Orson Welles Talks About Making 'Citizen Kane' | The Dick Cavett Show

Mr. Wells, I apologize. Please, Orson, please. Oh. Don't call me. Yes, my goodness. All right. Yeah. I must say, though, that there is a thing about calling you by your first name, which is done by people whose last names you don't know, that rather bewilders me. Have you ever had that happen? No. In show business, in movies, we get it all the time, you know. The second assistant director to whom you haven't been introduced to always calls you by your first name. And I had one meet me at the airport for a plane this year, and he said, hi, Orson, glad to see you. And he turned to the porter and said, sir, do you mind taking these bags? Curious. When you were out there, I've always wanted to know the answer to this, that you always hear that when you were 26 years old and you made Citizen Kane, and they said, you can't do these things, you can't have the background in focus or whatever it was, or you can't shoot a scene that way, Mr. Wells or young Mr. Wells or Orson or whatever they called you then. And you knew that you could. And how did you know this? Because I didn't know any better, and it's very much in the line with what Jack was saying earlier in the show. It comes from, from just, you know, sheer dumbness. You're sure it's got to be your good and your great, just ignorance. There's no authority in the world like it. But there's got to be something more than that technically. I mean, how did you know that? You know technically that the whole bag of movies can be learned in about a day and a half. I kid you not. Now, how does it work? How do you do it? Get a guy who knows how to... And then ask him, and that's the end of it. It isn't much harder than taking home movies. It's just about three points harder. And all these guys who do it try to make a big mystery of it because that's their living. And I have the right to say it because I had in my first picture in Kane, the greatest cameraman who ever lived was Greg Toland. And he came to my office and said, I want to work in your picture. My name is Toland. I said, why do you, Mr. Toland? He said, because you've never made a picture. You don't know what cannot be done. And so I said, but I really don't. Can you tell me? He says, there's nothing to it. And he gave me the day and a half lessons. And he was right. Showed you how the camera works. That's right. Nothing to do. And so we had the day and a half and there it was. But the only thing was I'd been directing in the theater for years and nowadays they have lighting people. We did then. And I had some of the greatest lighting people, in fact, but many of the shows I lit myself and I was supervised. And I thought a director did that in a movie. So for the first 10 days I was moving the lights around, you see. And Toland was behind me fixing it up and changing the readings and saying, shut up, let him go on. I want to see what he's up to, which was very chic of him, I think. And then somebody told me and then I went and got on my knees and apologized and everything. I thought that's what the directors did. Because if you see a picture by Ford, for example, you were speaking of Jack Ford earlier. He's had, what, must be a hundred cameramen in his long career. And almost every Ford picture you can tell from the look of it that it's a Ford picture, just from the physical look of it. His signature is on it, you know. When every list of great films, of course, many of them lead with Citizen Kane and say it's the finest film made. Do you agree? No, certainly not. My next one is, though, that's the... The Magnificent Ambersons. No, not the one after that, the one I'm preparing at this moment. Oh, the next one. That is. That's going to make history. Could you give us the title of that? I haven't decided what it is yet. Oh. Thank you. Now, could I just check one other thing with you? Is it true that the Hursts tried to actually have the film destroyed before it was screened? They tried to have it destroyed. They even tried to frame me. In one town, I was doing some kind of date, I don't know, a bond tour, a lecture, some kind of a gig, and I was in a nightclub afterwards, waiting to go back to my hotel, have a little supper. Waiter came up and says, there's a police officer wants to see you. Well, I tried to hide, because if that ever happens, I'm sure I'm guilty. I don't know how you are about it, but then I see a cop, I know I did it. There was no way out of it. I had to go see him, and he took me aside, and he said, Orston, I don't know why they always call me Orston, he says, don't go back to your hotel room. I said, why? He says, they've got a minor staked out there, and a photographer. A lady? Luckily, a lady, I think. I prefer to tell it that way. I meant ER, as opposed to OR, I'm sorry. And they were going to frame me. And I would have been in jail, with the cops waiting to jump in and arrest me. That was not Mr. Hurst itself, it was somebody in that town who thought he'd get in good with the boss by doing a favor. I don't think Hurst would have stooped to that. Would you change- Although I did have a conversation with him about the picture, which was in an elevator in San Francisco the night it opened. We found ourselves going up together, and he'd known my father, I'd never met him. And I introduced myself, things you'll do when you're young, you know. And I said, would you like to come to the opening tonight? And he didn't answer, and I said, well, Mr. Cain would have come. And that's the difference between the two people, because the character of Charles Foster Cain had enough class to have gone to the opening. He just, he was very uptight, that was the end of that. It wasn't really about him, it was made up of a lot of people, that's the truth of it. What's the last time you saw it? I saw it, that opening in San Francisco, and I snuck out right after it started. I've never seen a picture of mine after I finished it. You haven't seen Citizen Cain in all these years? No picture I've ever made, except as an actor, but never seen a picture I've directed. Only once? Yeah. Well, a thousand times in the cutting room. Yeah. But why wouldn't you want to see it now? Because I like to sit here and think how good it must have been, you know. Is there any chance that you would change any of it, or do any of it again? Of course, everything. You'd want to change everything, I think. You know, don't you want to change things after you've done them, and a movie can't be changed? No, that was the whole thing. And I like to think, oh yes, and all those great pictures, and I know if I saw them that all confidence would go.