Director explores movie Welles didn’t finish
It would be hard to think of two cultural figures more different from each other than Mister Rogers and Orson Welles. But if you drew a Venn diagram of the children’s television host and the director of “Citizen Kane,” in the middle you’d find documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville.
This summer, the 51-yearold Neville had a $22-million sleeper hit at the box office with his documentary about Rogers, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Now the filmmaker — who won an Oscar in 2014 for his film about background singers, “20 Feet From Stardom” — is back with “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” which recounts the strange and twisty story behind Welles’ long-lost final film, “The Other Side of the Wind.”
“They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” is available to stream on Netflix along with the recently unearthed “The Other Side of the Wind,” which is also receiving a limited theatrical release.
A brazenly experimental documentary-style drama centered on an aging filmmaker, “The Other Side of the Wind” was to be the magnum opus for Welles, who died in 1985 at age 70. But the production was Morgan Neville From left, Cybill Shepherd, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Gary Graver and Oja Kodar on the set of “The Other Side Of The Wind”
beset by financial difficulties and never completed. Last year Frank Marshall, who was a production manager on “Wind,” and Filip Jan Rymsza managed to rescue and finish the film with a major assist from Netflix, which kicked in $5 million.
In late August, before “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, Neville spoke about his fascination with Welles and the state of documentaries.
Q: How did “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” originate?
A: I’ve been a lifelong Welles fanatic, but I never thought I would make a film about him because I didn’t see an opportunity to tell a unique story. When Josh
Karp’s book (“Orson Welles’ Last Movie: The Making of ‘The Other Side of the Wind’”) came out maybe four years ago, I read it and just loved it. I thought, “Well, this is something I didn’t know anything about in Welles’ life.” I remember thinking, “If I could ever get the footage, I’d love to make a documentary about this.”
I wanted to focus on the last 15 years of Welles’ life. He comes back to Hollywood in 1970 as the godfather of the New Hollywood. It should have been such a fertile time from a business point of view for him, and he never made another scripted movie. Why that happened is the central question I wanted to ask.
Q: People have an image of
Welles in his later years as being this slightly pathetic, washed-up figure peddling Paul Masson wine on TV, but you show that he remained a maverick filmmaker right up until the end. Did your perception of him change as you delved into the documentary — and are you hoping to change other people’s perceptions?
A: Yeah, it certainly deepened my understanding of him considerably. He was probably the most complex person I’ve ever made a film about. I think he was really somebody who was a different person depending on the day and the company and everything else. There were times when he was doing things that were undignified, and there were other times when he was the most adventurous maverick you could aspire to be.
Part of the problem in the public’s perception is that Orson had drawn a line between acting and directing. He said, “Acting to me is a base art form, and I’m happy to prostitute myself to take as much money as I can. But when it comes to directing, I remain virginal.” I don’t think the public understood that line that he was drawing.
Q: Netflix has become a huge player in documentaries, but a lot of people still view them as this scary 800pound gorilla. You’ve now done several projects with them, so I assume you see them as a force for good.
A: I think it would be hard to find a documentary filmmaker who didn’t. I think one of the reasons documentaries are so popular now is that Netflix put them on an even playing field with every other kind of movie, and people were able to discover them. For years, making documentaries, I always heard, “I love documentaries, but I don’t know where to find them.” I think both the quality of the films and the appetite has been a huge boon to documentary.
With a film like “The Other Side of the Wind,” who else was going to put up the money to save it? For 40 years they tried to find somebody who would and nobody would. Netflix is the only place that would have done it.