Spanish screenwriter Agustín Sánchez Vidal has just published Quijote Welles, a novel which delves into Orson Welles’ love of both Spain and the Cervante’s character Don Quixote.
The 668-page novel utilizes interviews, diaries, confessions and even fragments of the Don Quixote script.
Vidal, a professor of Film History at the University of Zaragoza, is the author of The Master Key and Nudo de sangre and winner of the 2016 Aragonese Literature Prize.
“Quijote Welles was about to be my first fiction text, before The Master Key. It was not for two reasons: I did not want to jump into the novel with a work about my professional specialty, cinema, and because of responsibility. I think I didn’t have the ability to handle Orson Welles, who is one of the brightest, most intelligent, most cultured characters that exists, and to make him talk,” Vidal told the Spanish newspaper Heraldo de Aragon.
The novel utilitzes dialogue and quotes uttered by Welles and people like Jesús Franco and Luis Buñuel, as well as fragments from the filmmaker’s Don Quixote script.
From book publisher Fórcola Ediciones’ description:
A young journalist, Barbara Galway, sets out on the ambitious and perhaps impossible mission of writing the biography in the form of interviews of one of the most famous directors and actors of the 20th century, Orson Welles, at that time a genius in low hours. Throughout their encounters, she discovers in him an overflowing creativity, undermined by a self-destructive background. But, beyond the clichés – inveterate cigar smoker, fondness for fake noses, good hotels, alcohol, sex, or binge eating – Barbara is bewitched by two recurring themes that inform their conversations from the beginning: a Always unfinished film about Don Quixote and love for Spain, where he rivaled his compatriot Ernest Hemingway and shot Mr. Arkadin and Chimes at Midnight. On account of that tape in fragments, whose thousands of meters are scattered in cans, laboratories or storage rooms, and that Welles, the man of the Great Shadow, carries in his suitcases during his travels, turned into Wandering filmmaker – Barbara, who stops at nothing, confirms that there is hardly a script for Don Quixote, that it has been improvised on the fly and that for three decades the director has not managed to finish filming and editing it. Now the last chance, with Steven Spielberg as producer, is up in the air. The various testimonies or encounters of the journalist with John Huston, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Suzanne Cloutier, Charlton Heston, Miguel Delibes, María Asquerino, Gil Parrondo, Pedro Vidal, Keith Baxter, Jesús Franco, Ira Wohl, Audrey Stainton, Frank Marshall, Salvador Dalí, Peter Viertel, Sergio Leone, Gore Vidal, Pier Paolo Pasolini or Luis Buñuel, among others, complete the mosaic of this story as a tessera, whose common thread is Orson Welles’s route through Spain in the 1950s and 1960s. last century, when the lands and culture of Don Quixote have been trampled by a Hollywood subsidiary in the hands of Samuel Bronston or the spaghetti westerns. And that idealized country, now sold to industrialization and tourism, is volatile, while he doubts that the Cervantes characters are still in a position to serve as spokesmen.
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