The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

56 Peter Bogdanovich
Texasville (1990)
Noises Off . . . (1992)
The Thing Called Love (1993)
The Cat’s Meow (2001)
Citizen Kane
1941
Directed by Orson Welles
Starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore,
Agnes Moorehead, and more
How would you describe Citizen Kane to someone who has never
seen it?
Bogdanovich: The story, the life of a very rich and powerful man, how he
got to be that way and what it did to him, told from the point of view of a
number of people who knew him.
It’s just not like any other movie you know. It’s the first modern film:
fragmented, not told straight ahead, jumping around. It anticipates everything
that’s being done now, and which is thought to be so modern. It’s all
become really decadent now, but it was certainly fresh then.
When did you first see it?
Bogdanovich: I first saw it when I was about fifteen. It was a revival of the
picture in New York. It hadn’t played in New York in fifteen years or something,
hadn’t been seen since its initial release, and some theater brought it
back for a week or two. So they made sort of a big deal about it, and the press
didn’t write much about it, but I remember seeing an ad and went to see it.
And it fucking flipped me out.
[laughs] Why specifically did it flip you out?
Bogdanovich: ’Cause, I mean, it was like no other movie. It still isn’t—what
movie is like it? Oh my God, and also, for the first time, I had a realization—
somehow it was the first time, and I figured it out later why, it’s obvious—but
for the first time you felt that somebody had directed it, because you could