Orson Welles interview

A fascinating and very personal interview with Orson Welles, perhaps the greatest filmmaker of all-time (and one of the great iconoclasts of the 20th century). Welles remains one of my two or three favourite filmmakers, and a great influence on my own work, or at least my method. I absolutely agree with his statement (in the third segment) that there's no point in watching your own movies once they've been made, because it's locked in time, and there's nothing you can change about it.

Of course, as a filmmaker you never get to see your film fresh for the first time on the screen anyway, because you've seen bits and pieces of it so many times in post production. A premiere of a film is a wedding for everyone in the theatre but the filmmaker himself, for whom it is a divorce.

But that's fine, because a filmmaker has seen the film long before anyone else - the first time it plays is in your head, and it is there that the only true version of it will ever exist. The challenge of filmmaking is to make as much of it come to life as possible for everyone else; the secret of being a filmmaker is that you always keep a bit of that original film out of the finished production, so that there will always remain that one special part of the film that will be yours, and yours alone.

Paul Kimball