Peter Bogdanovich talks with director Rian Johnson (Knives Out) about Orson Welles, the authorship of Citizen Kane and making The Other Side of the Wind in an entertaining third episode of the new podcast series One Handshake Away. Other topics include the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, FDR and The Trial.
Taped before Bogdanovich’s death two years ago, Johnson talks with The Last Picture Show filmmaker about Welles’ final major project and other career highlights. Their conversation is punctuated with archival interviews with Welles. The podcast is narrated by Bogdanovich’s former wife, Louise Stratten.
Of Welles, Johnson says: “…he’s one of my all time favorite directors, and he’s somebody who’s whose work I really discovered kind of in film school, right when I was being exposed to Fellini and a lot of directors. And they’re becoming kind of lifetime obsessions for me. And Welles was right there at the start, and he’s one of those directors that has, as I’ve discovered, his work and kind of come back to it over the years. He’s just been kind of a bottomless research — resource of inspiration, not only his work, but also his his life and sort of the mythology of the man.”
In a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, Johnson said he was “gobsmacked” after two private screenings of The Other Side of the Wind before its release on Netflix.
“As a Welles fan, this movie lands so hard,” Johnson told Vanity Fair. “On a style level, it’s cut in a way that feels slightly beyond where we are now. It’s got a very fast, collage-like feel. This movie keys directly into what’s grand and tragic about (Welles’) later years. It taps directly into the fuse box of that tragedy. I’ve seen it twice, and I need to see it a dozen more times.”
At the close of the 48-minute podcast, Johnson asks Bogdanovich about his relationship with his idol.
“Orson was a pretty big deal. And I always loved him. And even though we had a falling out there for a while because of Saint Jack. We ended up on a good note, you know,” Bogdanovich recalled. “I said to him at the last phone conversation we had about two weeks before he died, I said, ‘Gee Orson I feel like I’ve made so many mistakes.’ And he said, ‘well, it does seem to be impossible to go through life without making great many of them.’ We both laughed.”
The podcast can be heard at https://www.iheart.com/podcast/274-one-handshake-away-peter-b-147163042/episode/episode-3-rian-johnson-orson-150221591/ while a transcript can be read at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cVipc0q1Qfaeujj2ewqRJSgKO1aPGmeq/view
At the time of his death in January 2022, Bogdanovich was working on the podcast series that saw him in conversation with Johnson, directors Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino and Ken Burns and framed through a series of rare archival interviews with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and others. Bogdanovich wanted to call the series One Handshake Away because he believed that through him the contemporary directors were one handshake away from the pioneers.
Bogdanovich, who co-authored This is Orson Welles and co-starred in The Other Side of the Wind, passed away on January 6, 2022 at the age of 82. He worked to complete The Other Side of the Wind following Welles’ death in 1985.
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