By RAY KELLY
Oscar winning documentarian Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor) is a self-professed Orson Welles fanatic, and the opportunity to explore a misunderstood chapter in the late filmmaker’s life proved hard to resist
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead offers an insightful and highly entertaining look into The Other Side of the Wind, a project Welles devoted much and time and energy toward, only to die at age 70 without seeing it completed.
In spring 2015, Neville read an excerpt of Josh Karp’s book Orson Welles’s Last Movie in Vanity Fair. Intrigued by the story, he approached Karp, who introduced him to The Other Side of the Wind producer Filip Jan Rymsza. The two agreed to a companion documentary to the completed Welles feature. The two films were sold by Rymsza to Netflix as a package deal. (Rymsza and Karp both serve as producers of the documentary, alongside Neville and Korelan Matteson.)
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, which debuts on Netflix on November 2, follows the tumultuous production from the first day of shooting in August 1970 until Welles’ death in October 1985. It is loaded with a trove of never-before-seen outtakes from the film and tales from all of the key participants, who sometimes offer conflicting accounts of what happened during the 1970s shoot.
“With Orson, there were so many alternate truths,” Neville said. “People want you to sometimes be the arbiter of truth. With Orson, that is a fool’s errand.”
The documentary has received positive notices with The Hollywood Reporter saying it has a “great deal to offer to Wellesians, but also to film students and the merely culturally curious who like to learn what goes on behind the scenes in the lives of deeply creative but flawed human beings.”
Neville spoke with Wellesnet about how the documentary was influenced by another Welles film and his effort to recount the making of The Other Side of the Wind.
Why did you decide to make a documentary about The Other Side of the Wind?
I was a Welles fanatic. F for Fake was an influential film for me. There is a whole cottage industry in Orson Welles books and biographies. I didn’t think there was another story to be told. Then, when I read the excerpt of Josh Karp’s book, I loved it. I called Josh and said, “If I could my hands of that footage, I think there’s interesting film to be told.”
So much of what was happening in Orson’s life was being put into that movie. It’s a chapter in Orson’s life that I think was misunderstood. I think the public perception of his latter years is that Orson was doing commercials, just a bit of a has-been, and not working. Because The Other Side of the Wind did not come out, people did not appreciate the work he was doing. He did so much work. I felt this was a chance to tell that last chapter of his life more fully.
You chose to start the documentary with the actual filming and end with Welles’ death. Did you ever think of covering a much larger time frame?
I think it would’ve been unwieldy. I had a bit about him meeting Hemingway, Spanish Earth and the fights they had (in 1937). We had another scene of Keith Baxter talking about Sacred Beasts (a proposed early 1960s take on the subject) and what the original script was as Orson told him. Even those things started to feel distant from what we were trying to do.
He had such a huge life. I felt looking at it through a keyhole gave us more freedom. I have seen virtually every Orson documentary and I really went out of my way to make it feel fresh and different.
Welles and his late cinematographer Gary Graver are well represented in archival clips — and it seems you interviewed everybody still alive. You interviewed his youngest daughter, Beatrice; his companion and co-writer, Oja Kodar; and Andres Vicente Gomez, the Spanish producer some have accused of embezzlement. How did you pull that off?
You mentioned the three who were perhaps the trickiest to get. The overwhelming sense I got from everybody else on the list was that it was a chance to tell the story they have been wanting to tell forever. This was the first film some these people had worked on or it was early in their career. It was indelible.
I felt the two incredibly important voices I needed (were Kodar and Gomez).
Oja was a co-writer and star and I really wanted her voice. I approached her, talked and offered to go to Croatia. She asked me to send her my questions. She wrote back and said she would record her answers and send them back to me, which is what she did. So that was unusual, but very helpful. She said it was probably the last interview she will give on this. I felt her voice was essential. If her voice was not in this movie, there would have been a hole. I was happy she was going to do that.
Gomez was a little suspicious. I told him, “Nobody knows your side of the story” — and hearing his side makes it balanced. Without it, it would’ve been very different.
Other than that, everyone else kind of jumped at it.
Welles maintaied the movie was not autobiographical, but clearly there are elements of the reality of his life in that of the fictional Jake Hannaford. Do you think he was aware of how much of his own life and circumstances were in the film?
That’s a good question, but I feel I cannot presume to know what Orson would have known. It is a slippery slope.
So many things, from his relationship with Pauline Kael to his relationship with Peter to his relationship with many of his actors… I feel so much of his story, his relationship with Hollywood, is all reflected in there. However, the one major departure is the machismo of Hannaford. I think Orson would point to that. That is not who Orson was. But I think all of the other trappings of the story are very much Orson.
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead invokes the style and whimsy of Welles’ essay film F for Fake. What is it about F for Fake that appeals to you?
One thing I love about F for Fake is that Orson asks a lot of his audience. I feel too often with documentaries people spoon feed the audience. Orson was the opposite. I like this idea that “I’m going to challenge you to follow along and make up your own mind.” I think the overwhelming experience after watching F for Fake is that I want to watch it again— right now. There is an element of “let’s challenge the audience and make them work for it” that I love as a viewer. I wanted to play with that idea.
I did things did with this (movie) I have not done on documentaries before — from the way I shot it to the lack of IDs to the speed of the edits. If you don’t experiment when you’re making something about Orson, when are you ever going to have that chance? I felt we not only had the permission, but the responsibility to play with form.
The documentary ends on a somewhat cheeky note. You strongly suggest that the completion of the feature film was perhaps unnecessary and your documentary is more in tune with what Orson would have wanted.
That was cheeky (laughs). I was being provocative. Orson was nothing, if not provocative. If my North Star was F for Fake, it felt having a bit of a twist at the end is what would have Orson loved, a little bit of a trick. I am not going to argue that it is true. Anything that’s more fodder for debate is great!
But do you think The Other Side of the Wind should have been left unfinished? Should the producers have just gone the documentary route?
No, actually.
The reason I bring this up is it has been suggested by some scholars, and those close to Welles, over the years that completing the film in his absence would be a mistake. They advocated using the footage in a documentary.
If you get both, then everybody’s entitled to their opinion. What was interesting about making the documentary was we were making these films in tandem. We were getting the batches of footage together, but we were not doing them together.
We were very deep into finishing our film before we looked at the feature. I was the last person to watch the feature because I wanted the documentary be what the documentary wanted to be before I was influenced by watching the feature.
When I did watch the feature, I was really pleasantly surprised by how complementary they were, but also how different they were.
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