected them.
This was more your style.
Macbeth - a distant castle, misty middle ground.
It's like Charles Foster Kane's isolated castle.
Castles fired your imagination.
Especially if they were crumbling.
This etching of yours looks like there's been a fire.
You had an eye on Piranesi's
imaginary prison sketches of the 1700s.
The lens you liked to use most, the 18.5, was a king lens,
you could say.
It made the world bulge.
Whole is the marble, founded as the rock.
You slung it low, of course, to make foreground people look massive.
Quiet, confined.
Bound into saucy doubts and fears.
To make patterns between near and far.
It was expressionist, this lens.
It was good at abstraction.
Beyond visual things, your king men are lawmakers and lawbreakers.
That lens, again.
A seated king, an insolent press baron.
Yes, tell Wheeler, you provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war.
That's fine, Mr Kane.
Yes! I rather like it myself.
And here in your late film, The Immortal Story, you're a king,
of sorts, in a carriage.
The running man is a sailor you've just picked up.
You'll pay him to have sex with a woman.
You're a pimp king.
Making the rules, setting down the law.
Treating others like pawns.
And here's your Hank Quinlan in Touch Of Evil.
Belly first, then looming above the camera.
Then a Wellesian body twist.
He's a king in his own mind,
a detective who thinks the law's for little people,
for pawns, not for him.
He's above the law and bends it to his will.
Beyond their visual and legal lives,
your kings are often suffocated or imprisoned.
They're trapped inside their castles.
They can't escape their own power,
their own thoughts...
..their echo chambers.
Beatrice tells us this was painted in frustration
at the Universal film studio stopping you completing
Touch Of Evil.
It's an isolation picture, too, isn't it?
A Piranesi in the desert.
You were the king forced to abdicate.
Intense visuals, a man above the law, isolation.
You know where this is leading, I'm sure.
To Scotland, and your film, Macbeth.
You'd first imagined Macbeth in your teens,
in this drawing in your Everybody's Shakespeare book.
And we've seen your Voodoo Macbeth of 1936.
Just nine years later - what a long nine years they must have seemed,
two marriages, war, radio stardom,
Hollywood fame, four films - you were filming it on the cheap
for a B-movie studio.
You imagined the film's landscape with angular trees against the sky.
The film would be shot quickly in a studio,
so, you came up with this main set.
Scotland can sometimes look like a production designer's
had a hand in it.
The characters were to be horned, like cattle, or rams.
It was your most graphic film.
The witches' pagan symbols,
that set that looked like something you'd see in a fish tank.
An underwater Macbeth, perhaps.
The contrasts were violent.
Slow-mo mist then dissolved to this close-up.
One of the most contrasty images in American film.
Then we're behind the head of Macbeth.
This king, whose ambition is detestable, this Hank Quinlan,
this Stalin, this Faust.
Say, sir.
As I did stand there watch upon the hill, I looked towards Birnam.
The real world seemed to enter the film as a nightmare.
Macbeth, so in the shadow of himself,
that he doesn't even realise that he's free.
He feels railroaded by the witches' prophecy,
he's a slave to his own lust for power.
You've dived so deep, now, that in you're in the land of the surreal.
The colonnade is like a de Chirico nightmare painting, Orson.
The least categoriseable image in Macbeth,
and in all your art, I think,
is this shot, Orson.
It looks like clouds seen from an aeroplane.
Or, an archipelago with a colossus standing in it.
Macbeth's one of the few films I wanted to draw as I watched.
The fourth aspect of your kingship
is its totalitarianism and corruption.
These themes are in Caesar, of course,
and in your Cesare Borgia in the film, Prince Of Foxes.
A map of all he conquers.
The king actor's big shoulders and flowing gown.
The ultimate goal...one Italy, one kingdom.
One king, Cesare Borgia.
You made Prince Of Foxes in the same year that you played
your most corrupt character -
Harry Lime, who profiteers from penicillin stolen from hospitals.
He famously talks of the Borgias, as you casually put on gloves
and the camera glides in.
Well, what the fella said.
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias,
they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed.
But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci,
and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland they had brotherly love.
They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?
The cuckoo clock.
So long, Holly.
A scene you wrote, of course. Cinema's most famous strike
of the authoritarian bell.
In the late 1930s, before Citizen Kane,
you were to make a film about an even more dangerous man...
..ivory trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's novella,
Heart Of Darkness.
Here's your sketch of the compound where he lives.
In 1938, you adapted Heart Of Darkness for radio.
You played Kurtz, of course,
and tried to capture his genius, his panic, his tyranny.
How are you tonight, Mr Kurtz?
Aware enough to be back at my station.
That place is mine.
They have no right to take me away.
That manager, that stupid scoundrel, he wants my ivory.
He's blocked me at every turn.
Don't excite yourself, Mr Kurtz.
You're sick, you know.
Sick?
Sick?!
Not so sick as you'd like to believe.
Heart of Darkness is set during one
of the worst human atrocities, Orson,
Belgium's colonisation of the Congo.
Kurtz was, for you, a fascist king.
That's end of the king line, in a way.
Except for one more thing...
..the madness of kingship.
In 1953, you played King Lear live on TV.
That low king angle.
That roaring king voice.
Here I stand, your slave.
A poor infirm, weak and despised old man.
He says, "Oh, let me not be mad.
"Not mad, sweet heaven."
But he's driven by the burdens of power and family.
The camera pulls out, and lightning, and that expressionism again.
THEY SHRIEK AND THUNDER ROARS
Did you intend this to be Lear, Orson?
It's like it's raining here,
or it's a lightning storm.
You did Christopher Marlowe's Faust on stage in 1937.
You had him say, "I refuse to be insane.
"I do not claim the sanctuary of the madhouse.
"Do not think I stumbled into the pit.
"Pray for the free man who dammed himself."
Did you damn yourself, Orson?
And, if so, for what?
Politics?
Love?
Power?
Glory?
Excitement?
Loneliness?
Decline?
Fury?
Dear Mark,
I pray you in your letters,
when you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
speak of me as I am.
Nothing extenuate.
So, the world kept turning after I died?
Who'd have guessed!
It sounds as if I'd have taken to the 21st century.
I wasn't tired of living.
I wasn't tired of art.
In your letter, Mark, you split my politics from my love,
but they're the same thing!
Or, at least, of the same root.
You missed how funny I found it all!
You do know that life is a circus, don't you?
Beatrice still seems to.
Was this not in your box?
ORSON LAUGHS
My ending of The Lady From Shanghai,
that crane shot as I walk into the empty funfair...
Everybody is somebody's fool.
The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old,
so I guess I'll concentrate on that.
Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her.
Maybe I'll die trying.
..that's more important than the ending of The Trial.
And, as you're so taken by my drawings, how about this one?
She's Lady Would-be from Jonson's Volpone.
A broad - bumbling and inept.
Those pursed lips...I adore her.
The toffs, with their drinker's noses and eyes closed.
Amidst all the power and politics of which you speak,
my line ran naturally to doodles like this.
Does he remind you of anyone?
And, several lifetimes ago, before Kane, I made a lark of a film
called Too Much Johnson.
There was a scene where a well-dressed young man
and police officers had their hats removed.
It was absurd, like a Mack Sennett comedy!
That's cluelessness again, like so much of life.
And since you mentioned Mr Arkadin,
recall, if you can, its climax.
I stalk through the film like a shadow,
but the world of my story is absurd.
Akim's character, Zouk, has lost his pants!
What will he think if he catches me out here,
dancing around in my under-drawers?
Does it remind you of anything?
Laurel and Hardy, perhaps?
My camera was usually lower, of course, but the humanity
in Stan and Ollie is the same.
The childishness, the circus, the commedia dell'arte, Pulcinella,
what you in the UK call Punch and Judy.
I did scores of pictures of St Nick.
There were conventional ones in red and white.
He'd come down the chimney, or be by the fire.
But I remember that, as I drew,
he started to look like he was on a stage,
taking a bow, perchance a curtain call.
Those with a keen eye might say I painted him more and more
so he merged with some of the things that I admire.
And he morphed!
His colours changed.
The red disappeared.
Or, rather, it shrunk to his nose, as you see.
Santa is becoming a drinker in my Christmas world.
A drunk.
Sir John Falstaff.
The more cards I did, the more rapid I became.
The colours leeched out.
They became night in this Christmas Carol of mine.
And the bottle grew.
And then even the nose was no longer red.
They took on the tone of a lot of my work.
Call it dark exuberance, if you like.
That's what the Lady From Shanghai was.
But, Macbeth...tenebrous and excessive.
I've often said that Kane has the same tension.
Kane himself is close to farce, close to parody, close to burlesque.
That roller-coaster you showed was like the great imperium,
the United States.
I was a satirist.
Didn't you see that?
The stick was straining.
What happens when it breaks?
Absurdity becomes the norm.
The sots and thralls of lust do in spare hours more thrive
than I that spend, sir.
Life upon my cause.
How is Ireland these days?
Yours, Orson.
Dear Orson, I just imagined that you wrote back to me.
I wish you had.
How do I finish a letter like this?
Should I mention that there's been another financial crash?
The wolves of Wall Street screwed up, like they did in 1929.
This is Kenosha, where you were born, now.
Parts of it look like a deserted Hollywood studio back lot.
Or images from the 1930s.
The Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash helped form you, didn't it, Orson?
Will our new depression make a new Orson Welles?
Beatrice had an unopened letter from you to your guardian,
Dada Bernstein.
This letter was written on the 14th of October in 1931,
when Dada was still living in Chicago.
And it is unopened.
Nothing in it!
SHE LAUGHS
This is too funny.
He forgot to put something...
This is insane.
We were hoping that there'd be some secret in that envelope, Orson.
Some new way of seeing you.
Isn't that wild?
But maybe what was in the box and what's in the University of Michigan archive
is a bit of a new way of seeing you.
Your art has made me look again at your life and work.
This scene in Mr Arkadin, for example.
What's with all these crazy Frankensteins?
Now, look, old boy, you don't understand.
All these people are supposed to represent the paintings!
Now, some of us have come as the visions and monsters.
Goya. Who?
You know Goya. Glad to meet you.
It's a Goya painting, with an added pinch of Josef von Sternberg.
In the same film,
this scene near the start is what?
Graphic, certainly.
It's a murder and chase moment.
But who's being shot, or why,
doesn't seem to be your main concern.
You're more taken by the steam of the train,
the shapes within the frame, the angles, the Cubism.
And in The Lady From Shanghai,
you painted these sets yourself, didn't you?
You walked through a lattice, shards, a constructivist's design...
..like this one by Aleksandra Ekster.
And a few scenes later, in your hall of mirrors,
we're in the land of Muybridge.
..playing it your way. You didn't know that.
Panel imagery.
Erotic.
In love with lenses.
And then The Lady From Shanghai is like a drawing.
Oh, he knew about her.
She planned to kill Bannister, she and Grisby.
Isn't that it?
Is that what's been on the tip of my tongue in this letter?
Many of your films are like charcoal drawings.
Their nets and grilles are hatchings.
Shadings.
In Mr Arkadin, you use the Segovia Aqueduct
like an architectural drawing.
I knew it! Well, what do I win? This!
As I'm thinking this,
I see this scene in The Lady From Shanghai.
Rita wants her cigarette lit.
Your shot sweeps left with it, mano a mano.
There's no story need to do this but there's a graphic need,
a drawing need.
..to God she'll never be too old to earn the salary...
And then the shot comes back again,
following the cigarette again.
Two simple moments, but they're like this drawing of yours.
Or, this drawing.
That's it.
That's my light bulb moment, Orson.
That's what's been on the tip of my tongue...
..your visual thinking.
You thought with lines and shapes.
Your films are sketchbooks.
Calligraphy.
That's why people who love Laurence Olivier's literary
and psychological Shakespeare films don't like yours.
Yours were rougher and more to do with space
and graphics and power.
Once I realise this, I discover that you'd sort of said it already.
You told one of your biographers that Macbeth
was a violent charcoal sketch of the play.
And the Nazi Party's film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, of all people,
wasn't far off when she said that,
"Welles draws marvellous pictures in the margins of Shakespeare."
F For Fake was a sketchbook on folded paper.
A Touch Of Evil's a fresco.
The Trial is like a linocut.
Macbeth, The Lady From Shanghai, Othello, and Mr Arkadin
scratch at their characters, like your quill and ink scratched
in the TV sketches.
Approximately, excitingly, but in a way that many found too sharp.
They make you seem mad for contact with the world.
Taking its fragments roughly and absorbing them into yourself
to make art that's jagged and fractured.
In 1953, you went here, Edinburgh in Scotland,
and made a speech about the future of the movies.
You said that a Hollywood film needs
an audience of 60 million people to break even.
But you dreamt of smaller, more distinctive films
who could speak to two million people.
Guess what, Orson?
From the future, I can tell you that your dream has sort of come true.
Film technology has changed massively since you died.
If many of your films were like sketches,
if you dreamt of a camera being more like a pencil,
your dream is coming true.
More than ever, you can draw with a camera now.
Studio cinema was like history painting.
Now, film is more like oil painting.
And, look at this...
..an oil painting of you?
No, it's an accident.
Our computer didn't copy some footage of you properly
and so it pixelated it.
And it looks like Manet or Rembrandt.
Way back in the 1940s, when you were making Citizen Kane,
you and cinematographer Gregg Toland dreamt of a time
when there would be no film and the camera would be an electronic eye.
That dream has come true, too.
On the morning of October 10th, 1985,
you died.
It was said that you were at your typewriter when it happened.
This typewriter.
But your life probably ended in your bathroom.
But, still, is this one of the last things in the world
those great eyes of yours saw, Orson?
If you were alive now, if you were still seeing,
you could be making so many films.
Your archetypes - pawns, knights, kings and jesters -
are as relevant as ever.
Your friend Kenneth Tynan said, when writing about you,
"The bee will always make honey."
What honey you made.
What honey you could have made.
BEES BUZZ
In an interview in 1962, you said, "Being alive means not killing
"the tensions one carries within oneself.
"On the contrary, a poet must seek out
"and cultivate his contradictions."
You buzzed with contradictions, Orson.
You loved pawns, knights, and kings.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
I am large.
I contain multitudes.
I, too, am not a bit tamed.
I, too, am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
We can still hear your sound, Orson.
And, most of all, we can still look through your eyes.
Thank you.