Morgan Neville
(Updated on January 30 to include the Collider interview)
Oscar winner Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal) was at the Sundance Film Festival promoting his Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
But during interviews with Deadline, and Collider, Neville spoke briefly about his upcoming documentary on Orson Welles and The Other Side of the Wind, tentatively titled They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.
The Netflix documentary, expected to be released later this year, will use archival and new audio interviews with participants, as well as outtakes from The Other Side of the Wind.
Neville told Collider he already has a cut of the documentary. He also revealed he had decided to take on the project before seeing the footage.
“I made the decision to make the movie before I saw the material,” Neville said. “All I knew there was six years worth of film and it had better be interesting — and I can say is that it was more than interesting.”
Here are a few excerpts from Neville’s conversation with Deadline:
Among your projects coming up in the next year or so is a Netflix doc on Orson Welles called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. It may seem silly to ask why make a film of a cinema icon, but what drew you to Welles as you were drawn to Fred Rogers?
… I was a big Orson Welles fan, but I never thought I was going to make a film about it until I got the rights to all of his dailies of this unfinished movie he made called The Other Side of the Wind, which is essentially about himself.
So it just presented this incredible opportunity of Welles telling his own story through a film, and I get to tell a story about Welles through his film, through my film. So it gets a little meta, to say the least.
Netflix acquired the actual The Other Side of the Wind, so is the plan to coordinate that film with yours?
The producers of that film, Frank Marshall and Filip Rymsza, are my executive producers, too. So it’s all kind of coordinated on the distribution and business side, but it’s very separate on the creative side. Partially, because the thing about the film was that Orson shot it for six years and he kept squirreling away characters, and re-casting. So I feel like most of what I’m going to use isn’t even going to be in their film.
Will they premiere at the same time?
They are going to go up on Netflix at the same time, but they are two totally separate projects.
So we could see you back at Sundance 2019 with the Orson Welles docu?
Could be. Could be sooner.
In a May 2017 interview with Wellesnet, Neville said his documentary will center on Welles’ return to the U.S. in the early 1970s to shoot his ill-fated Hollywood comeback film. The documentary concludes with his death in October 1985.
“Welles is the protagonist of my documentary. (The Other Side of the Wind) is so autobiographical, even though he said it was not,” Neville said. “I am trying to interview everybody — and everybody at this point has been receptive. There has always been a deep reserve of goodwill toward Orson.”
A self-professed Welles fan. Neville has said that the late director’s F For Fake is one of his favorite documentaries. “It’s why I wanted to make documentaries in the first place.”
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