Did Welles really say this?

[Harvey Chartrand]

"Films should be made with innocence, the way Adam named the animals."
Orson Welles

I came across this quote on the Classic Horror Film Board. What could Welles have possibly meant by this baffling statement? Was he stewed to the gills on Paul Masson wine or NIKKA whisky when he uttered these puzzling words?

[evenswr]

I would guess that he means that films should be created with no pre-conceived notions about how to make a film.

Welles made Citizen Kane (I mean, ya know, Citizen Kane, for Pete's sake) despite never having made a movie before (basically), and has always given cinematographer Gregg Toland credit for taking Welles' innocent inspirations and turning them into reality.

[tonyw]

Maybe he meant films should be made with some thought - something that does not apply to today's horror film.

[RayKelly]

The full quote clearly explains his thinking. It is from a 1982 BBC interview:

"I think it is very harmful to see movies for movie-makers because you either imitate them or worry about not imitating them. And you should do movies innocently. The way Adam named the animals the first day in the garden. And I lost my innocence. Everytime I see a picture I lose something. I do not gain. I never understand what directors mean when they compliment me, young directors, and say they've learnt from my pictures. Because I don't believe in learning from other people's pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, innocently, as though there had never been D.W. Griffith or Eisenstein or Ford or Renoir or anybody."

[The Night Man]

"Everytime I see a picture I lose something. I do not gain. I never understand what directors mean when they compliment me, young directors, and say they've learnt from my pictures. Because I don't believe in learning from other people's pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, innocently, as though there had never been D.W. Griffith or Eisenstein or Ford or Renoir or anybody."

An odd comment, coming from the man who also said "I'd learned whatever I knew [before Kane] in the projection room - from Ford. After dinner every night for about a month, I'd run Stagecoach... It was like going to school."

The full quote really doesn't hold water (at least not for me), but then Welles did sometimes spin words just to fill the void.

[ToddBaesen]

***

What I find interesting is that the Welles quote was taken totally out of context. Thus, you can see where a lot of the mis-information about Welles comes from. So thanks to Ray for providing the correct context to that quote.

At the same time, as The Night Man points out, Welles claimed he had watched Ford's STAGECOACH 40 times before shooting CITIZEN KANE. Now maybe because KANE was his first picture, he needed that kind of cinematic background before he felt he could direct his own first film... but obviously by 1982 Welles had seen a lot of movies when he made his comments about wanting to be "innocent."

Maybe Welles was simply reacting to the idea that Pauline Kael had brought up in her CITIZEN KANE BOOK, namely that Welles had probably seen and stolen the look of CITIZEN KANE from Karl Freund's MAD LOVE.

It would seem to make sense, as Welles seemed very sensitive to the subject, and he even wrote a reply to Kael in his script for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND:


JULIETTE RICHE
Otterlake’s new picture is breaking the
house record at the Music Hall, and when
his own production company goes public,
they say he’ll walk away with forty
million dollars...

OTTERLAKE
And YOU’LL say I stole it all from Mr.
Hannaford... I’ll never walk away from that.

JAKE
Well it's all right to borrow from each
other. What we must never do is borrow
from ourselves.

[NoFake]

Yesterday I attended a play whose Playbill featured an interview with Austin Pendleton. (The article, while dealing only peripherally with his Welles work, was titled "Shining in Orson's Shadow.") Near the end was this observation about Mike Nichols's experiences directing Welles in Catch-22 (Pendleton played Welles' military aide and son-in-law in the film).

Pendleton: "He [Welles] wanted to direct all the time and and, in fact, took over the direction of certain scenes we were in together. Mike Nichols handled it brilliantly. If anybody ever does that to me, I'll just remember what he did. He was very patient and gave Orson a lot of rope. Orson was always wrong, and Mike was always right, but Orson wouldn't listen to Mike and made a big point of it. I had made some pretty snide remarks about him [Nichols?] in the press, and then I regretted that."

There's a lot I could say about that (which I might, as per Pendleton, regret), so I'll leave it open to Wellesnetters, then weigh in later.

[RayKelly]

Excellent points Night Man and Todd. I totally forgot the Stagecoach story. Obviously Welles "gained" from seeing someone's else's work, even if he truly believed it robbed him of his innocence.

In the book Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, Joseph McBride recounts a conversation with Welles from the early 1970s (a decade before the comments to BBC on innocence). Welles chided McBride for having seen Citizen Kane sixty times. McBride countered that Welles had watched Stagecoach forty times.

Welles offered, "Yes, but I didn't really watch Stagecoach every time. Every night for more than a month, I would screen it with a different technician from RKO and ask him questions all through the movie."

Ok boys, how do you define watch? <g>

In the same section of McBride's book, Welles stated that he only went to the movies when he had a fit of guilt about being out of touch with contemporary filmmaking. During one of these fits, he would catch several movies a day, but usually leave after the first 20 minutes unless he found a rare one that intrigued him. (Again, these remarks were made a decade before the BBC interview on innocence).

There may be a lot of truth to Todd's theory that in a post-Raising Kane world, Welles did not want to give substance to the notion that Citizen Kane's style was influenced by Mad Love. But as Night Man points out, Welles loved to talk.

It was either in the same BBC interview or another from the 1980s that Welles dismissed a question about a "profound" comment he had made to another interviewer. My memory is weak on this one, but Welles either attributed his earlier remarks to poor translation or wanting to impress the interviewer.

[Roger Ryan]

Pendleton:"I had made some pretty snide remarks about him [Nichols?] in the press, and then I regretted that."

I think Pendleton meant Welles. In at least one interview his gave when his play "Orson's Shadow" debuted, he said he regretted criticizing Welles in the press after the shooting of "Catch-22". More recently (as in the article NoFake quoted), Pendleton has continued to talk unfavorably about the time he and Welles spent together shooting the Nichols' film. One must surmise that Pendleton's admiration for Welles as a creative talent grew over the years, but not enough to erase the bad memories of the time the two had worked together.

Personally, I think Welles performance in "Catch-22" is excellent and matches the same satirical tone as the rest of the cast.