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| Orson Welles
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong. Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat. Ask not what you can do for your country. ask what's for lunch. By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment. Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me. Create your own visual style ... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others. Criticism is the essence of creation. Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid. Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him. Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan. Everybody denies I am a genius – but nobody ever called me one! Everything I do today took me 25 years! Fake is as old as the Eden tree. Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone. Gluttony is not a secret vice. He is as unaffected as albert Einstein. Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money. Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things. Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation. I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I've always wanted to be a magician. I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money. I don't pray because I don't want to bore God. I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could. I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them. I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable. I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose. I have an unfortunate personality. I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai. I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional – and I hate every kind of snob. I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right! I started at the top and worked my way down. I'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them. I'm a lurid character! If I want to pursue the art of painting – or music or writing or sculpture – it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars! If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. and they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys. If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations. Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad, except you never know when luxury is going to stand up. Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle. Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre. My definition of success is not having things thrown at me! My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people. Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest. Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions. Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations. Nowadays, people's interest in motion pictures is restricted to wanting to know whether Veronica Lake's hair is all her own. I don't see how it could be. Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy. Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there. Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head. Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature. The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful. The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age. The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it. The ideal american type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left. The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism. The most personal thing I've put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It's better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power. The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can. The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age. There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze. There are three intolerable things in life – cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women. They teach you anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies. We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends. You could write all the IDEaS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin. You long-faced, over-dressed anarchist! [The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived. |
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