A new book out of Croatia looks at the filming of Orson Welles’ unfinished The Deep in Hvar.
Orson Welles in Hvar is bilingual (Croatian and English) and written by Dusko Kovacic and Daniel Rafaelic with additional writings by Nenad Polimac, Tonko Maroevic, and Slavko Kovacic.
Aside from known photos, the book has never before seen photographs from the private archives of actress Oja Kodar, Rafaelic and Hvar photographers who were following Welles and his crew during the filming.
Bound to 150 pages and divided into three chapters, Orson Welles in Hvar, the book recounts the filming of The Deep, which starred Welles, Jeanne Moreau, Oja Kodar, Laurence Harvey and Michael Bryant.
The launch for the book on August 17 including the sailing of the Saracen, the yacht used by Welles during the filming, into the Hvar harbor.
U.S. buyers can order it directly from Kovacic for $30 plus $15 shipping. He may be reached by email at duskokova@gmail.com
Publishers are the town of Hvar and its the tourism board with distribution by ArTresor from Zagreb.
Welles envisioned The Deep as a commercial offering.
“My hope is that it won’t turn out to be an art house movie,” Welles said during the production. “I hope it’s the kind of movie I enjoy seeing myself. I felt it was high time to show that we could make some money.”
During the established 1967-1969 shoot of The Deep, Welles utilized Bavaria Film Studios in Geiselgasteig. Cinematographer Willy Kurant (The Immortal Story), along with Ivica Rajkovic, worked on the filming.
Professional and personal relationships complicated filming of The Deep from the start.
Kurant told Cinémathèque in 2003 that shooting was halted for a day when the award-winning Moreau, who had been romantically involved with Welles years earlier, unhappily discovered that Kodar, the 52-year-old director’s current girlfriend and a novice actress, had been given the larger role.
Weather, finances, cast commitments, and Harvey’s death in November 1973 at the age of 45 were initially cited as reasons for the film’s delays and eventual abandonment.
Oja Kodar in a scene from The Deep.
Kodar has since blamed Moreau for the scuttling of The Deep. She told an audience in Woodstock, Illinois, and the Brazilian website AdoroCinema in May 2015 that the legendary French actress refused to dub her lines because she was jealous of Kodar.
“We pretended at the time that the film could not be completed because of the death of Laurence Harvey, but that’s not true. We could not finish because Jeanne Moreau refused to participate in the dubbing. I say this without fear of repercussion, without fear of being sued, because I have letters from Orson and Orson lawyers, proving that the culprit is Moreau,” Kodar told AdoroCinema. “I was a very pretty girl, and at the time she was hired for the film, she was a middle-aged woman. When she saw me, she hated me, and could not forgive Orson for loving me rather than love her. That’s why The Deep has not been completed. It was jealousy.”
Prior Harvey’s death, Moreau told a newspaper that Welles’ hectic schedule was the reason the pair “never got together to do the dubbing.” “Orson is an incredible person. He’s always traveling, so it’s hard to get together in Paris at the same time,” she told the Montreal Gazette on April 21, 1973. “But we’ll do it sometime.”
A far different explanation for The Deep’s downfall was offered by editor Mauro Bonanni. In a June 2015 interview with the Italian website Quinlan, Bonanni claimed that Welles scrapped the movie after realizing his young lover was ill-suited for the lead role.
“I told him one day at lunch – it was just me and him – ‘Can you imagine, Welles, the day when the movie comes out, there will be a few reviews, and they’ll all speak only of the leading actress, Oja?’ Because of this, there was deathly silence on his part … and that was why we did not do any more work on it,” Bonanni said.
The real reason may never be known for certain.
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