’ AD DE S ING ‘ LLE BR WE E LIF TO
A documentary about the great director’s last project — now completed — is also a salute to his technique
of the Wind” in 1970 and worked on it off and on for years until his death in 1985, after which it was tangled up in legal wrangling and sat in a Parisian vault for three decades, so easy fortune was never in Neville’s cards.
But after looking into the rights and discovering that producers Frank Marshall and Filip Rymsza already were trying to rescue the 100 hours of Welles’ footage from purgatory, the three filmmakers decided on parallel tracks. “We kind of struck a pact that if they could get the footage I could make a documentary and they could finish the feature and we would collaborate,” Neville says.
But it wasn’t until Netflix stepped forward to fund both films that things started to move fast, Neville says. Already deep in the work on “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” his documentary on Fred Rogers of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” fame, which arrived to critical and commercial acclaim in June, he had to scramble to finish “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” for release this month.
Footage was shipped from Paris to Los Angeles and cleaned after years of storage. Negative cutter Mo Henry was lured out of retirement to work with the now-vintage film stock. “We were getting these pieces every day of footage,” Neville says. “It was like random puzzle pieces, trying to figure out
what they all were.” “The Other Side of the Wind” is a complicated story, and its difficulty as a documentary subject was made worse by its unfinished state when Neville started working it. Essentially it is two movies, a film within a film, both sharing the title. Director Jake Hannaford, played by director and actor John Huston, is making a European- style art film that is going off the rails in production. At the same time, a documentary film crew is doing a movie on Hannaford, with much of it being filmed at his 70th birthday party, which turns out to be the last day of his life.
Director-actor Peter Bogdanovich, at the time a Welles protege, plays a similar character named Brooks Otterlake, and other wellknown figures show up either as thinly veiled versions of real people — Susan Strasberg is a film critic modeled on Welles’ nemesis Pauline Kael — or versions of themselves, like filmmakers Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky and Henry Jaglom.
To pull all of that together with some 40 interviews of people who were involved in the making of the film, Neville created a framework and style inspired by Welles’ own inventive past, including the use of actor Alan Cumming as an on-screen narrator, and a stylized black-and-white look for the inter- views to distinguish them from the color and black- and-white footage shot by Welles.
“Going back and watching everything that Orson did, you realize that Orson loved narrators,” Neville says. “I think he loved the idea of the narrator being a character too, not like ‘ the voice of God.’ The documentary he made, ‘F for Fake,’ was one of my all-time favorite films, and that was kind of our North Star in terms of his sense of play and how a narrator can be a character unto himself.”
The interview sections are a much crisper black- and-white than the grainy, found-footage look of Welles’ faux documentary, and Neville says he intentionally shot them in a looser, behindthe- scenes style, microphones and lights visible, instead of the straight- on talking heads look of many traditional documentaries.
“I feel like ‘Citizen Kane,’ the conceit of it is this journalist is going around and interviewing people about who Charles Foster Kane was,” he says of Welles’ masterpiece. “So I wanted to show the fact that we’re doing an interview, that it’s us going around and trying to piece together who was Orson Welles, in a way.
The interviewees range from well-known figures such as Bogdanovich, whose story of friendship and betrayal in the documentary is truly touching; Oja Kodar, Welles’ longtime partner who co- wrote and stars in “The Other Side of the Wind”; and members of the film crew and their families. It can be tricky at times to figure out who is who: In another stylistic choice, Neville opted not to place their names on the screen as they talk — you’re able to figure out most of them — so as not to interrupt the flow of the film.
“I just felt like if you’re not going to experiment doing an Orson Welles film, then just quit,” Neville says. “Because he was somebody who was always pushing every boundary, so in that way it was really inspiring.
“To see that he was doing stuff that was so avant-garde so late in his life. It was so out of whack with what the public perception was of Welles at the time, a hasbeen actor, selling Paul Masson wine. And that’s because the public saw him as a washed-up actor, but they never saw these movies that he was making because he wasn’t finishing them.”
So what would Welles think if he knew that his film would one day be finished?
“On the one hand I have no doubt that Orson would nitpick because Orson always nitpicked,” Neville says. “But I think he would love the fact that everybody was talking about him and taking him seriously. I think on balance he’d be happy about it.”
As for the documentary, Neville says he’s amazed at how often people under the age of 30 don’t really know who Welles is.
“He was such a towering figure in my childhood and growing up as a film lover,” he says. “So I feel like if anything, all this sheds light on somebody who to me is really like the most inspiring independent filmmaker.
“Here’s the man who made ‘Citizen Kane,’ hiding under a sheet in the backseat of a car, sneaking onto back lots to shoot on a student permit,” Neville says, sharing one story of how far Welles was willing to go to make “The Other Side of the Wind” when Hollywood no longer welcomed him. “Or erasing every day the one shooting permit they had and typing in the next date until the paper wore through.
“If it came to servicing his art, nothing was beneath him. I love that. That part of it I find just totally endearing and romantic and inspiring.”