Orson Welles names his three favourite filmmakers
If one director can be said to embody cinema, then it is undoubtedly Orson Welles. Born in frostbitten Wisconsin in 1915, he went on to craft one of the most celebrated films in cinema history: 1941’s Citizen Kane, which cemented him as one of the modern film’s great innovators. Here, we join the actor-director as he names his three favourite directors.
After the success of his notorious broadcast version of H.G. Welles’ (no relation) The War of The Worlds, Orson Welles side-stepped into moving pictures, making his feature debut, Citizen Kane, in 1941. It was a commercial failure, losing $150,000 at the box office. Today, of course, it is frequently cited as the best film ever made, although only by people who are yet to see Ratatouille.
After a string of similarly commercially unsuccessful films, Welles travelled to Europe in 1948, where he remained in self-imposed exile for many years. In 1958 he directed Touch of Evil, which bombed in the US but won an award at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. By the 1970s, the disparity between Welles’ box office record and his influence on the landscape of contemporary cinema was so obvious that the American Film Institute offered him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
A few years later, not long before the Directors Guild of America awarded him the D.W. Griffith Award, Welles was asked about the cinema scene he’d helped shape. Speaking to L’Avant-Scène Cinéma in July 1982, Welles was hesitant to heap praise on other filmmakers.”I don’t go to the movies very often. Anyhow, I don’t like talking about directors very much,” he began. “But I’ll make an exception to tell you that I admire Scorsese, Bertolucci and Warren Beatty, whose film Reds has a lot of character.”
Welles passed away just three years later, having released his first single, ‘I Know What It Is to Be Young (But You Don’t Know What It Is to Be Old)’, in his penultimate year. The song was performed with the Nick Perito Orchestra and the Ray Charles Singers and features production by Jerry Abbott, the father of metal guitarist Dimebag Darell. Now there’s a surprising connection.
You can watch one of our favourite scenes from Reds below.
Orson Welles’ three favourite filmmakers:
- Bernardo Bertolucci
- Martin Scorsese
- Warren Beatty
