By RAY KELLY
Fifty years after Chimes at Midnight was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Juan Cobos vividly recalls scouting locations in Spain, laboring on the low-budget shoot and working with Orson Welles on the post-production of what the legendary film director considered his greatest work.
The respected Spanish film scholar enjoyed a decades-long friendship with Welles. By all accounts, Welles considered Cobos a dear friend and welcomed him into his inner circle. He was among those present when Welles’ ashes were interred in Ronda, Spain.
Their friendship began when Cobos interviewed Welles for a film magazine in 1964 and then served as his assistant on Chimes at Midnight. The film is now enjoying a successful revival through the efforts of Janus Films – 50 years after it was awarded the Technical Grand Prize and 20th Anniversary Prize at the Cannes on May 5-20, 1966.
Cobos also has insight into the unfinished Don Quixote and Treasure Island. In the 50 years since then, Cobos has directed more than a dozen projects and scripted two dozen films. He is the author of the book Orson Welles: Espana como obsesion (Orson Welles: Obsessed with Spain).
Now 83, Cobos recalled his time with Welles in an interview last week with Wellesnet.
How did you come to meet Orson Welles and work on Chimes at Midnight?
I met Orson Welles for the first time in 1964 as editor of Film Ideal. While editing the magazine with some friends, I studied to be a film director at Madrid Film School, where some of my colleagues and teachers were part of a new generation of film directors, such as Carlos Saura, Victor Erice, Mario Camus, Miguel Picazo. I worked part time as Luis Garcia Berlanga’s secretary. And that´s how I was, until I was sent to Rome to work as a reporter for one of the three most important Spanish dailies. In the ’50s, I wrote a daily report on politics and economy, but Rome was then a very special place for a film critic and in those days I interviewed for Film Ideal directors like Antonioni, Rossellini, Luigi Zampa, Visconti.
In the ’50s and ’60s, in Spain, Italy, England and France, I taped conversations with Hitchcock, Marco Ferreri, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Jean Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Luis Berlanga, Jacques Demi, François Trufffaut and no less than three long talks with my friend Nicholas Ray.
Orson Welles, the greatest film director, lived for some years in Spain with Paola Mori, his wife, and their daughter, Beatrice, who 50 years later is still my best friend. I thought that Orson was the best interview we could do. I sent him a special issue of our magazine, devoted to his films, and asked him for an long interview.
In fact, we spent several hours recording on a tape recorder in the garden of a house Orson had rented in a residential area distant from the city center in Madrid. He was very kind because it was May 6th. He was turning 49 years old that very day.
Since he dreamed about finishing his Don Quijote that he had started filming some years ago in Mexico, I asked him to let us print for some sequence of his script in order to add them to our interview. The next week, I visited him to pick up those pages. The conversation was so nice that I asked him if I could work with him if his project, Chimes at Midnight, was finally made.
Two months later, I came back from Paris where I met Marcel Ophuls, who was going to shoot an Eddie Constantine film in Spain and (asked if) I would be his assistant. I got a call from Alessandro Tasca to meet Orson. He wanted me to be his personal assistant for Chimes at Midnight. Once I finished my translation into Spanish of his French script, we had a farewell meeting. Marcel told me, “Juan you have now a wonderful opportunity. If you don´t take it, tell Welles that I will quit my movie to be his assistant.”
That is how I began to work with Welles, whose project was to do, back to back, Chimes at Midnight and Treasure Island. He was afraid that Chimes wouldn’t be a very appealing film at the box office and he proposed a remake of Treasure Island to the pack. It was a way to cover the money deficit of Chimes with a more popular film based on Stevenson´s classical novel.
In fact, for financial reasons, he suggested that Treasure Island would get a good subsidy as a Spanish movie shot in this country – but a Spanish director and most of the technicians were needed as part of the deal. At a meeting with the Spanish producers, Orson Welles suggested a director for Treasure Island with whom I had written a couple of scripts, Jesus Franco. The producers became rather startled because Franco never was a prestigious director in Spain. (Producers Emiliano) Piedra and (Angel) Escolano wanted a more famous Spanish director. At that working meeting, Orson didn’t mention it was my suggestion and he invented his own lie. He said that he had been told in Paris that young Jesus Franco was a very talented director.
Jesus was under contract to make Treasure Island, which was postponed after a week shooting on the Mediterranean coast of Alicante. The rented ship had been built for John Paul Jones, a film directed in Spain by John Farrow. It was the first Samuel Bronston production in the country. Then for three weeks time, Franco helped Orson on the Chimes scenes when we had many extras in the shooting. Then later Welles disagreed with him and Franco left the film. Treasure Island was wrapped. Years later, we had a long lunch: Piedra, Franco, Welles and I to pick up again the project. No economic agreement was reached with Piedra and some time later John Hough directed the film.
I didn’t start well my relations with Emiliano Piedra as a producer, but later we became good friends. I even translated, at Orson´s request, the dialogue of Chimes, and was a supervisor of the dubbing into Spanish. Some years later, I did the same job for (F For) Fake that had Piedra bought at the Berlin Festival.
When the decision was made to start shooting (Chimes at Midnight) in October 1964, we were still a minimum team. Since I was fluent in French and Italian, I sometimes accompanied Alessando Tasca, the executive producer, to get some permissions, and then made a trip to Barcelona in late August with the French director of photography of The Trial, Edmond Richard, to spot possible locations in the Gothic quarter in Barcelona and a village where Welles had heard of an interesting old church in an old castle: Cardona. With Richard, we took photographs for Orson…
Orson phoned me early in the morning to congratulate me on the birth of my first daughter, Laura, and asking for an after lunch meeting at his home. As soon as we left the Madrid airport, I ran to meet my first daughter. There I saw a big flower bouquet with a beautiful card from Welles and another from Nicholas Ray, whose bar in Madrid, “Nicca’s,” where you could find sometimes John Wayne when shooting in Madrid, was two blocks from the clinic where Laura was born.
What were some of your duties on Chimes?
I always had to be as close to Welles as possible. He was rather fluent in Spanish but I usually had to translate his orders to the film technicians, to the extras… The assistant director on the first part of the shooting of Chimes was very brave on his job, but he was not very good in English. I usually had to translate to European actors. When the first assistant was very busy in the crowd scenes, the battle scenes, as well as in the interior scenes in the King’s castle or in Mistress Quickly tavern, I was there to help a little.
Once this assistant left (because he was) angry with Welles, I was for three or four days the only assistant. We were filming the duel in the battle between Prince Hal and the young Percy. They asked me to keep this job but I preferred to work essentially for Orson. They put under contract a young Mexican, Tony Fuentes, who was brilliant as an assistant and spoke American English. Last I knew, he was working in Hollywood.
Once the filming was over, Orson asked me to be with him in the editing room. Sometimes I would go with him to the sound studios where he made the dubbing of some speeches by Falstaff (after) he had found the sound for technical reasons was not as good as he liked. When the final sound mixing was being done in a Paris studio, the producer thought my work on Chimes was over and I remained in Spain. Two days later, Welles asked Emiliano Piedra, the producer, to bring me back by plane to Paris, as he wanted me to be there… He wanted me to see by his side the definitive mixing of the long battle scene, now praised all over the world, between the armies of Prince Hal and Henry Percy.
Also, he would ask me to find some special music records as I knew the city quite well and our sound studio was far from Paris. And, if possible, to find for him his Havana cigars. De Gaulle had put some strict measures on Cuban trade and other errands on my trip, as I had done sometimes in Spain when he was editing his film.
You were close with not only Welles, but his wife, Paola Mori. What was she like?
I usually spoke Italian to her. In the ’50s, I had lived and studied in Rome and Naples for two years.
She was a very beautiful, nice and extremely friendly woman. When we were still a very small team, on the very start of the pre-production of Chimes, I sometimes would go shopping with Paola and Keith Baxter looking for some tissues Welles needed for a special custom. Weeks before the shooting started, Keith Baxter and I went scouting with Paola and Orson for possible shooting places for Chimes in a big quiet park park in the outskirts of Madrid.
Beatrice has the talent of Orson and the grace and beauty of Paola. Beatrice for more than 50 years is still my best friend. We – my wife, children and I – have spent some days with her throughout the years in Las Vegas, Morocco, Madrid and Ronda. I went with her to Ronda to leave Orson´s ashes in the estate of his friend, bullfighter Antonio Ordoñez.
The Welles family took part in the making of In The Land of Don Quixote. Were you involved in the shoot?
The filming of the Italian TV series was made before I got in touch with Orson. I have seen the Italian series and interviewed for hours the Spanish newsreel cameraman who used to work at the time for Franco’s Spanish weekly newsreel projected every day in every Spanish cinema before the commercial feature films.
Orson is shown in those reels with Paola and Beatrice, who was very young, taking flamenco dancing lessons in Seville, traveling with his family in a car and then introducing some of the country places he really loved.
In one of our talks in the small moviola room where he was editing Chimes, he told me that In the Land of Don Quijote was just a travelogue series. But he wrote many pages on the places he filmed – Spanish historical places such as Granada, Seville, Madrid, Salamanca, local fairs, bullfighting, painters like Velazquez, Goya, (and) landscapes. He deeply loved Cervantes and the country people in Spain.
After Chimes at Midnight, I had some more meetings with Welles. He asked me to translate into Spanish his script The Full Moon, based on thee stories by Isaak Dinesen The Immortal Story, The Old Chevalier, and The Heroine)… Also the almost finished script of Don Quijote.
What was the extent of your involvement in Don Quixote?
I took part in the talks about finishing Don Quijote in Spain with a brilliant and wealthy Spanish producer who had already funded some good films in the early ’60s.
At that time, Orson, Beatrice and Paola left Madrid for London for a couple of weeks for Christmas. He told me to get a Spanish film editor and work for a couple of weeks seeing a rough copy of Don Qiijote he had in the editing room on the basement of his villa. He wanted us to revise the reels of the rough copy with sound, and the majority majority, still silent, to be dubbed in a near future. It was about 75 minutes of rough copy.
When Welles (was) on his Christmas holiday in London, he asked me to help the cutter repair some minor damages on the copy of the film. I (watched) several reels a day on the editing table. Francisco Reiguera and (Akim) Tamiroff were great as Quijote and Sancho Panza.
(When Orson) was filming in Hong Kong as an actor, (he was also) thinking about the best way to finish his Don Quijote. So he sent a letter to the director of the Italian Radio-Television (RAI) to co-produce several programs on Spain. RAI would show the series in Italy and Orson would deal the rights in some other countries.
What he really was thinking of a deal to finish Don Quijote. Akim Tamiroff was ready, but Welles needed Francisco Reiguera, a Spanish republican who had fled Spain when Franco´s armies won the Spanish Civil War in 1939. I even asked the opinion of a friend of mine in the Spanish Foreign Affairs Ministry, who had been attached to the Spanish diplomatic missions in India, Argentine and other countries, to know if Reiguera would possibly go to jail for his political ideas from 30 years past. My friend told me after a time that Reiguera might have no trouble, but still the actor was afraid. He was working in Mexico and we had seen him in small parts in several Buñuel Mexican films. So Reiguera flew to Italy, where Welles filmed some adventures of Don Qiojote and Sancho Panza.
Still, Orson aimed to finish his film in Spain and that was the reason for my translating his screenplay into Spanish, since the censorship was mandatory for any screenplay to be shot in Spain. It was astonishing to search in Cervantes prose, and see how deeply Welles understood the novel and how he took dialogues from distant pages to write his scenes with a very deep understanding of Cervantes prose.
What was it about Spain that Welles found so appealing?
Orson loved the country, its landscapes and the people. He often said “Spain was not a country in its diversity, but a continent.”
I never spoke to him about his decision, but his Spanish lawyer was working for some time on the Spanish official documents for Orson to become a Spanish citizen. That would have let him apply for the official state aid for filmmaking in Spain.
I think he deeply loved France and Spain, but in Paris he was in a much better position to make films not only in France but also in England and Italy… In a much more culturally developed country than Franco’s fascist military government in Spain.
When Dino De Laurentiis was going to produce The Bible, directed by some great filmmakers , Welles wrote the script for the Jacob episode and took a large number of locations photos for the Spanish locations he had chosen. De Laurentiis chose the British dramatist Christopher Fry as the screenwriter for the whole project, but Welles wrote his own script of Abraham and he even wrote Luchino Visconti’s episode of Joseph and His Brothers. Welles and De Laurentiis kept (that) their secret. Orson let me know about this correspondence when I was by his side everyday cutting Chimes at Midnight.
In my opinion, his deep fondness for bullfights was the main reason for living in Spain. Sometimes he talked about his trips from Hollywood to Mexico to attend great corridas, about his respect and deep admiration for the Spanish matador, Manolete, killed in the ’50s by a bull in the south of Spain. He told me he was really happy when, at a meeting of bullfighters, he could follow their views on the bulls, the fights on the arena, their opinions about an art he loved most.
People respected Orson very much, so he could attend corridas like a Spaniard, without being disturbed by several thousands of people attending the bullfights. Back in those days, the Spanish people were very respectful of foreigners and deeply moved to see Welles happy in their country, knowing that he was a world-famous actor and film director.
Sometimes we were working in his apartment very near his own home, where the moviolas and a lot of tin cases with the film were kept. We had no phone and I would go to a nearby bar to call the film lab. The TV at the bar was always on and one afternoon I suddenly caught a glimpse of Orson among the aficionados at a Madrid bullring at least 300 kilometers away. Orson had left the cutting job for the day and we thought he was at home writing, reading or calling to Paris, London or New York.
The next morning he was again early at the cutting room,
He enjoyed his daily, quiet life in Spain, the very fine lunches and the respect people had for him. There he could write. He was all his life an avid reader.
Nobody approached him as a film star, or as a great filmmaker. He was just an “Americano” who enjoyed living in a country he had first known and loved before his American successful days in the theatre, radio and movies.
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