Orson Welles on Citizen Kane

Orson, is it true that when Citizen Kane was being made that people actually tried to stop it being made and is it true that Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon, took it as being an attack on himself and tried to stop it when it was made being shown? To the first part of your question there was indeed a very definite effort to stop the film during shooting by those elements in the studio who were attempting to seize power because in those days studio politics, particularly RKO and indeed many of the big studios in Hollywood were very much like Central American republics and there were revolutions and counter-revolutions and every sort of palace intrigue and there was a big effort to overthrow the then head of the studio who was taken to be out of his mind because he'd given me this contract which made the making of these films possible and stopping me or proving my incompetence would have won their case. So it wasn't malice toward me, it was a cold-blooded political maneuver having nothing to do with Mr. Hearst. That came later, you asked me did Mr. Hearst attempt to stop it, it's quite another story. He didn't. Mr. Hearst was quite a bit like Kane although Kane isn't really founded on Hearst in particular. There are many people sat for it, so to speak, but he was like Kane in that he wouldn't have stooped to such a thing but he had many hatchet men, editors and representatives of this great network of newspapers all over the country and to get in good with the chief there was a good deal of very strong hatchet including an effort to frame me on a criminal charge which a policeman was good enough to tell me about. It's sensational and silly and dangerous and gangsterish as that, very kindly exaggerated but Mr. Hearst must be absolved. Was Mr. Hearst's staff absolutely wrong? I mean, when you say that it was based on that kind of man, was he really stronger in your mind than just being that kind of man? Well, let me ask you if you think he was libeled. Well, I don't know him. I see, yes. Well, do you think that the figure of Kane himself is a deeply unsympathetic figure? No. In the Soviet Union, for example, the film has been forbidden general distribution because this important capitalist and newspaper tycoon and anti-social and crypto-fascist figure, etc., to quote all the slogans, is too sympathetic and for that reason it's not shown, never has been. When you read about Citizen Kane, a lot of the things you read suggest that it was a very big social document, a massive attack on big American institutions of the day. Now, I've always seen it rather as a story, to be honest. Naturally, any story has got its implications, but I've seen it as a story. I'd like to know what your intentions were. Did you mean it as a social document or as a story? I must confess to having to... I must answer this in a way that I loathe. I must admit that it was intended consciously as a sort of social document, as an attack on the acquisitive society and indeed on acquisition in general, but I didn't think that up and then try to find a story to match the idea. Of course, I think the storyteller's first duty is always to the story. It makes it all the more ironic, doesn't it, that it should have been stopped in the Soviet Union. Yes, but of course it wasn't at all a communist picture or a Marxist picture. It was an attack on property and acquisition of property and... And the corruption. Yes, and of the acquisitive society of a man who... Of real gifts and real charm and real humanity who destroys himself and everything near him because, you know, tired old words, mammon and all that really was, you know. Now, when you made this film, you were only 25, weren't you? I think I should explain that I never looked as young as all that. The idea was to look very young indeed, indeed younger than anybody ever could look, and my whole face was yanked up with pieces of fish skin in the way old ladies are fixed up nowadays. I can't help feeling you must have been young sometime, Orson. I was certainly 25 years old, but there's a sort of untouched look about that face you may have noticed that's impossible in real life. Now, a thing I noticed particularly about that scene, I mean, everybody knows that you had the most astonishing contract that Hollywood has ever provided, ever, ever. Not financially speaking, in terms of authority and rights. Financially, it wasn't extraordinary in any way at all. It was extraordinary in the control it gave me over my own material. You had total control. Total control, so much so that the rushes, which I perhaps should explain, are the pieces of film that are shown at the end of the day's work, as I'm sure you understand, and are always checked by everybody in the studio, department heads and the bankers and distributors and everything, long before there's a rough cut. But according to the terms of my contract, the rushes couldn't be seen by anyone, and indeed the film couldn't be seen until it was ready for release. Except yourself. Yes, and my own family, and it was a family. We were a little closed group. Now, what I'd like to know is, seeing that you'd never in all your life ever made a film before Caine, and had never, so far as I'm aware, been in a studio before Caine, quite apart from how you landed this contract, which was a result of enormous notoriety at the time and other gifts. What I'd like to know is... I know, really, I must interrupt you. I got that good a contract because I didn't really want to make a film. Well, you better develop that. And you know, when you don't really want to go out to Hollywood, or at least this was true in the old days, the golden days of Hollywood, when you honestly didn't want to go, then the deals got better and better. In my case, I didn't want money. I wanted authority. So I asked the impossible, hoping to be left alone. And at the end of a year's negotiations, I got it. Yes. Simply because there was no real vocation there. My love for films began only when we started work. Now, what I'd like to know is, where did you get the confidence from to make a film with such... Ignorance. Ignorance. Sheer ignorance. You know, there's no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession, I think, that you're timid, or careful. How did this ignorance show itself? I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do, or the imagination could do. And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you're taught all the things that the cameraman doesn't want to attempt, for fear he will be criticised for having failed. Yes. And in this case, I had a cameraman who didn't care if he was criticised, if he failed, and I didn't know that there were things you couldn't do. So anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph. You got away with enormous technical advances, didn't you? Simply by not knowing that they were impossible, or theoretically impossible. Yeah. And of course, again, I had a great advantage, not only in the real genius of my cameraman, but in the fact that he, like all great men, I think, who are masters of a craft, told me right at the outset that there was nothing about camera work that I couldn't learn in half a day, that any intelligent person couldn't learn in half a day. And he was right. It's true of an awful lot of things. Of all, you know, of every, you know, the great mystery that requires 20 years doesn't exist in any field, and certainly not in the camera. What I'd like to ask you about that, it's rather a technical question in a way. When you were making that sort of scene, and making that sort of shot, did you ever feel nervous that maybe you'd gone too far? I put myself in your shoes. You see, if I'd made that, I'd be terrified that I was just on the point of toppling over into farce, that I'd made the room too large. Did you have this sort of anxiety? No, because the room is that big. What room is that big? Awfully pompous answer, his room. Yes, pompous question, perhaps. No, not at all. You're quite right, and I should have had that fear, but I do feel that a man like Kane is very close to farce, and very close to parody, very close to burlesque, and that's why I tried every sort of thing, from sentimental tricks, to an attempt at genuine humanity, to keep him always counterbalance, but of course anybody who could build a place of that kind. Yes. You know, he's very close to low comedy. Of course he is. In Kane, there were these technical advances which everybody's talked about until they're blue in the face, and they, I think, you see Kane again today, you can see, have been largely digested by the film industry. I mean, you see the ceilings are now in the shots, the lighting of Kane is now in all kinds of films. They've been digested. The thing I noticed when I saw them the other day, before talking to you today, which I don't think has been digested at all, is the notion of making a film with a team of actors who've been brought from one theatre. It's very interesting you should say that, because nobody's ever pointed it out, as far as I know. The whole cast of that play, the entire cast, were a team from a theatre. We'd worked together for years. It was nobody who didn't belong to it, except the second girl and the wife, but I mean the great, the body of the people were, and all of them were new to films. Nobody'd ever been in front of a camera before, in the entire picture. No, I believe. Not one soul. Yeah. And that was deliberate. We didn't want anybody who knew anything, because they thought they would both show us up and change the dimension of the film. But it is true that that gives a kind of style. Automatic style to anything, just as a theatre, in which players live and work together for a certain length of time, begins to make its effect. When eventually Cane was made, it was an enormous success, as all the world knows. It's gone on being a success, and it's a long time ago now. Have you ever regretted that so great a success came so early? Well, I've regretted early successes in many fields, but I don't regret that in Cane, because it was the only chance I ever had of that kind. I'm glad I had it at any time in my life. I wish I had it more often. I wish I had a chance like that every year. There'd be 18 pictures. Yes, not just one. Two, Ambersons. Two, except Ambersons, the end of it. There's a very serious piece of surgery involved there, Change. Which wasn't done by you? No. There's two short scenes in it I didn't write or direct, and over three reels were taken out in their entirety, and they were, in my view, the reason for making the film. Not simply good reels, but the whole film was a preparation for those reels, which were too tough and too, in those days, too hard-boiled for the exhibitors' taste, and by the time I returned from South America, that's a long story I won't go into, to supervise the release of Ambersons, Archaea had fallen into the hands of the counter-revolutionary forces, and I no longer was invited into the cutting room. You've been denied the cutting room before. Several times. Just recently, on a touch of evil. Yes. That's happened really quite often to extremely individual filmmakers. I'm not saying it isn't a qualitative thing, it's a style, and there's a certain kind of filmmaker who really wants to make the film entirely on his own, and that sort of fellow is the sworn enemy of the system, and the system is at great pains to denigrate such a person. Not only myself, but many people like myself, and that's happened in Russia as well as America, it's happened in England, it happens everywhere in varying degrees. Seeing that this sort of thing happens... They rightly regard the artist as the enemy of their profession, you see. What do you think of Hollywood, Orson? I'm not at all against Hollywood. Not at all. It's a, I think, a remarkable community with a great history, and a very entertaining place to work in. The obvious things against it are so obvious there's really no need to list them over again. Anything you can say about Hollywood is true, good and bad. There's no extreme statement that doesn't apply, I think. I have heard it suggested that Citizen Kane is in some sort of sense autobiographical. The notion that Kane himself is some sort of version of myself, I'd really fail to recognize. Maybe out of blindness, but it seems to me that Kane is a... everything that I'm not. Good and bad.