The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Citizen Kane
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see the director. There he was, he was acting in it, too. And yes, we have that
with Chaplin and other people, obviously. But this director wasn’t like most
people. So it didn’t look like any other movie.
It was absolutely extraordinary, the impact of that movie at the time. It
galvanized me; I think it galvanized a lot of people; more people were galvanized
to be in movies by Citizen Kane I think than any other picture since
The Birth of a Nation.
Well, and François Truffaut said, more than any other director, you
know in the first three minutes of a film that it’s an Orson Welles film.
And what in the opening of Citizen Kane tells us it’s Welles?
Bogdanovich: Everything. [both laugh]
The whole beginning, the first five minutes is very unusual. It begins
with that “No Trespassing” sign, and the camera moves up and then you see
this mansion, and you keep moving closer and closer to this strange mansion,
and then a light goes off and a light goes on and you see a face, and
somebody, and this guy’s obviously dying, and he says, “Rosebud” and drops
something, and a nurse covers him, and then you go to a newsreel. Fucking
newsreel, it’s unbelievable. One of the great newsreels of all time. Well, that’s
not like any opening. [laughs]
In your book This Is Orson Welles you actually tell Welles that the film
started production the same month you were conceived. So you seem
to have a very strong link with this film.
Bogdanovich: Yeah, and he said to me, “Oh, shut up!” [laughs]
I just think a lot of people have a strong link to it; I think it’s just an amazing
film. It’s an extraordinary combination of pessimism and optimism. It’s
probably the most pessimistic, downbeat film about America ever made,
because no one wins anything, everything’s sad, there’s no happy ending.
On any level. [laughs]
And it’s just bleak. And yet the technique through which this bleak story
is told is so dynamic and exciting that it actually makes you feel the opposite
of what you would feel if you just go by the story. And that’s the interesting
tension in that movie.