They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018) – M. Neville

This documentary to accompany the (Netflix) release of Orson Welles’ last completed film (so far), The Other Side of the Wind, is cleverly edited together, featuring clips from across Welles’ oeuvre as well as footage from sets and interviews, as well as past and present talking heads.  The director is Morgan Neville who also directed this year’s doco about Mr. Rogers.  I’m a big Welles fan and have a few books about him, including Peter Bogdanovich’s interview book “This is Orson Welles” (1998; 2^nd edition) and Jean-Pierre Berthomé’s excellent Orson Welles at Work (2006; from Phaidon).  The former is referenced both in this documentary and in The Other Side of the Wind itself, where Bogdanovich’s character discusses his attempt to publish a book-length interview with fictional director Jake Hannaford (played by John Huston) that obviously echoes the real Bogdanovich-Welles relationship.  And I guess that is what I took away the most from this film, the fact that many of the TOSOTW characters were closely modelled on film personalities (such as critic Pauline Kael or producer Robert Evans), something I didn’t quite catch onto when I watched it, and the fact that Welles might have been pointedly critiquing some of his friends (as well as himself).  Was betrayal a key theme across his films? I’ll have to think about it. Beyond that it is always entertaining to see the charismatic and humorous Orson, even if the narrative attempts to portray him as sad due to his difficulties financing his films and even if many of the clips used (stolen from F for Fake, 1973, for example) are used “out of context” to add the illusion of snappy repartee.  It’s a light confection overall, without too much new to say, but very entertainingly put together.