(Editor’s note: At Orson’s Fireplace is an English translation of an article that will appear in the Italian film magazine Cabiria No. 196-197. Special thanks to the author, Alberto Anile, and Marco Vanelli, editor-in-chief of Cabiria.)
By ALBERTO ANILE
I’ll say it right away: Hopper/Welles has an insuperable starting flaw. The film “recovered” from the processing materials of The Other Side of the Wind and presented at the 2020 Venice Film Festival as a work “directed by Orson Welles,” cannot solve the basic questions, the only ones capable of help us decode it: what exactly were its author’s intentions, what promises did it offer, and how much does it manage to keep them?
Brief summary of the matter: in 1970 Orson Welles shoots the first scenes of a film he had been thinking about for some time, and which will become The Other Side of the Wind. In the party scene, he decides to involve some young filmmakers of the time in the role of themselves, and the one with whom he shoots the longest is Dennis Hopper, at that time working on The Last Movie. In Welles’s film, edited in 2018 by Bob Murawski, Hopper’s appearance will be very short, as the author intended, but the originally impressed material covers over two hours of filming (which, multiplied by two cameras operating simultaneously, make a total about four and a half hours).
From this material, Murawski himself then created Hopper/Welles, two hours and ten minutes documenting a tight series of questions and answers between Hopper, sitting drinking and smoking, and Welles bombarding him with questions. The fact is that Welles, always off screen, at times explicitly assumes the identity of Jake Hannaford, the protagonist of Wind (later played by John Huston). And then: does Welles, in these shots, represent Orson Welles or Jake Hannaford? And is Hopper responding to colleague Welles, so with a certain amount of sincerity, or to Hannaford, and is therefore playing himself with a fictional character?
A question that will never be able to be resolved completely, unless through clues. When the invisible interviewer says that Buñuel was “a Catholic who doesn’t go to the church and thinks he’s damned” it is probably Welles who says it; when he asks Hopper who Bob Dylan is, it is probably Hannaford; and the one who talks about the boredom of Antonioni’s films, and how little he bears it, is undoubtedly the director of Touch of Evil, not the aging filmmaker who in Wind will show excerpts from a film that resembles Zabriskie Point.
Not being able to establish with certainty the point of view of all Welles’ questions, it is therefore also quite difficult to interpret the answers and non-answers of the interviewee. The shy, sometimes naive attitude of Hopper is determined by awe in front of Citizen Kane creator or is a really fresh way of proposing himself to the others? Welles, for his part, puts him in difficulty several times, for a large number of reason we could only guess: his gigantic personality, a small test of supremacy against the “new Hollywood”? Or the fact that in this dialogue he was substantially assuming the role of Jake Hannaford, idolized director spoiled by an underlying machismo?
One of the few able to offer sensible answers to these questions is Joseph McBride, who besides being one of the most important and authoritative scholars of Welles, was also one of the interpreters of Wind. According to him, during the interview with Hopper, Welles takes on the role of Hannaford for roughly two thirds of the total, although in some passages it is not clear even to McBride whether the interviewer is Orson or Jake. But on this and other aspects we refer to “Hopper/Welles” review: “I, Hannaford” vs. Mr. “Easy Rider” Era, his illuminating essay published on 21 September 2020 on Wellesnet. Here we limit ourselves to adding a few considerations. Hopper/Welles is certainly not a finished work, it is not even a work in fact, but his attribution of direction to Welles is unquestionable: the tone, photography, content and rhythm of the questions are all and only his. Even considering it as a simple processing document, it demonstrates how passionate and scrupulous was Welles for his Wind, preparing four and a half hours of shooting for a brief cameo (the hypothesis of using these shots for a Welles documentary on Hopper, attested by his daughter Beatrice, seems to me just a hypothesis: their first purpose is obviously to obtain a cameo for Wind).
From an Italian point of view, it’s also very interesting how much Italian cinema is quoted: Antonioni’s La notte, De Sica’s Umberto D. (which Hopper initially confuses with Fellini’s I vitelloni), Visconti’s The Damned: it is always said how much our cinema was esteemed and known in America, but hearing it mentioned by Hopper so often and with perfect naturalness during a chat makes us Italians a certain impression.
Of course, Welles cannot limit himself to the role of the interviewer, and often ends up giving his opinion, helped by the pauses and uncertainties of the interlocutor; his thoughts are always stimulating, even though some of them were told elsewhere (in this case, the movie works also as a first hand confirmation): about cinema vs. revolution, boredom in movies, catholic religion, director’s closer proximity to a sorcerer than to God, and about Welles’ inclination to finish the editing to the extreme, cutting all the cuttable and even more. The most beautiful line of the film, which in its exhibited extremism also lends itself to being counterproductive, is that of Welles who, in front of Hopper’s hesitations on editing, tells him: “I’m lucky: when I go in the cutting room, I’m going as the enemy of the film I made, I hardly wait to take off beautiful shots”, where “beautiful” stands for “flashy.” A statement that could hardly be put into the mouth of Jake Hannaford.
Hopper/Welles also offers, for the first and unique time, the possibility to see and hear a full conversation between Welles (albeit partly in the guise of Hannaford) and one of his friends, and the result is no less interesting than the ones published and edited in book (This is Orson Welles by Bogdanovich/Rosenbaum, My Lunches with Orson by Jaglom/Biskind, etc.). He made something similar conversing with Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards in Filming Othello, but in that case the operation was explicitly organized in favor of the spectators. In Hopper/Welles, we are simply and naturally with him, sitting in the dim light, silent guests at Orson’s fireplace: a privilege.
Dennis Hopper in a scene from Hopper/Welles.
Understanding Hopper/Welles means first of all clarifying its genesis. So, I close with a brief interview with Bob Murawski, at the end of which the editor (Oscar winner with Chris Innis for The Hurt Locker) prefers to call himself with the humble denomination of cutter instead of the canonical editor. Made on the occasion of the Venetian presentation of Hopper/Welles, it seems useful to me to clarify some technical aspects of the operation.
Whose idea is the film?
While working on The Other Side of the Wind, I watched all the footage of Orson’s interview with Dennis Hopper and thought that the conversation was incredibly compelling. So before we finished that movie, I spent a few nights roughly editing the interview together so that it would be ready to go if anyone ever wanted to try to do something with it at some point in the future. Filip discovered the edited version last year and thought that it would be something that film festivals might be interested in. We worked together to refine it into a feature film.
The film consists of the shots of two cameras from two different angles, reloaded at different times in order to maintain a fluid continuity.
Actually, there was never any intention to maintain fluid continuity while shooting. Orson not trying to document a live event in the traditional documentary style. He was only hoping to get footage to use in The Other Side of the Wind. The cameras were initially loaded at the same time, and ran out at the same time, but over the course of the shoot they naturally became staggered. I take it as a compliment that you feel that there is fluid continuity. We worked hard to create this feeling.
Could we say that your job consisted first of all in choosing the best angle between the two cameras?
My job as editor is always to chose the best piece of footage to represent any given moment, so a multi-camera shoot is really not different than something shot in multiple takes and later constructed to seem continuous.
However, the two cameras are reloaded alternately 13 times, and the beginning of the interview begins with the second load of film. Were there shots named 1A and 1B? Was there anything you had to give up?
The slate numbers refer to camera roll numbers here, not shot or scene numbers. Roll 1A/1B is actually an interview another young up-and-coming filmmaker, Curtis Harrington, which was shot before Hopper’s interview, on the same day in 1970. That interview was obviously much shorter, since Orson only shot one roll per camera – about 20 minutes total. Our film presents Hopper’s interview exactly where it began.
What other kind of choice did you make?
We chose to keep a few moments of very compelling dialogue where we did not have film footage due to the cameras both running out at the same time. This required “cheating in” shots where you could not see Hopper’s face. Orson had a bold history of using that technique in his films, so we felt entirely justified.
On what medium was the sound part recorded?
The sound was recorded on reel to reel analogue tape.
In what condition was the material, visual and sound?
The original 16mm negative was in fairly good condition, but the negative had been cut up in many places at the time Orson edited the movie. This made the editing process complicated, as you might imagine. Our film restoration artists at Fixafilm spent countless hours removing evidence of splices and making the image seem as continuous and pristine as possible. The audio tapes were in good condition, but unfortunately, the track was very noisy due to the kerosene lamps used for illumination. And all of Orson’s dialogue was off-mic and very difficult to hear. Our sound supervisor Jussi Tegelman did an incredible job removing the noise and making Orson’s side of the conversation clear and intelligible.
Your work here seems to have been very different from that for The Other Side of the Wind. In conclusion, the intention was to present the material of this exceptional conversation in its entirety, and not being able to offer at the same time the double point of view of the two cameras, in choosing the best form. It’s right?
Correct. In The Other Side of the Wind, we were trying to tell the story that Orson wrote in the best way possible, which often involved following the stylized editing patterns that Orson had established in the scene that he had edited. With Hopper/Welles, we are preserving a historic conversation between two filmmaking giants and presenting it for audiences to see, in the most honest way possible. I didn’t want to force the pace like I would have in Wind and other movies I have edited. Of course, without any shots of the other character – Orson Welles, the interviewer – this would be a very difficult task anyway.
As an editor, is there anything you can say you’ve learned from Orson Welles?
From Orson I learned that an artist should be fearless, fight for what he believes in and never give up. He also taught me that I am not an editor. I am a CUTTER!
(Alberto Anile is an Italian film critic, historian and journalist. He is the author of several books, including Orson Welles in Italy.)
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