Tag Archives: Emeric Pressburger

wendy2

Blu-ray Review Round-up: Films by Kelly Reichardt, Hong Sangsoo, Bill Gunn & more!

WendyWendy and Lucy (2008)
Oscilloscope Laboratories

There’s a scene in Kelly Reichardt’s first masterpiece, Wendy and Lucy, when Michelle Williams’ Wendy is apprehended by a self-righteous teenager working at a small-town Oregon grocery store. She’s trying to shoplift a few cans of barf diet for dogs, Lucy, who’s tied up outside. He hauls her back to the manager’s office, with an indignant quaver in his voice. “The rules apply to everyone equally,” he says. Reichardt, who’s quite possibly the greatest working American filmmaker, keeps the camera on Williams, whose hardened gaze flickers for a moment of incredulity at this statement. The rules apply to everyone equally? Like hell they do.

Wendy and Lucy is one of the most affecting portraits of working-class disaffection in American film. A life on the margins is acutely felt in Reichardt’s images of a gas-station bathroom, a desolate parking lot, a quieted port town, the inside of a busted Honda Accord. There’s beauty too: a stranger who’s kind for no reason other than being kind or the relationship one has with a dog. Lucy, played by Reichardt’s own dog, is a symbol of unadulterated good in a world that takes very little notice of her owner, a woman chasing opportunity in Alaska, if she can only get there.

Reichardt’s eye for striking, unexpected compositions reveals the strangeness in ordinary life and the inner turmoil that’s often hiding underneath a placid surface. There have been a lot of great performances in Reichardt films, particularly in her most recent film, Certain Women, which would have made Lily Gladstone a major star in a just world. But Williams is her ideal collaborator, a performer who pulls back the veil on an inner life with the slightest of gestures. Wendy and Lucy is often described as a small film but it’s not; it’s an expansive one, every character movement and pillow shot of Pacific Northwest terrain building to a devastating emotional climax.

After months of kicking myself for not picking up Soda’s UK Reichardt Blu-ray box before it went OOP, I’m grateful to Oscilloscope for upgrading Wendy and Lucy. (Now we could just use an Old Joy upgrade stateside.) The 1080p, 1.78:1 transfer is very pleasing, significantly improving on the DVD’s handling of the 16mm grain, which looks natural and well-supported here. Colors are true and clarity is strong. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is excellent. Some retrospective extras would have been welcome for a film of this stature, but nothing new is added from the DVD. The intriguing selection of experimental films by Reichardt’s Bard College colleagues remains a great bonus feature though.

Oscilloscope Laboratories / 2008 / Color / 1.78:1 / 80 min / $32.99

PersonalPersonal Problems (1980-1981)
Kino Lorber

A fascinating work of collaboration and experimentation, the “meta-soap opera” Personal Problems is a landmark of Black independent filmmaking, resurrected from the ashes of deteriorating video tape with a new restoration from Kino. Conceived by Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon and director Bill Gunn, the two-part film/television hybrid casts a restless eye on a family led by the irrepressible Johnnie Mae (Vertamae Grosvenor), an emergency room nurse in Harlem.

Consisting of direct-to-camera address, kitchen-sink domestic strife, musical interludes, nature interludes, juicy if undecipherable gossip and what seems like the whole range of human emotions, Personal Problems contains multitudes. It’s compelling and enervating in almost equal parts. Gunn’s curious video camera always seems to be in the right place to catch a moment, and the smearing inherent in the format lends both a verité-like realism and an otherworldly effect.

Part one, which revels in Gunn’s unusual cutting a little more, features an indelible performance from Grosvenor, whose Johnnie Mae is caught in a love triangle with her emotionally inconsistent husband (Walter Cotton, one of the project’s other originators) and a musician (Sam Waymon, Nina Simone’s brother). Though Personal Problems possesses the building blocks of soap-opera drama — affairs, unwelcome family members, unexpected death — it’s not organized around them. Though the film would benefit from staying centered on Johnnie Mae’s experiences, as Grosvenor is easily its standout actor, it’s approach is far too diffuse to be satisfied by that.

In part two, the focus tightens some with a very long scene set at a wake, and the complaints of a grieving family member become as grating to the viewer as they do the characters. One longs for the “unfocused” escape the first part would have provided. Personal Problems doesn’t play by the rules of narrative though — even rules it seemed to be following just minutes earlier. One can only imagine what a full season of this would have looked like.

Kino’s Blu-ray offers a 1080p, 1.33:1 image that is obviously limited by the capabilities of the 3/4” U-matic tape Personal Problems was shot on. But taking the smearing, ghosting and interlacing as a feature not a bug, it’s easy to appreciate the relative clarity of the image. Hiss is persistent, if not omnipresent, and the audio is pretty clean otherwise, taking into account the intentionally muffled sound of some overlapping dialogue. The disc is also a carefully assembled special edition, with preliminary video and radio versions, deleted scenes, cast and crew interviews, Q&A from the restoration premiere and a booklet with essays by Reed and author Nicholas Forster.

Kino Lorber / 1980-1981 / Color / 1.33:1 / 164 min / $29.95

MatterA Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Criterion Collection

Before viewing the new Criterion disc, it had been a while since I’d seen A Matter of Life and Death, and in my memory, it was mid-lower tier Powell and Pressburger, which is hardly faint praise given the high quality of the pair’s output. But still, it wasn’t major in my recollection. Well, that was a stupid thought.

The new 4K restoration of the three-strip Technicolor is certainly a factor — those reds, my god — but I’m not sure how I missed the reality that this is just a perfect movie, a fantasy in which the universe’s most ecstatic pleasures are earthly delights. The inversion of the expected — heaven’s scenes are in black and white, earth’s are in color — is a brilliant conceit. When WWII RAF pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) cheats death by surviving a jump from his burning plane, he emerges from the sea reborn into an idyllic paradise. Who can fault him for thinking he died and went to beachfront heaven? (Meanwhile, in the strict environs of the real thing, his dead buddy is bending the rules simply by waiting for him to arrive.)

When Peter realizes he hasn’t died, and he can actually pursue a relationship with the woman he fell for over the radio in his presumed final moments, he grabs the opportunity wholeheartedly, as does June (Kim Hunter), the American radio operator. And if love weren’t enough of a reason to exult in living, how about friendship, as offered by the magnanimous Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey, never more rakishly charming).

When the forces of heaven try to correct their accounting to atone for Peter’s accidental survival, the trio must mount a defense. A Matter of Life and Death seamlessly shifts from ebullient love story to wry celestial courtroom drama as metaphor for US-Britain-European relations, which might be the most ringing endorsement of Pressburger’s screenwriting adroitness there is. Powell, Pressburger, cinematographer Jack Cardiff and production designer Alfred Junge made so many capital-G Great films, it’s almost mind-boggling. To think I once thought A Matter of Life and Death wasn’t among them? Stupid.

Criterion’s 1080p, 1.37:1 Blu-ray presentation of the 4K restoration is remarkable, showcasing exceptional depth, astounding color and perfectly clean black and white images. The three-strip Technicolor restoration is impeccable, with none of the color inconsistencies that were present on the old Sony DVD release. The uncompressed mono soundtrack is exceptionally clean. A stunning disc for a stunning film. Ported over from the Sony DVD are Ian Christie’s audio commentary and a Martin Scorsese introduction. Newly filmed are an interview with Thelma Schoonmaker and a featurette on the film’s visual effects. A 1986 episode of The South Bank Show features Powell, while short doc The Colour Merchant focuses on Cardiff’s career. A restoration demonstration and an insert with an essay by critic Stephanie Zacharek are also included.

Criterion Collection / 1946 / Color/Black and white / 1.37:1 / 104 min / $39.95

RoccoRocco and His Brothers (1960)
Milestone Films

Is Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers a work of neorealism or melodrama? Certainly, the film sits somewhere at the intersection of the two, but for me, the film can be most appreciated for its bravura emotional flourishes. It may depict hardscrabble lives, but it does so with the same operatic charge given to the depiction of aristocracies in Senso and The Leopard.

The apparent neatness of the structure, in which each of the five brothers of a working-class Italian family is afforded a delineated section, belies the film’s messy sprawl, which Visconti luxuriates in. The intra-country fractures are writ small, playing out in the conflicts of a family who moves north to Milan.

The major players, brothers Simone (Renato Salvatori) and Rocco (Alain Delon), clash over their dispositional differences — Simone is a pugilist inside and outside of the ring, Rocco is sensitive — and their shared interest in Nadia (Annie Girardot), a prostitute who both brothers use and abuse in different ways. While Simone’s actions are far more egregious, Rocco’s attempts to play savior aren’t necessarily any better for Nadia, or for the family at large.

While all five brothers are constantly trying and failing to live up to the expectations of their religious, domineering mother (Katina Paxinou), it’s Rocco who takes on the biggest burden, and perhaps sets himself up for the most failure. Visconti raises the stakes expertly, every small disappointment or minor fit of rage a stepping stone toward the ultimate tragedy to come. The tragedy is both deeply personal and emblematic of the violent cultural and class shifts in postwar Italy. Looking at it from that perspective, the divide between melodrama and neorealism isn’t so obvious.

Milestone’s Blu-ray release features a 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer sourced from the same 4K restoration as the earlier UK Masters of Cinema release. Largely, this is an excellent transfer, full of impressive levels of fine detail and excellent grayscale reproduction. Image density and clarity can be inconsistent due to the condition of the elements, but the restoration has largely mitigated the damage that’s to blame for this. Overall, the film looks great, and the 2.0 uncompressed mono audio is solid, given the expected limitations of Italian post-sync dubbing of the era.

Milestone has wisely given the nearly three-hour film its own disc, shared just with the Martin Scorsese introduction. Disc two features a newly filmed interview with Caterina d’Amico, daughter of screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico, as well as archival cast and crew interviews, a brief selection of outtakes and a restoration demonstration.

Milestone Films / 1960 / Black and white / 1.85:1 / 177 min / $39.95

HongTwo Films by Hong Sangsoo: Woman is the Future of Man (2004) and Tale of Cinema (2005)
Arrow Academy

It can be difficult to keep up or catch up with South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, both because of his prolific output (he’s made about two-dozen features in just over two decades) and because many of his early films aren’t easily available in quality English-friendly versions. Arrow kicks off what is hopefully an outpouring of Hong Blu-ray upgrades with a twofer of early films in a US/UK release.

Though one could probably find thematic echoes in most pairs of Hong films, these two are well-suited to be presented together. In both, mirror images of two men reveal their unique brands of misogyny. In Woman is the Future of Man, Hong’s approach is blunt and acrid. Two friends, Lee Munho (Yoo Jitae) and Kim Hyeongon (Kim Taewoo), reunite and discover in their reminiscing that they dated the same woman, Park Seonhwa (Sung Hyunah). Munho seems to be the boorish, ostentatious antithesis to the meek Hyeongon, but flashbacks to their past interactions with Seonhwa complicate this idea. When they decide to go find her in the present, their fundamental similarities become even more apparent.

Tale of Cinema is more melancholy and beguiling, and its aims aren’t as immediately apparent. The emotionally damaged Jeon Sangwon (Lee Kiwoo) clings to the attention of Choi Youngshil (Uhm Jiwon), going so far as to convince her to overdose on sleeping pills with him in a suicide pact. Some of the drama feels a bit overdetermined, and Hong’s typical even-keeled stylistic approach is replaced with a more mobile, zooming camera. The reason becomes apparent in the film’s second half, which introduces a metafictional wrinkle and a new character: the blissfully oblivious Kim Dongsoo (Kim Sangkyung), a source of plenty of cringe comedy in his interactions with Youngshil and others, and a way for Hong to tease out an examination of the divide between film and real life.

Both films share a disc in Arrow’s release, which features two solid 1080p, 1.85:1 transfers. Visuals in both can be a little flat, but clarity and sharpness are strong. Digital manipulation doesn’t appear to be an issue. 2.0 and 5.1 DTS-HD tracks are available for both films, offering clean if understandably sedate dialogue-heavy presentations. Extras include introductions by Tony Rayns and Martin Scorsese, a making-of for Woman and cast interviews for both films. Trailers, galleries and a booklet with an essay by critic Michael Sicinski are also included.

Arrow Academy / 2004/2005 / Color / 1.85:1 / 88 min/89 min / $39.95

PeterBlack Peter (Černý Petr, 1964)
Second Run

Miloš Forman’s debut feature is mostly a modest affair, with a gentler satiric tone than his later Czech films, but its pleasures are numerous, from its wry depiction of the frustrations of teenaged life to the sense that its protagonist’s aimlessness could result in the film going in just about any direction. Perhaps it’s a stretch to call Black Peter unpredictable, but when sullen Petr (Ladislav Jakim) leaves the grocery store where he works to follow a customer he suspects of shoplifting, one could easily see the film following his detours through the streets for the rest of its running time.

Instead, the film’s episodic structure sees Petr trying to please his imperious boss, who extols the integrity of his customers while urging Petr to watch them closely for any suspicious behavior, and clumsily wooing the girlfriend (Pavla Martínková) of an acquaintance. He jockeys for social positioning with another teenager, Čenda (Vladimír Pucholt), who first comes across as a boorish asshole before we realize how pathetic he is. And naturally for a Forman film, there’s a wide disconnect between generations; Petr’s imperious father (Jan Vostrčil) doesn’t need much of a reason to berate his son, and his haranguing makes for the film’s most overt “fuck you” to authority with its final freeze-framed image.

Second Run’s region-free Blu-ray marks a vast improvement over the old Facets DVD (a statement that probably always goes without saying). Sourced from the Czech National Film Archive’s 4K restoration, the 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer displays excellent depth and healthy fine detail. A few shots have some inconsistent softness, but it’s minor. Damage is limited to a few isolated incidents. The 2.0 uncompressed mono soundtrack is clean and clear. A nice slate of extras accompanies the film: a typically detailed Michael Brooke audio commentary, a new interview with Martínková and an archival Forman interview about the production of the film. A booklet features an essay on Forman and the film by Jonathan Owen.

Second Run / 1964 / Black and white / 1.37:1 / 90 min / £19.99

 

Dusty Somers is a Seattle-based writer and editor who splits his critical ambitions between writing Blu-ray & DVD reviews and theater criticism. He’s a member of the Online Film Critics Society and Seattle Theater Writers.

Lunch featured 1

His Lunches with Orson – Henry Jaglom Remembers Orson Welles

Lunch

Alternately sad, hilarious, outrageous, and revelatory, My Lunches with Orson is the must-read Peter Biskind-edited book of transcribed tape-recorded conversations between the great director-writer-actor Orson Welles and his friend, confidant, disciple, and go-between in those terrible last years, fellow director-writer-actor Henry Jaglom.

By the late 1970s through the mid ‘80s, Welles’s meteoric rise in the 1930s and early forties was a distant memory. His last completed work, F for Fake (1974), was barely released, and though today it’s recognized as a daring, innovative work, and the time it was mostly met with hostile reviews. Pauline Kael’s vicious essay, Raising Kane, since discredited, tried to deny Welles his unimpeachable masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941), suggesting co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz was the true auteur behind that film. Later, Charles Higham, infamous for his disreputable, trashy “biographies” (e.g., Errol Flynn: The Untold Story; Higham was also notorious among his peers as a thief, pilfering one-of-a-kind archive material) further damaged Welles’s career with books theorizing that Welles pathologically abandoned projects before they were finished.

But Welles was a peerless cinema artist responsible for the movie widely regarded as the greatest ever made, to say nothing of nearly a dozen or so other masterpieces and near-masterpieces. And yet no one, even the most successful actors and directors in Hollywood, people who regarded Welles as a personal friend and a major influence on their own careers, would help him when he needed them most. Instead, during this time, Welles was forced to rely on income as a pitchman (for Paul Masson wines, etc.) and intermittent work doing TV guest spots and movie cameos.

The exception was Henry Jaglom, who directed Welles in Jaglom’s first movie, A Safe Place (1971), as well as Welles’s last film appearance, in Jaglom’s charming Someone to Love (1985). Jaglom called in every favor, asking friends and colleagues from his BBS/New Hollywood days and beyond, contacts he had made through the distributions and film festival screenings of his own films (Sitting Ducks, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, etc.) to locate financing for Welles’s latest projects: The Big Brass Ring about a gay presidential candidate in 1940s America; The Cradle Will Rock, an autobiographical project about the Federal Theatre Project’s 1937 musical of the same name; a version of King Lear to have starred Welles; and The Dreamers, based on two stories by Isak Dinesen that was to have starred Welles’s partner, Oja Kodar.

Lunch 2

The dismally unsuccessful efforts to get any of these projects made has long been the source of much speculation and confusion, but My Lunches with Orson traces the unraveling of these projects in heartbreaking detail and clarity.

And yet My Lunches with Orson isn’t merely depressing. The great raconteur Welles was on myriad talk shows of the period is also on display, but here, privately dining with Jaglom at Ma Maison, he speaks with a candor that, on almost every page, is outrageously funny and revealing. For instance, there’s a long discussion where Jaglom passes along an offer for Welles to appear on The Love Boat, which Welles is reluctant to accept. The money isn’t so hot and the obvious lure for down-and-out talent – a free cruise – doesn’t appeal to him. “They don’t know that I can go on any cruise in the world free,” he says, “if I lecture, or do magic one night and then sign autographs.”

But there’s another reason: “I don’t like the man who plays the captain. From Mary Tyler Moore. He has a kind of New York accent that gets my hackles up. I can’t stand it!”

Welles gleefully gets Jaglom’s hackles up, too, saying outrageous things about various actors (e.g., “Larry [Olivier] is very – I mean, seriously – stupid”; he refers to Dudley Moore as “the dwarf,” etc.”), films (he and Jaglom share a dislike of Vertigo but argue over the merits of Powell & Pressburger), and various nationalities and ethnicities. “Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks…Measure them. Measure them!”

The book, of course, is much more than this, with Welles making astute observations of 20th century history and art that he was so much a part of, as well as prescient statements about Hollywood and the industry that so stupidly rejected him. Most significantly, it helps clarify exactly why (and because of whom) he was ultimately unable to get any of these promising works off the ground, and identifying those who, like Prince Hal in Falstaff, rejected him and broke his heart.

orson_jaglom_4

Long after reading My Lunches with Orson some questions remained, and Henry Jaglom generously took time out from the busy postproduction of his latest film, Ovation (2015), to answer them:

WCP: Reading and hearing about Orson Welles’s last years, prior to this book one had the image of the two of you desperately trying to sell people these magnificent projects, but that no one was buying. The book reveals a subtly different reality, one more complex, that instead of Welles being bereft of any offers at all, the two of you were fielding a variety of obscenely complex proposals, some shaky at their end rather than yours. Welles, however, was quite understandably cautious. He wasn’t about to agree to anything without a signed contract that ensured him final cut, and one that explicitly detailed where and how certain things would be done, and by whom. For instance, at one point he’s very insistent that postproduction on one project be done in the United States (rather than France) for tax reasons. On another (or maybe it was the same project) he talks about wanting to make sure that he retained home video rights. In other words, rather than the image of the artist denied his paints it was more a case of the artist desperately wanting to move forward but more so wanting to ensure that he wouldn’t get screwed over like so many times in the past?

Henry Jaglom: No, basically it was about him being denied his paints, though it is also true that his need for self-protection required certain things, certain freedom, casting, final cut. But essentially no one was buying, except that one time with Arnon Milchan and the actors Milchan required all said no in one way or another. No one else ever offered a real deal.

WCP: Well, then, do you imagine if the deal hadn’t fallen apart that he might have compromised his position on some things in order to make it happen, or would he have held film, even if that meant killing an offer? What if, say, everything had been set, but they insisted on an actor Welles didn’t like (e.g., Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman in The Big Brass Ring)? 

Henry Jaglom: All three too “ethnic” he said, couldn’t win the Midwest, couldn’t become President. Wish he’d lived to see Obama, it was beyond his imagination. Wish my parents, for that matter, had lived to see the unimaginable Obama.

WCP: Other than Cameron Crowe’s Conversations with Wilder, I can’t think of another book where one can clearly hear the subject’s voice, and all the subtleties that go with it, as one reads it. (I didn’t hear Hitchcock’s voice while reading Truffaut’s book, for instance.) As you and Peter Biskind were putting all this material together, did the Orson Welles you knew so well come alive again in that sense, a person that was in some ways very different from his public persona?

Henry Jaglom: He was, on the tapes, exactly as I had remembered him nearly 30 years before

WCP: Near the end of the book Welles is essentially saying that he’s got to make a living with money coming in NOW, not later. That people didn’t seem to realize that he, too, was mortal, That he had bills to pay, people to support, that he couldn’t devote a year of his life on a film, however personally rewarding, if founded on a vague promise that he’d be paid once everything’s done. What struck me as so profoundly sad about those remarks is that they’re nearly identical to what scads of struggling professional writers with a couple of books or scripts under their belts go through all the time – only in this case, here it was happening to the greatest living filmmaker. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is.

Henry Jaglom: Exactly. I don’t see a question here, though.

WCP: Well, maybe it’s more an observation that the book clarifies just how tragic the situation was, that on one hand he had to eat and pay bills just like the rest of us, and to the degree that impeded his ability to make films, that – try as you might – he was in a pretty hopeless situation. Let me put it another way: What should have been in place then, and perhaps still needs to been in place now, to ensure artists like Welles are able to work? Some sort of National Endowment for the Arts program? One partially funded by the major film companies? And, were he now the age he was then, do you think the adoption of new technologies like HD video would have made it easier for him to keep making films, or has the distribution end of things changed so radically that it might be worse?

Henry Jaglom: Yes, only a National Government thing would have made a difference. Films can be made much less expensively now, the technology would have enthralled him, but distribution theatrically is much worse. But non-theatrically has become something else and I think that the long form of quality TV that started with The Sopranos, combined with the incredible simplification of the technologies would have allowed him to possibly thrive. But the problem was he didn’t want to make films like mine with limited audiences like I’m happy with. He had had too big a taste of mass success (even if never financial success) to make “small” films for limited audiences, he needed to “show them” that he was still capable of making a BIG film, especially after F For Fake failed to even get distribution. (Today I could have distributed it like I did for Max Schell’s My Sister Maria and several their films.) But, once having failed at even that, the small art film, he reverted to the idea that his “next” film should show “them” that he was still in their game. That was his most self-destructive notion, combined with the idea that I was lucky because I wanted to make films about ”people sitting in rooms talking to one another” and he needed to bring “Elephants onto the hills above Rome,” [as] he would say.

WCP: Throughout the book, Welles frequently expresses very strong, negative opinions about seemingly unimpeachable movies and directors. For instance, I was surprised by his dislike of Powell & Pressburger, who movies I would have expected him to adore for their intelligence and cinematic innovation. Do you think he really felt that way? Or did he sometimes say something controversial for effect, or could his opinions have been colored by so many decades of professional disappointments at being treated so badly?

Henry Jaglom: He certainly said some things for effect or mostly to get a rise out of me, like some of his silly stuff about the Irish and some other groups, but what he said about actors and directors and movies expressed his real views in every case.

He knew I loved Powell and Pressburger, so perhaps he said whatever more strongly than he might otherwise. But where we agreed, like on post-black-and-white Hitchcock like Vertigo he was just as strong and opinionated. These comments were his real views, [and] I don’t believe they were influenced by his disappointments or said for effect.

WCP: And yet the book is often hysterically funny in the way Welles criticizes fellow actors. For example, saying John Gielgud played Shakespeare “as though he were dictating it to his secretary…’Witness this army…Have you got that, Miss Jones? Such mass and charge, led by a delicate and tender prince…Am I going too fast for you?’” This was a facet of his personally one normally didn’t see on The Merv Griffin Show.

Henry Jaglom: But he meant the criticisms he made, and the judgments about others and their work, even when he knew he was being funny and entertaining. We knew each other so well and this book only reflects a small percent of that. But, of course, he wasn’t going to show that side on Merv Griffin.

WCP: During the last ten years of his life, friends and professional colleagues in a position to help him get one of his films off the ground essentially turned their back on him. My Lunches with Orson identifies some of these people. And while most of the actors and filmmakers Welles has harsh words for have since passed away (Olivier, Charlton Heston, et. al.), some of the others are still living. Have you heard from people like Peter Bogdanovich, John Landis, Burt Reynolds or others since its publication? And were you and Peter Biskind compelled to leave anything out?

Henry Jaglom: My deal with Biskind was that the only things I could insist on his taking out were personal things about Oja Kodar, though I did get him, with some pressure, to agree to take out one most personal item about Bogdanovich and one intimate one about Spielberg, both I felt much too personal. Yes, John Landis called me up and was very upset and – needless to say – so was my old friend Peter, to put it mildly, especially after Maureen Dowd’s review in The New York Times. I don’t know Burt Reynolds but can’t imagine he can read.

WCP: According to the book, there was a kind of unspoken agreement that the subject of Welles’s weight was off-limits. What the book doesn’t address, and perhaps you never discussed with him but maybe the backers you negotiated with, was the question of whether or not he was insurable, what with all his various maladies. Was that ever a concern, and did you ever discuss a back-up plan/director should he have become unable to finish one of these late-career movies, as was done with John Huston on The Dead?

Henry Jaglom: His weight was the one subject we never talked about, though he would from time to time tell me how many laps he had swum that day, trying to earnestly prove that he was trying. And when we were together in LA or New York or Paris or Cannes he ate carefully, but I learned that late nights at hotels were a very different story. Whether he was insurable never came up, strangely enough, because we knew there were doctors who would write what was necessary. What various maladies, his knees were his main problem. Your mentioning John Huston reminds me of one of the most touching days. Shortly after Orson died, Huston called and came up to my cutting room to see footage on my Kem of Orson talking about this and that in his last film, which I was cutting, Someone To Love. Huston with an oxygen mask attached to his face and a nurse/girlfriend carrying it, as he sat and watched his old friend for the last time.

WCP: What are your thoughts on the current plans to release The Other Side of the Wind?

Henry Jaglom: You know as much as I do. It was some of my best acting and scenes from it moved around the Internet a few years ago, which was fun and are now vanished. It was hard to tell what it would look like if somehow all put together. I am skeptical but Bogdanovich tells me that they are “working on it.”

WCP: This year marks the centenary of Orson Welles’s birth. Will you be participating in any special screenings/events to mark the occasion?

Henry Jaglom: All kinds of people planning all kinds of things. Did you see the four shows on TCM with me hosting about Orson one night some months ago, two of his films and two of mine? Interviews about him in-between. It was well done, and they are talking about something for his 100th Birthday, as are many others.

WCP: You’re now several years older than Welles was when he passed away. When you look back at those conversations now, can you see things now that you couldn’t see when you were in your forties? And are there things the older, wiser Henry Jaglom wishes the younger version of yourself had asked him about?

Henry Jaglom: Really? I’m older than Orson was? Wow, I feel like a kid, the same age I was then. Hard to believe but I’ll take your word for it. No, there is absolutely nothing I feel that would be different, nothing I didn’t see and feel I understood about him back then, nothing I can think of that I would have asked him about that I didn’t. I’ve always been very open and easily communicative and Orson made it easy to be that way with him because he was so open and communicative with me. I just wish I could show him the films I’ve made; that would be a lot of fun.

It was also really interesting to discover that Welles had some input into your screenplay for Always. Since his death, when you’re writing, shooting, or cutting do you ever ask yourself, “What would Orson do?”

Henry Jaglom: All the time! I have tapes somewhere of his sitting behind me smoking his cigar while I’m editing Can She Bake A Cherry Pie? and commenting and suggesting all sorts of things. I always have his voice in my ear while I edit, which I’m doing right now as I write this, on my new film, Ovation.