Me and Orson Welles

 

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater on the set with Zac Efron and Richard McKay

Author Robert Kaplow

Arthur Anderson and Orson Welles in Julius Caesar, 1937

ME AND ORSON WELLES                        B+                                                                          USA  Great Britain  (114 mi)  2008  ‘Scope  d: Richard Linklater

“How the hell do I top this?”   —Orson Welles (Christian McKay)

Richard Linklater movies tend to have a modernist bent to them, where you can feel at times as if you’re lost in a minefield of existential drift.  But that is certainly not the case here in what amounts to a charming and thoroughly enjoyable piece of historical nostalgia, set in 1937 when Orson Welles was attempting to open his Mercury Theater production with a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a heavily cut, empty-staged yet daring, politically-charged stage adaptation set in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, with Welles playing the part of Brutus.  Linklater is a sincere admirer of Welles, calling him the patron saint of independent filmmakers.  With wall-to-wall jazz music and a typewriter style opening title sequence, one would swear we are about to witness a Woody Allen movie, but we are soon introduced to a strange new world, all led by the larger-than-life persona of the young 22-year old Welles who has yet to make a single movie and is full of swagger and theatrical bluster.  The brilliant performance by British actor Christian McKay, an alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company who was discovered when he played Welles in a one-man play, Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, on a small stage in London, just nails the all-too-perfect speech intonations and sardonic facial expressions of Welles, a young genius child prodigy who has yet to take the world by storm.  Alongside Richard Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s CAPOTE (2005), this is one of the great biographical film performances, though completely ignored by the Academy, where Welles’ blustery self-assurance and bullying sarcastic wit are on full display, obviously a man on a mission who is just getting his first taste of his own powers, literally browbeating his cast into submission, refusing to accept anyone else’s way except his own, quickly showing them the door if they refuse, so everyone defers to his judgment.  After all, he takes credit for every idea, even Shakespeare’s, calling it an Orson Welles production of Shakespeare, where he gets top billing, deleting characters and scenes on a whim whenever the mood suits him, but also making everyone feel that despite the fact they are receiving no salary, they are just a few days away from being a part of theater history. 

Interesting that this is the very first Shakespeare performance on Broadway, ever, where Welles is like a traveling road show that rolls in and out of town, driven by the breeze of destiny, yet the “Me” of the title concerns a small bit player, a coming-of-age 17-year old New Jersey high school student Richard (teen idol Zac Efron, working outside his comfort zone), who dreams of becoming an actor, skipping school, wandering downtown, and happening by chance to see Welles on the street in front of the theater, playing up to his enormous ego, all lies and pretense, but he wins a role as the charming, lute-strumming (it’s actually a ukulele) Lucius in the modern-dress revival of the play which is opening in a week.  Adapted by a husband and wife team of Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr. based upon a New York Times best-selling, meticulously researched historical novel by Robert Kaplow, a writer and New Jersey high school English teacher who was inspired by an archival photograph of a young 15-year old actor (Arthur Anderson) strumming the lute next to Welles onstage, imagining just what he must have been thinking at the time.  Linklater cleverly mixes fact and fiction in this portrait of the artist as a young man, as the film is limited to this memorable week of rehearsals, providing a window into the world of theater, showing the passionate camaraderie of those weary participants, very attentive to period detail, revealing behind-the-scenes vignettes of the principal players, but especially Welles who dominates every scene, as even when the cast sits around doing nothing, “We’re waiting for Orson,” his aura remains evident at all times.  To learn his part, Richard is referred to Sonja (Claire Danes), the all-purpose, exceedingly ambitious personal assistant who is likely already sleeping with Welles (along with pretty much every other female), who has promised her a chance to meet David O. Selznick and an opportunity to play in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939).  Discovering her last name is Jones, Richard serenades her with a line from Rodgers and Hart, Have You Met Miss Jones?, which might actually have spawned the director’s later interest in making Blue Moon (2025). Thoroughly flirtatious, leading to grownup sex, the two become fast friends, which they remain throughout the film, though she trusts Richard simply because he has no clout, so she can be open and honest with him, guiding him through the egos and everyday disasters that take place each day on the set. 

Recalling the immersive nature of Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS (2000), with an observant young teenage reporter surrounded by a brave new world of rock ‘n’ roll, Efron is not very good in the play, but that hardly matters, as he’s playing a young novice who’s not supposed to be very good, so he fits comfortably into the production, enthralled by the world around him, which features excellent performances all around.  In perhaps the film’s best scene, Welles whisks “the kid” into a cab with him on route to the radio studio where he observes Welles perform a skit on a live radio broadcast, but along the way Welles drops his guard and reads him a passage from Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons, where he mourns that “Ambersons is about how everything gets taken away from you,” a stunning personal admission considering the Hollywood brass did exactly that to his career just a few short years later, destroying his original ending on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and effectively ending his Hollywood career.  When Welles ad-libs an Ambersons passage on the radio, adding a delicious soliloquy for himself, he’s profoundly seeing his career years ahead of himself.  Outside of Welles, James Tupper is absolutely brilliant as the suave and ever cordial James Cotton, the man behind the scenes of so many of Welles’ successes, Ben Chaplin plays an anxiety-ridden leading man George Coulouris, quickly whisking his mistress offstage when his wife arrives, Eddie Marsan plays the constantly perplexed theater manager and old friend, John Houseman, while Zoe Kazan (Elia Kazan’s granddaughter) plays Gretta, an aspiring young writer Richard befriends, helping her get published in The New Yorker.   While Richard is quickly informed by Sonja of his status, “You’re not getting anything except the opportunity to be sprayed by Orson’s spit,” Orson has a habit of initially bolstering each actor’s confidence with flowery praise, such as seeing “images of magnificence” in their eyes before bringing them back down to earth with his rapid fire rounds of terse criticism.  Thankfully, Linklater does show various scenes from the theatrical premiere, all of which feel like a special treat, so the audience is rewarded and never for a moment feels cheated in this film.   

While the film was a box office bomb, premiering in Toronto after select footage was screened at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and not released in the U.S. until a year later, this is something completely different for Linklater, yet it’s essential filmmaking, upbeat and thoroughly enjoyable, like a light at the end of the tunnel following the dark times of the Depression, beautifully extolling the glories and virtues of still being young, filled with idealistic hope and promise, with the film suggesting, “it’s all ahead of us.”  Offering an ambitious, behind-the-scenes glimpse of a theater production in the making, this spirited film always feels balanced, intelligent and amusing, filled with an unbridled wit and humor, along with a select few poor souls who unfortunately feel the ignominious wrath of an undeterred mad hatter in charge, yet the focus doesn’t always swirl around Orson Welles, the man who commands the salacious interest in every scene, where it’s hard to take your eyes off such a brilliant rendering of his overwhelming personality.  Instead, the week’s events are seen and filtered through the somewhat bland eyes (think Tab Hunter) of the young thespian who’s still taking classes in high school (actually found sleeping in class, due to his late night carousing), an idealistic, wide-eyed everyman character, just a few years younger than Welles himself, who instantly falls in love with Sonja, and whose life is forever altered by this experience.  Beautifully shot in London, New York, and the Isle of Man by Mike Leigh’s superb cinematographer Dick Pope, the film benefits from some plot twists, capturing the essence of Welles as a rising star and the beginning of the Welles legend, exhaustively researched, with a very beautiful reconstruction of the post-depression era of the 1930’s, a period where art and culture merged together.  Perhaps not up to the caliber of Cassavetes’ brilliant Opening Night (1977), or Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), both the ultimate masterworks in revealing the wrenching behind-the-scenes activities of a stage production, or even Desplechin’s delightfully offbeat ESTHER KAHN (2000), this film is nonetheless fueled by the supercharged performance of a young, unheralded actor who perfectly captures the indomitable spirit of Orson Welles, a legendary, larger-than-life figure who is one of America’s greatest and most controversial artists.   

Nouvelle Vague

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

original cast in 1960

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater at Cannes with Guillaume Marbeck and Zooey Deutch

Linklater with Guillaume Marbeck

NOUVELLE VAGUE           B+                                                                                             France  USA  (106 mi)  2025  d: Richard Linklater

Each film is made up of five different films: The film you write, the film you cast, the film you shoot, the film you edit, and the film you release.                                                                        —Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe)

A movie about making movies, Richard Linklater takes us back to a date in history when the French New Wave originated with the introduction of this seemingly unimpressive, non-traditional cinematic technique that would revolutionize the way low-budget, independent films would be made in the future.  This is a Who’s Who of all the players surrounding the making of Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959), with critic Pauline Kael writing that the film “gave young people the idea that they could make movies on their own, that film could be as personal as a poem or a painting,” where the many names are name-dropped, with the audience actually more familiar with the historical characters they are playing rather than the largely unknown modern day actors in the roles.  Shot in Paris on 35mm using the black and white aesthetic of the New Wave, working in French for the first time, with an all French crew, Linklater has a blast recreating the chic cool of what went on behind the scenes during the making of the film, using a jazzy piano and sax score with plenty of relatively unknown musical juke box songs thrown in, where the mix of playfulness and existential anxiousness at changing the entrenched movie traditions felt to the actors more like a home movie than anything audiences would ever want to see.  Yet this really does offer a you-were-there moment in time, filled with all the ambition and terror at what they were attempting to create, throwing away all the established rules, making this a fly by the seat of your pants project.  While this is in no way a film made in the style of Godard, it is instead a unique approach by Linklater, who is himself a self-taught filmmaker, to recreate the times in which it was made, where it’s especially interesting to see all the heavy hitters surrounding him, with name cards identifying each and every one of them, from his fellow Cahiers du Cinéma film critics turned filmmakers, François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), and Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), magazine film critics who became some of the era’s greatest filmmakers, with appearances by recognizable directors Robert Bresson (Aurélien Lorgnier), Agnès Varda (Roxane Rivière), Jean Cocteau (Jean-Jacques Le Vessier), Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe), and Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre), with other major players behind the scenes like producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery), cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), make-up artist Phuong Maittret (Jade Phan-Gia), screenwriter Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest), who worked with Rivette and Truffaut, and a healthy dose of others.  We’ve seen this before in the energetic exuberance of Christophe Honoré’s love letter to the French New Wave in DANS PARIS (2006), where this is another tribute to the Nouvelle Vague, which was a collaborative effort for all those involved, like a family, with Linklater creating a playful portrait of some of the immortals of French cinema, a tight-knit community of film fanatics who live, eat, and breathe cinema, but certainly part of the beauty for casual viewers and cinephiles alike is the constant in-jokes and references to other films.  Prone to endless quotations, like Jean Cocteau, “Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood,” T.S. Eliot, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” Paul Gaugin, “Art is either plagiarism or revolution,” Duke Ellington, “I don’t need time, I need a deadline,” or Leonardo Da Vinci, “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” while also adding his own, “Disappointments are temporary, film is forever.”  Godard is an extremely literary filmmaker, characterized by a “collage-like profusion of quotes and allusions,” (Jean-Luc Godard Was Cinema's North Star), fond of blending high and low-brow references, subverting traditional storytelling, or using cinematic form to explore themes as if it were a literary work, especially later in his career, using complex ideas in a way that parallels literary essays, yet in his first film, no one knew who he was or what to expect, having little respect for his innovative yet peculiar working methods on the set.

One of two films Linklater premiered this year, both extremely personal examinations of intensely eccentric artists, yet imagined in very different ways, the other being songwriter/lyricist Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon (2025), each allowing viewers to soak in the era, the people, and the atmosphere, literally living alongside these creative forces and sharing intimate moments, yet this is the more playfully fun of the two, and is a delight from start to finish.  As to the birth of the French New Wave, an argument was made by Georges Sadoul, a noted French journalist and film historian, that Agnès Varda’s LA POINTE COURTE (1955) was actually the first film of the French New Wave, edited by Alain Resnais, shot in her mother’s hometown of Sète, a small fisherman’s village in the south of France, inhabited by her love and knowledge of paintings, literature, and poetry, poking fun at herself through art, yet the release date overseas came long afterwards.  Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) (1958) had a significant impact on Godard, as did François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), another eye-opening influence, which the Cahiers crew are seen watching near the beginning, instantly garnering international praise, while more quietly made in a similar style was Éric Rohmer’s The Sign of Leo (Le signe du lion) (1959), which failed at the box office.  Other early contenders are Claude Chabrol’s social realist film BEAU SERGE (1958), a naturalistic rural drama that was refused entry at Cannes, and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), a deceptively complex and deeply disturbing work that on the surface appears to be a freewheeling, light-hearted drama about the social patterns of young Parisian girls, shot in a near documentary style following events as they occur over the course of several days, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 at the same time as Godard’s BREATHLESS, which catapulted into an overnight sensation, literally exploding onto the scene, forever associated with the birth of the French New Wave.  Originally the term may have been more of an attitude than a film movement, coined by journalist Françoise Giroud in 1957 to describe a new generation of young French filmmakers and a youth movement in French society (FRENCH NEW WAVE HISTORY).  With a casting process that took more than six months, the heart of this film is capturing the early, irreverent spirit of Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), seen in his everpresent dark glasses, even indoors when watching movies in a darkened theater, almost always with an indispensable cigarette, so he stands out, becoming a deliberate part of his public persona, never revealing much about himself, yet he was ambitiously driven to direct movies, fueled by his own self-professed mantra, “The best way to criticize a film is to make one.”  Transported to the streets of Paris in 1959, Godard, still not yet 30, is exasperated that he’s the last of the Cahiers critics who have not yet made a film, so he is eager to put his plethora of ideas into motion, but when he doesn’t have a screenplay or a devised shooting schedule, he gets plenty of push back from his producer Beauregard, who tries to steer him in the right direction, but the young filmmaker is having none of that, intentionally disregarding the standard formula for making films, having something fresher and more spontaneous in mind, where shooting on the streets of Paris is his built-in movie set, and he doesn’t want too much worked out ahead of time, preferring to be “in the moment.”  Beauregard agrees to finance a low-budget crime movie, but only if Godard works off a screenplay written by Truffaut and employs Chabrol to work behind the scenes, as they are already known quantities in the film world.

Lining up his stars, he turns to an amateur boxer, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), who worked with the director before, making the short film CHARLOTTE AND HER BOYFRIEND (1958), shot entirely in a hotel room, where Belmondo’s voice was dubbed by Godard after Belmondo was called into the army for his National Service, also American actress Jean Seberg (Zooey Deutch) in her short blonde hair, having made two films with Otto Preminger, SAINT JOAN (1957) and BONJOUR TRISTESSE (1958), known for his very demanding directing style, as he was a screamer and yeller, creating anxiety on the set with his endless takes.  Godard would be the antithesis of Preminger, as his only rule was there were no rules, which kept Seberg continually flustered, thinking this role might ruin her career.  Meticulously following the daily shooting routine over twenty days, the revolving characters behind the scenes inject the film with good-natured humor, as no one knew quite what to expect, but they never anticipated the audacity of a director who only shoots when he feels inspired, some days just for a few hours, and other days not at all, preferring to play pinball in a café, which infuriated his producer.  Working without a script, instead jotting down bits and pieces on a café napkin each morning before the shoot, there were no planned rehearsals, which Godard believed would take all the life out of the performances.  The Bogart-idolizing criminal Belmondo was a go-with-the-flow kind of physical actor, so he was good with it, as natural authenticity fit his persona, but Seberg as an American journalism student was all nerves and worry, wondering just what she got herself into, believing it would be a disaster, preferring to work with Rohmer or Truffaut, repeatedly threatening to quit, as this was a director who refused to take charge and instead let everything flow as it happened.  Linklater beautifully integrates the variety of characters behind the scenes while capturing that unbridled freedom on the set, where filming is like a jazz composition, with a central theme and multiple improvisational variations, including an impromptu dance sequence in a café by Belmondo and Seberg to (Baby) Hully Gully ~ The Olympics (1959) YouTube (2:03), a prelude to the Madison in Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), Bande à Part - Madison Cafe Dance Scene - Jean-Luc ... - YouTube (3:50).  Written by a collaborating group consisting of Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., both having worked previously with Linklater, translated into French by Michèle Halberstadt Pétin and Laetitia Masson, and shot by David Chambille, having worked with Bruno Dumont on France (2021), none are exactly household names, but the real standout would have to be the original musical compositions written by jazz legend Sonny Rollins, where the chaotic, reckless energy feels perfectly integrated into the era.  While there are plenty of surprises, including a stream of directors and influences, one of them has to be Godard running into filmmaker Robert Bresson, the patron saint of French cinema who completely rejected established norms, greatly influencing the young New Wave directors, found shooting a scene in the Parisian subway tunnel from Pickpocket (1959), a film Jean-Luc Godard watched over and over again before filming BREATHLESS (1960), trying to capture the rhythmic design through such minimal film construction.  Godard’s quick working methods, in collaboration with former war photographer Raoul Coutard, who was used to shooting with minimal light, unsynced sound, and a lightweight, handheld movie camera, hilariously seen squeezing himself into a covered cart with his camera to secretly film along the Champs-Élysées, essentially captures the urgency of youth, with its creative chaos at the heart of one of the world’s most beloved and influential movies, where the personal manifesto driving its creation is art and freedom, yet this film goes beyond that, with Linklater portraying an entire generation of filmmakers, resurrecting the giddy spirit that infused this prolific period in cinema history.