THE GENIUS OF WELLES

The Eyes Of Orson Welles director Mark Cousins discusses what made his subject great

ON… HIS UPBRINGING

“He was so far ahead of his time. But also his own age. He spent most of his youth with grown-ups, meeting captains of industry and people high up in arts and politics. So he heard and absorbed all that table talk. He had an accelerated access to the world of power, corruption, decline — all those things.”

ON… HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH HOLLYWOOD

“Hollywood turned against him because he showed up their banality. He was so much more talented than most of them, and so much younger. They were jealous as fuck. Welles and Hollywood fell out of love. Remember, he was an experimental artist working in an industrial system, and that was always going to go wrong.”

ON… HIS FILMMAKING

“He didn’t shoot much in colour, because he was interested in violent passions between very powerful people and very powerless people. Between the passion of erotics, the passion of politics etcetera. The visual extremity of black and white is what appealed to him.”

ON… HIS GREATEST FILM

“Touch Of Evil. It’s the atmosphere — that dark, brooding, heavy, thrilling, nighttime, velvet, sexual atmosphere. It’s like a labyrinth. I love films where you can really get lost in them — where you’ve lost your bearings. Touch Of Evil has that.”

ON… THE REAL ORSON

“We think of Welles as this colossal figure, Olympian almost. Formidable. But what I found going through his drawings was he stopped being a legend for me and became flesh and blood. There were signs of someone much more playful, vulnerable, a bit of self-doubt in there. Somebody who just wanted to have a laugh.”