Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welleswas an American actor, director, writer, and producer who worked in theatre, radio, and film. He is remembered for his innovative work in all three: in theatre, most notably Caesar, a Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; in radio, the 1938 broadcast "The War of the Worlds", one of the most famous in the history of radio; and in film, Citizen Kane, consistently ranked as one of the all-time greatest films...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 May 1915
CityKenosha, WI
CountryUnited States of America
Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great - I'm taking myself as a character - for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the vulgarian.
It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]
In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.
A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours.
As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.
One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden...Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody.
A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have.
The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.
I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.
Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.
If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be 'Grand Illusion.'
Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.
Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!