Best Director Ever? Give Me A Break!
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Greeny_24 — 17 years ago(April 01, 2009 05:45 AM)
He had a very hard time finding budgets to finance his films and its such a shame that he never got to make more films. Whats the reason for this btw, is it because noone wanted to touch him after Citizen Kane?
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pad264 — 16 years ago(January 27, 2010 06:46 AM)
He had plenty of opportunities after Kane. Read up on The Lady from Shanghai. He had full control and created an absolute mess, which was then butchered in half before distribution into mess with a shorter runtime. You still see people claiming the finished product is a masterpiece for reasons well beyond my understanding though.
The guy was brilliant, but he made films that weren't bankable and had horrid luck with studios. It's certainly arguable that he was the most talented director of all-time, but if you're comparing the actual work, he doesn't come close to deserving the actual title.
Not only is it possible, it is essential
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Balthazar-5 — 13 years ago(January 15, 2013 03:44 PM)
There are two theories that I have heard about this. I prefer the former, but the latter may well be the more accurate:
a) I was at a sort of party at Cannes in the eighties - I think it was just after Welles' death. I started talking to a woman of about my age - late 30s at the time, and the conversation turned to Welles - maybe we were talking about Jaglom's '
Someone to Love
'. The lady was the wife of an Australian director working in5b4 Hollywood - Philip Noyce, I think.
She said that she had, from time to time, asked people in Hollywood why Welles didn't get financing since to produce an Orson Welles film would have been one of the few almost guaranteed routes to immortality. Then she said that someone high up in one of the studios explained it like this: if you are a studio boss with the ability to greenlight major productions, you are pretty damned proud of youself - you think you are important, and you are. But if Orson Welles comes to see you, you feel small and insignificant. So that un-nerves you and you don't like the idea of being reminded of this fact, so you send him away with words of encouragement but no money.
b) Alexander Walker, the fine and under-rated film critic once told me that several film producers had told him that Welles wouldn't get financing because at the post-production stage, he would never let go of a film, never 'sign it off', he always wanted to keep working on it, and that could result in very unpleasant legal disputes, so he was effectively 'black-balled'.
In any event, he was the most wondrous artist: a deep thinker and a poet of his art. The inactivity of the last twenty years of his life will be regarded as one of the great cultural tragedies of the 20th Century.
THe only currently working director whom I think deserves to be mentioned in the same paragraph as him is Terrence Malick.
'Wb68isdom would be to see life, really see, that would be wisdom.' JLG. -
stephen-morton — 16 years ago(April 11, 2009 03:23 PM)
I could be wrong, but I think the BFI poll just asks what each critic/director thinks the Ten Greatest Films of all time are. THeir list of greatest directors is then calculated by how many times films by each director appear in the list. So since Citizen Kane is on practically everybody's list, he ends up first.
I personally don't consider him the greatest director of all time, though he's easily top 5. While he was clearly a genius, his output, constrained as it was, was just not up to the level of Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick, so he loses out because he has fewer masterpieces and too many of his films were butchered by studios. Unfair, I know, but I judge by actual films instead of potential. (And I believe I've seen all his theatrically released films except The Trial and Journey Into Fear.) -
joeparkson — 16 years ago(April 21, 2009 03:14 PM)
Part of being great means working with the tools or people you've got, succeeding in the time and place you're in.
From reading "Citizen Welles", I am amazed that Welles got as far as he did given how many people he rubbed the wrong way and the numerous lies he told to get his way, the many, many unfinished projects. No director ever gets everything they want. Greatness means doing great work with what you've got. It means getting along with studio moguls whom you don't like because it's their studio, not yours.
I admire a director who can create great works with a small budget or modest actors. Look at George Stevens and "Shane". He made a great western with an undersized actor who's best years were behind him, Alan Ladd. -
grampashab — 16 years ago(April 22, 2009 10:43 AM)
" Unfair, I know, but I judge by actual films instead of potential."
I can dig that. Hitchcock and Kubrick ARE pretty stiff competition anyway, but I don't think they quite touched Touch of Evil. I do, howev7ecer, consider 2001, Dr. Strangelove and Psycho (on a good day) a tad better than Citizen Kane, however.
Badges? We don't need no stinking badges! -
cult_classics — 16 years ago(May 04, 2009 04:06 PM)
"Apparently, packers56789 hasn't heard of "Othello", "Chimes at Midnight", "The Trial", "Touch of Evil", "Macbeth", "F for Fake", or "The Lady From Shanghai"."
Or Mr. Arkadin, which in my book is Welles best film. I'd put many of those directors in the top 5, but Welles was streets ahead imo. His ever enduring sense of idealism is right up with Kubrick and Gilliam, even though without him we likely wouldn't have had them either.
"Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating." -
grampashab — 16 years ago(April 22, 2009 10:41 AM)
If you can't see the mark of genius that separates Orson's best from everyone else (other makers of English-speaking film anyway) then frankly you're not alone. His incredible legacy doesn't catch everyone the same way, people tend to want to look at it in terms of quantity and so on, and they're welcome to. To me, it's not about how many great films, but about exactly how great the films are. He probably can't be called the greatest director uncontroversially (can anyone?) but he's as good a choice as anyone else. I do think he had more TALENT than any of the other guys you've listed, whatever that means.
Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!