I’ve just returned from a fabulous�two week vacation in Spain, which�by sheer accident has turned out to be a�wonderful�source of Welles information – �inparticular on Chimes At Midnight, which was�Welles own favorite movie, as well as mine.
Chimes�of course, was shot in Spain, which was�Welles� favorite country in Europe, as can be seen in this excerpt from the OSOTW script:
Jake Hannaford was a vagabond… He worked for Hollywood but he took his cameras around the world…�When he didn’t find himself in�the tropical jungles, the icy tundra’s, or a country where it was hunting season, the place where he felt most �at home� was in Spain…�
Strangely, my trip to Spain was in�no way intended to be� releated to my interest in Welles. I simply wanted to visit Spain for it’s own virtures, but�by coincidence, right before I left, I managed to get in�touch with one of Orson�Welles great Spanish friends, Mr. Juan Cobos. Juan worked�as Welles assisant on Chimes At Midnight, and conducted two great interivews with Welles. A few days before I left,�Juan�provided me�with�a long list of places to visit in Spain where Welles had shot films. Of course,�that was�like a magnet for me, and�I tried to see�as many of the�spots Juan provided for me as possible during my�visit, but unfortunately I only had time to see a very select few of�them.
However,�I think the information that Juan provided�will still be quite interesting for�Wellesnet readers, so here it is:��
JUAN COBOS: In Madrid Welles shot Mr. Arkadin in the Sevilla Film Studio, that more than 20 years ago was totally rebuilt into a big supermarket. The scenes of Mr. Arkadin�s castle were shot in Segovia � at Alcazar castle. Also, at the Segovia�s big Aqueduct and the fortaleza de los Reyes Cat�licos. The big Goya-esque masquerade was shot in Valladolid in the Museo Nacional of Sculpture, a really beautiful setting not far from Cervantes’ home in that city. A big villa in Costa Brava (north of Barcelona) was filmed as the Mexican resort where Arkadin was staying when he confraonts Robert Arden in Mexico.�
On his first stay in Spain in the early thirties Welles lived in Seville, in the Triana neighborhood of that city. As a fan of bullfighting, Orson traveled to any summer place where his favorite matadors would be appearing on a certain day. �For many years Welles traveled in Spain. Pamplona, known as the setting of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, was a place he loved and there he shot some scenes of Don Quixote (Pamplona is in the north not far from San Sebastian and near France).
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In the sixties, Welles brought a villa in Colonia Camarines, Aravaca on the outskirts of Madrid, where he also shot scenes for�The Immortal Story. Other scenes were shot in Chinchon and in Pedraza, outside of Madrid.� In the editing room Pedraza and Chinch�n were mixed together for the Macao setting of The Immortal Story. �
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In a park in Madrid, Casa de Campo, Welles shot a lot of Chimes at Midnight. On the hills of a place near Madrid called Colmenar Viejo he shot the speech on Sherry wine and other scenes from Chimes. Also for Chimes we shot near Pamplona in two places, Lesaca, and in Lecumbrerri the snow scenes and Shallow’s house. We also filmed in Soria, about 100 miles from Madrid. The coronation of Prince Hal was shot in an old convent in Medinaceli, and the King’s castle was shot at what is now a Parador hotel in Cardona, north of Barcelona. The medevial walled city of Avila was�used for scenes�with Welles and Keith Baxter.
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Welles wrote a screenplay to be shot in Galicia, the Celtic part of Spain, in the Northwest, with locations as beautiful as those of Ireland. At the beaches of Almeria Welles� played as an actor for the film version of Treasure Island.
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Sadly I only had the time to�visit a few of these locations, with�the most impressive being the fabulous Alcazar castle in Segovia.� But�luckily,�Juan Cobos was�living only�a short distance from where I was�staying in the south of Spain, in Marbella, on the Costa Del Sol.� So I was able to visit with Juan in his home in Vejer, a beautiful whitewashed village near Gilbraltar,�where we met and spent three hours talking about Juan’s�work with Orson Welles�in Spain.
Of course, any Welles fan will recall�the name of Juan Cobos as�the author of two of the best interviews with Welles that have ever been printed, and thankfully both of them�were translated into English.
Here’s what Juan told me about his interviews with Welles:��
JUAN COBOS: Lawrence, as you know, we did�two interviews with Welles, one on his film career before my working association with him and the second one was after my work on the dubbing for the Spanish version of Chimes. He wanted me to make the Spanish translation and supervise the dubbing of Chimes.�Later on, in the seventies, the very day we attended the premi�re of F for Fake, we lunched with Welles�and he agreed on a new and definitive third interview that unhappily was cancelled that very afternoon as he didn’t feel well. Some time later he called me from Seville to have lunch the following day in Madrid. Early the next morning a secretary phoned me to excuse Orson for not coming to Madrid. Instead he had to fly from Seville to London.��
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So thanks to Juan Cobos for taking the time to talk with me while I was in Spain about his work and friendship with Welles.��I�will eventually be posting the entire interview here when I have transcribed it,�but in the meantime here is�an excerpt of Juan’s wonderful interview (done with Miguel Rubio), shortly�after they had completed work on Chimes At Midnight:
JUAN COBOS: In Chimes at Midnight, as in all your films, you don’t give much value to landscape as such. There’s a rather stylized and unreal feeling about it, so that a scene like the robbery at Gadshill ends up looking a bit like a set.
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ORSON WELLES: Oh, that’s sad to hear. Really? Well, to an extent I wouldn’t object to that criticism … to an extent. I may have to submit to the criticism, because it may be true, but I regret it if the country doesn’t seem real. But it mustn’t seem perfectly real. In other words, one of the enemies of the film is of course the simple, banal fact, the tree or rock that looks as it looks to anybody who takes a picture of his family through a camera on Sunday. So we have to be able to invest what is real, by reason of the photography, position of the lights, the conception, with a character, sometimes with a glamour, sometimes with an allure or a mystery which it doesn’t have. To that extent it must be treated as a decor. I feel that there is almost an aesthetic problem here, one which is almost never resolved in costume pictures. I don’t know why I say almost: I would say never in the history of films, with the possible exception of some films of Eisenstein. Films which I don’t particularly admire in themselves, but which have solved the problem that the real world outside� sky, clouds, trees and so on�doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the decor. No matter how convincing the set, whether it’s a real place or made out of cardboard, as soon as people in costume ride out on their horses it’s suddenly banal, it’s modern. You see a perfectly-made costume, actor wearing it correctly, everything is all right: he goes outside, and it’s suddenly a location. You feel the trucks behind him and everything. I don’t know why. In Henry V, for example, you see the people riding out of the castle, and suddenly they are on a golf course somewhere charging each other. You can’t escape it, they have entered another world. The only place where you don’t feel this is in Westerns, and Japanese pictures which are like Westerns because they are a tradition. And it’s a tradition in which the clothes, and nature and so on, have learned to live together. But I believe the problem can be solved, and I think I solved it to some extent in Othello, and more here. What I am trying to do is to see the outside, real world through the same eyes as the inside, fabricated one. To create a kind of unity.
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JUAN COBOS: The seventy minutes we have seen of your Don Quixote seems to translate just that ideal world which Cervantes dreamed1 for his characters.
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ORSON WELLES: That’s the problem, isn’t it? The people must live in their world. It is a fundamental problem for the filmmaker, even when you are making apparently the most ordinary modern story. But particularly when you have a great figure of myth like Quixote, even like Falstaff, a silhouette against the sky of all time. These are people who have more life in them than any human being ever had. But you can’t simply dress up and be them, you have to make a world for them.
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JUAN COBOS: You originally had certain ideas about the photographic look of Chimes at Midnight, a kind of grading which would give the images almost the quality of an old engraving. In the first print we saw, you used this for the credit titles, which came up over the characters present at the coronation. Why did you change this?
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ORSON WELLES: They weren’t able to do it in the lab. It would have produced an extraordinary effect, I think, and it’s my great sorrow that it hasn’t been done. In fact, the film would have been lit in a completely different way if I had known that this process was likely to fail.
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JUAN COBOS: From reading theShakepeare plays, one had the feeling that the film might have been happier than you made it.
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ORSON WELLES: It’s a very sad story: perhaps it should be happier, and that may be a failure on my part. But I also think that it is funnier in the English version than in the Spanish. The Spanish version loses very little in the serious story, even though you can’t expect a popular audience to appreciate that speech of the King on sleep unless it is an English audience. There is a density in what Shakespeare wrote that cannot be changed, and you must understand that every time you come to a speech of that kind you must fail except in English. You just have to sit still and say ‘well, we lost it.’ Luckily this picture only has one speech like that; but there are technical difficulties of translation for the jokes. All the same, the thing that most concerns me about the film and my own performance is that I am not as funny as I expected to be. That was part of what preoccupied me all through the shooting: the more I studied the part, the less funny he seemed to be. Falstaff is a man defending a force�the old England�which is going down. What is difficult about Falstaff, I believe, is that he is the greatest conception of a good man, the most completely good man, in all drama. His faults are so small and he makes tremendous jokes out of little faults. But his goodness is like bread, like wine…� And that was why I lost the comedy. The more I played it, the more I felt that I was playing Shakespeare’s good, pure man. I have played the part three times in the theatre and now in the film, and I’m not convinced that I have realized it properly yet. It’s the most difficult part I ever played in my life, and there are at least three scenes in the film that I would like to do over again from my point of view as an actor. I feel he is a wit rather than a clown, and I don’t think much of the few moments in the film when I am simply funny, because I don’t think that he is. But I can see that there are scenes which should be much more hilarious, because I directed everything, and played everything, with a view to preparing for the last scene. The relationship between Falstaff and the Prince is not the simple, comic relationship that it is in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, but always a preparation for the end. And as you see, the farewell is performed about four times during the movie, foreshadowed four times.�
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JUAN COBOS: There is a wonderful moment after the play-acting at the tavern, when they are talking about Falstaff’s banishment (“banish plump Jack, and banish all the world…”‘) and the Prince says “/ will….”�
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ORSON WELLES: That’s the clearest of all those farewells. And you discover in making the film that the death of the King, and the death of Hotspur, which is the death of chivalry, and Falstaff’s poverty and Falstaff’s illness run all through the play. Comedy can’t really dominate a film made to tell this story, which is all in dark colors. But the basic thing is the innocence. The interesting thing about this story is that the old King is a murderer, an usurper, and yet he represents the legitimate idea. So Hal is the creation of a legitimate Prince who must betray the good man in order to become a hero, a famous English hero. The terrible price of power which the Prince has to pay. In the first part of the play, the Hotspur subplot keeps the business of the triangle between the King, his son and Falstaff (who is a sort of foster father) from dominating. But in my film, which is made to tell, essentially, the story of that triangle, there are bound to be values which can’t exist as it is played in the original. It’s really quite a different drama.
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JUAN COBOS: The film has become a sort of lament for Falstaff.
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ORSON WELLES: Yes, that may be true. I would like to think that… The film was not intended as a lament for Falstaff, but for the death of Merrie England. Merrie England as a conception, a myth, which has been very real to the English-speaking world, and is to some extent expressed in other countries of the Medieval epoch: the age of chivalry, of simplicity, of Maytime and all that. It is more than Falstaff who is dying. It’s the old England, dying and betrayed.
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