How Orson Welles maintained creative control on ‘Citizen Kane’
Each generation sees the emergence of new filmmakers who approach the medium in new and exciting ways, but it’s safe to say that there will never be another Orson Welles. The man who changed cinema forever, Welles’ impact on the art form is simply unparalleled. Ranging from the young auteurs of the French New Wave to the pioneers of Asian cinema, almost every director owes a huge debt to the bold experiments conducted by Welles.
While Welles produced several masterpieces, like Touch of Evil and F for Fake, over the course of his trailblazing career, the film that inevitably gets the most attention is Citizen Kane. However, before he made the opus that would redefine the cinematic traditions of America, Welles actually went to Europe and tried to make a name for himself by falsely claiming that he was a Broadway star. He climbed through the ranks of theatre and radio, eventually managing to wrestle an unprecedented filmmaking contract from RKO.
During a conversation with Huw Wheldon, Welles revealed: “I got that good a contract because I didn’t really want to make a film… And when you don’t really want to go out to Hollywood, at least this was true in the old days – the golden days of Hollywood, when you honestly didn’t want to go, then the deals got better and better. In my case, I didn’t want money. I wanted authority. So, I asked the impossible, hoping to be left alone. And at the end of the year’s negotiations, I got it. Simply because there was no real vocation there. My love for films only began when we started work.”
According to Welles, the only reason he was able to shake up the frameworks of cinematic language was that he wasn’t trained by the system. While talking to Wheldon about his unique background and his entry into the industry, Welles claimed that he truly believed that he could use the camera to capture anything he could see with the eye.
The filmmaker continued: “Ignorance, sheer ignorance. There’s no confidence to equal it. It’s only when you know something about a profession, I think, that you’re timid or careful. I thought you could do anything with the camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticised for having failed”.
Welles also heaped praise on the bravery of his incredibly talented cinematographer – Gregg Toland: “In this case, I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticised if he failed, and I didn’t know there were things you couldn’t do. So anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.” This boldness in his approach translated to the pioneering experiments in Citizen Kane, a masterpiece that could never have been made without the auteur’s creative control.
Watch the interview below.
