The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

58 Peter Bogdanovich
How did it change your life? Can you palpably say: This is how it made
me see things differently?
Bogdanovich: Well, it showed the extraordinary possibilities of the medium
in such a galvanizing way that did not happen through any other film.
Every time I see it I’m still blown away by how young he is—he was
twenty-six years old.
Bogdanovich: I think he was twenty-five. The performance alone is extraordinary.
That’s what a lot of people don’t even talk about, the performance. To
do that range of character, range of age, at that age. People don’t even bother
to talk about that; they’re so busy talking about the directing and the writing.
Or arguing about who wrote it. What a stupid argument.
Thematically, there’s this sense of loss of innocence and then the corruption
of power. Those are the central themes. But what do you think
was the most thematically interesting to Welles?
Bogdanovich: I think Orson was very much interested in power, in what
power does to people, what money does to people, what lack of love does to
people. I think he was interested in all that.
And what’s most compelling to you in the film?
Bogdanovich: Orson was also interested in age and aging. There’s a lot
of that in his movies—and what that does to people. Interested in loss, not
just of innocence. There’s a sense of elegy in the movie that appeals to me.
That’s one of the reasons Welles loved John Ford, because Ford had that
sense of elegy.
And how do you think that manifests itself in the film?
Bogdanovich: The whole thing.
[laughs] Just a large statement of elegy?
Bogdanovich: It is an elegy, to this man. And power in America.
The original New York Times review took an advocate’s position with
it. The Times wrote that suppression of this film would be a crime, and