Welles spent six years filming and another eight years attempting to completeWindbefore his death at age 70 in 1985.
Every day you never knew what was going to happen.
It was incredibly inspiring and kind of life-changing.
Credit: Courtesy Netflix
I offered to help.
That was quite a long time ago.
In the 1980s still?Marshall: Yes.
It was just happenstance that I was told that the rights were available.
I really didnt know anything about the project.
The more I read about it, the more I researched it, it got its hooks in me.
It was curiosity with it and then investigating why the film hadnt come to be.
In a nutshell, we tried over and over for many years.
Back in 2011, we decided to band together.
We met each other at the Telluride film festival and we decided to bring our resources together.
Then, Netflix [came onboard] and the rest is history.
Gary Graver, the cinematographer, lived down the street from me and we became pretty good friends.
When he passed away in 2006, I thought that was the end of it for me.
What percentage was already edited?
I really didnt want to be part of that.
I tried to do as much research as possible.
Before I started on the movie, I went back and re-watched a lot of his movies.
I read every book that I could.
I went to the Academy library and read as many interviews as I could find with Orson.
I watched interview clips with him on the Criterion releases or on YouTube or wherever I could find them.
I always go into a movie intending to finish it.
This was a treasure hunt for some of these things that were missing.
Every little clue uncovered something else or led to a dead-end.
We didnt have much access to the script.
Orson would tell us what he wanted on the day and that was certainly enough.
Not until the last 10 years or so did I fully understand what we were doing.
I certainly felt when we were shooting it that John Huston could possibly represent Orson.
I did feel there was something that Orson was trying to say about friendship and betrayal and Hollywood.
Along similar lines, youre doing something really rare in that the pieces youre dealing with are long gone.
You captured a moment in Peters career that is now over and John Huston has been dead for years.
Imagine a party where everybody brings their iPhones and everybody is filming.
Back then it was 16mm revolutionizing independent filmmaking at that point.
To be able to hear Orson Welles directing those actors and trying to get the performance.
Really focusing in on the tiny details of making the movie and getting that one line of dialogue perfect.
No matter how many takes it would take to get it.
Its just the way movies are still made.
Everybody is incredibly focused on any movie, and Orson Welles was the epitome of that.
He really appreciated comedy for example.
He had a great sense of humor and he appreciated Johnny Carson, Dick Van Dyke, Steve Martin.
To be able to shoot outside of the studio system.
I hope weve done that.
