This is a Moviola.
A machine for editing film,
but you know, when we say that we're editing or cutting a film,
we aren't really saying enough.
Movies aren't just made on the set.
A lot of the actual making happens...
right here;
so a Moviola, like this is very nearly as important as the camera.
Here films are salvaged, saved sometimes from disaster, or...
savaged out of existence.
This is the last stop on the long road
between the dream in a filmmaker's head and the public...
to whom that dream is addressed.
Carlyle said that almost everything examined deeply enough will...
turn out to be musical.
Of course this is profoundly true of motion pictures.
The pictures have movement; the movies move.
Then there's that movement from one picture to another.
There's a rhythmic structuring to that;
this counterpoint, harmony and dissonance.
A film is never right,
until it's right musically.
This Moviola,
this filmmaker's tool,
is a kind of a musical instrument.
It's here that other film instruments are tuned and finely...
orchestrated, so if you find me winding up our conversation here,
you understand that...
I'm speaking to you from my home.
This is to be a conversation,
certainly not anything so formal as a lecture,
and what we're gonna talk about is Othello.
Shakespeare's play...
and the film I made of it.
That sounds rather arrogant doesn't it, just...
naming the two in the same sentence.
Truth is of course that by any real standard of worth,
comparison is not merely impossible, it's absurd.
The play is...
something more than a masterpiece. It stands through the centuries as...
one of the great monuments of western civilization.
We pick an arbitrary figure: Twelve.
Name twelve plays which could be called great.
Othello must be one of those twelve.
And of that twelve, at least nine,
which is another arbitrary figure, are by Shakespeare.
That leaves three on our list for all the other writers who ever lived.
Is that putting it too strongly?
Or is it too high? You can't go higher than that,
and Shakespeare remains immortally...
number one.
Among all dramatists the first. The greatest poet...
in terms of sheer accomplishment, very possibly...
our greatest man.
So...
where does that leave a mere moviemaker?
Nowhere.
Nowhere at all...
unless we leave out all comparisons and consider...
that my Othello, based upon, adapted from and...
inspired by William Shakespeare's tragedy has...
some little right to be considered
on whatever merit it may presume to have as a movie.
As a movie, and yet...
if merits there be...
This is...
not at all a conversation,
nor am I the conversationalist to treat with them.
Don't imagine for a moment that I'm
pretending to be modest, it's just my fixed conviction
that critical opinions about one's own work should be left to others.
Is my movie, Othello, good or bad, flawless...
or flawed, a masterpiece or a mess?
It's been vigorously, even viciously attacked,
denigrated and dismissed and...
also praised, sometimes...
quite extravagantly.
I don't know your opinion.
And I won't tell you mine.
I can't help the movie by telling you it's good and...
if I think it's bad, if I really do, I'd better not say so.
Why? Because...
this movie is still being shown in the theaters and for almost thirty years...
People are still going to see it,
and I admit to feeling quite happy about that.
Good or bad there's still some kind of life in it, which is...
the reason I'd be sorry and I guess pretty foolish to do anything...
to kill it.
Kill that like other fact.
But I've been asked to talk to you about it after all this time,
and this imposes upon me, I guess that...
a certain...
guarded respect for the subject. So...
what I'll do is to tell you...
what I can.
How the picture came to be made, for instance.
But I can tell you about that, and how it was made.
To put it mildly, that was...
quite an adventure.
It led us...
before we were... done to many...
strange and rather wonderful places in the world.
Into and out of more than one disaster. There were moments of...
sheer desperation and...
there was much delight.
Escaping then from...
auto-criticism by means of autobiography,
I will...
to quote the Moor himself,
"A round unvarnished tale deliver."
Now, how to begin the tale.
Where shall we begin? You might...
You might say it all began in Rome,
in a Roman film studio, with a Roman film producer...
named Scalera, who owned the studio.
He wasn't going to own it for very much longer, but...
if anybody else knew about it, nobody bothered to tell me.
Now those are early post-war years in the Italian motion picture industry,
Montatori Scalera was still very much Mr. Big.
He came on the set, he looked at me and said, "Dobbiamo fare Otello."
We've got to make Othello. I...
I saw no reason to argue.
As an actor...
since my very earliest days when I first
charted an optimistic course I hoped would...
take me to some of the great roles in dramatic literature, Othello has always
been among...
the highest...
of those aspirations.
But why did Scalera
suggest that I should do Othello?
Well, he loved opera, he was an opera buff and he'd made a lot of opera movies
and made a lot of money making those movies and...
when he saw me...
made-up as I was for the role of Count Caliostro, in a gypsy make-up,
with curly hair and a big gold earring...
he was thinking Verdi,
and not Shakespeare really,
and he naturally said, "Otello.
Let's make Otello."
Why did it happen in Rome?
I...
I didn't even want to be in Rome, I wanted to be in Paris.
It was the wrong place and the wrong movie.
I'd been planning to do Cyrano de Bergerac.
Now there's a romantic part for you.
Body has a nose, He describes himself as a man with a funny nose.
I was going to make Cyrano,
I'd been working with Trauner on it for months in Paris,
but suddenly Korda, who was our producer, came to me and said,
"my dear fellow I need dollars. I want to sell it to America."
And he did, Jose Ferrer played it and got the Academy Award,
and that's the end of that story.
Cagliostro was supposedly commercial,
and it wasn't, it was supposed to make me rich, and it didn't.
It was a result of a letdown, but...
But here's an irony.
I've been talking quite a bit...
too much perhaps,
about myself as an actor.
It's because as you've seen, it was primarily as an actor
rather than as a filmmaker that I came to do Othello in the first place.
But, if that movie is still being seen
and if it is indeed still worth talking about at all, it's...
It's not, I must admit, primarily because of what...
I contributed to it as an actor.
I was just reading a book,
on the subject of my Othello,
in preparing for this conversation with you this afternoon and...
it quoted Eric Bentley, who said that, "I don't act, I'm just photographed."
Those are the kinds of things you never forget.
So maybe I was just being photographed in Othello. After all that,
act to thinking and after all that
nonsensical actor's ambition.
Which means it's high time for a word or two about Othello as a film.
I won't venture into the territory of the critics,
I promised I wasn't going to, but...
staying safely on my own side of the fence, what I can offer is a...
hint or two of what I was thinking of in terms of cinematic style and substance,
or less pompously, what kind of film it was...
that I set out to make. What was thematic, what was planned...
and what was accidental.
In...
Olivier's Othello,
which was a cinematic record of his stage production,
"its core was the
shocking spectacle of a man reverting to savagery, eaten up by jealousy...
until he murders the woman he loves.
My film, by contrast,
tries to depict the whole world in collapse.
A world that is a metaphor...
not just for Othello's mind, but for an epic,
pre-modern age."
And here, I'm...
or misquoting...
to... not very good effect,
the critic, Jack J. Jorgens who wrote a book on...
Shakespeare on Film. I'm very grateful to him,
for what he said. I'm going to leave out the good things, and the bad ones.
There're also some other quotes I'll refer too, because it does sum up
the intention behind the film.
"The visual style of the film mirrors the marriage at the center of the play
which is not that of Othello and Desdemona,
but the perverse marriage of Othello and Iago.
Part of the cinematic language is born of Othello's romantic and,
here we come to that word, his romantic and his heroic nature,
which we embody,
I attempted too, and here it says that I did, by vast spaces,
monumental buildings, the sky, sea and rocks. The brute fortress.
And these walls, these vaults and corridors
echo and repeat and reflect and multiply, like so many mirrors,
the eloquence of Shakespeare's tragedy," at least that's the intention.
"The grandeur and simplicity are the Moor's.
The dizzying camera movements, the tortured compositions,
the grotesque shadows and insane distortions,
they're of Iago, for he is the agent of chaos.
In Shakespeare's verbal terms, Iago's masterpiece is to reduce
Othello's lyricism to bursts of confused logic, shattered syntax,
obsessive repetitions, and unconscious puns."
"Lie with her? Lie on her, we say lie on her when they belie or lie on her!
Zounds, that's fulsome." I can't quote it exactly right,
but it's a total disintegration and the attempt of our camera was to create...
that sense of vertigo, a feeling of tottering instability
culminating of course in Othello's epileptic seizure,
that murder of Roderigo, the Othello's dizzying final fall.
And in Venice, Iago's attempt to sow discord are frustrated.
He is but a shadow on the canal.
or a lurking whisperer, a threat, a possibility.
The civilized order in Venice
is embodied in rich harmonious architecture, placid canals,
and in the symmetrical altar at which Othello and Desdemona are married.
In Cyprus, at the frontier of the civilized world,
the restraints of Venice are lifted.
Art, luxury, and institutions are taken away. And the longer we are in Cyprus,
the more the involuted Iago style triumphs over
the heroic and lyrical Othello style in the film.
Venetian Christianity is overpowered by paganism.
Christian images appear but they're put to perverse use.
Othello's killing of desdemona is a dark ritual recalling the wedding in Venice,
but now...
he puts out the candles at the altar.
The sounds in Cyprus - wind, shouts, echoing footsteps, slamming doors...
they become surreally loud. Moving shadows distort the human figure...
characters are separated by tremendous distances, yet there's...
an increasing feeling of confinement. Ceilings bear down,
walls become overpowering, the world seems to be closing in."
"In the play, one of Iago's favorite images is that of the net,
the snare, the web, making him a fisherman, a hunter, a spider.
`With as little a web as this, will I ensnare as great a fly
as Cassio,' he says.
And our camera holds that image before the camera's eyes
and plays variations on it. We see it
through the grate which Desdemona passes to escape her father,
the net that holds her hair in Cyprus,
the ships rigging, the rack of spears in the fortress, and the windows and doors
of Othello's bedroom. In the end...
Iago is caught in his own mesh;
always hovering above him is the iron cage where the sun will scorch him...
and the gulls will peck at his flesh."
Again, my thanks to Jack J. Jorgens and to Andre Bazin
whom I quoted in the midst of all that, or misquoted again.
But now having laid all that heavy stuff, here I think I'd better explain
how circumstance itself had a lot to do with the determination of our style.
I should explain that as originally projected,
we were going to shoot most of the movie in the south of France.
We were going to work out of the old Victorine studios in Nice.
This was the choice of the art director, my dear friend Alexander Trauner.
I know only a few true artists who've emerged from...
or worked in that profession.
Men like Georges Wakhevitch, Cameron Menzies, Vincent Korda,
and Trauner is at the very least their peer.
Well, we'd just finished working together for several long months
preparing that Cyrano de Bergerac for Alexander Korda,
which you remember was never made.
And we were working at various museums in Paris,
especially in the fascinating Carnavalet
and... Paris was Trauner's city.
Once you've turned your back on Budapest in the good old days, I guess...
there wasn't any choice.
Anyway like many another Hungarian, Trauner was in love with France.
I really do think that's why we were there. Why not?
Anyway so I found myself rehearsing a cast of English actors
in the Bois de Boulogne.
That's why we were going to build the island of Cyprus on the Cote d'Azur.
Why shouldn't we, after all Cyprus,
Cyprus as Trauner painted it was a grimly handsome fortress of a place,
starkly posed between Veneto and Byzantine,
And for our movie much more right than anything real
which might still be standing in this century.
I say he painted it, because...
that's what he did.
None of the usual architectural renderings. No mere color sketches.
Trauner, Trauner painted, he made pictures.
Picasso, who's not
frequently an enthusiast for the work of lesser mortals,
spoke very highly of those paintings. I heard him.
I was very happy and pleased about shooting in the south of France
and this was not to have been only for the Cypriot part of the story,
but for Venice too, and you'll see why.
If for three-fourths of our film we were to inhabit
an invented world rather than a series of real locations,
than our version of reality would have been merely mocked by those
famous and familiar old stones of Venice.
There could be no
stylistic integrity unless Venice too, would be a Venice by Trauner.
A city totally undeveloped by the tourist industry.
So what happened to all that? The answer is Montatori Scalera is what happened,
or rather what didn't.
Remember him, saying "Biama fare Otello"
Well, the arrangement for financing Othello
as he explained Italo-Francese co-produciona
that's co-production between Italy and France,
but even as the first nail was to be driven
in the construction of Trauner's Venice a la Nicoise,
word was rushed to us that the French part of Scalera's construction
had somehow collapsed. There was no more co to the produciona.
We were now Italian, 100%.
We would be several other things too, before all this was over.
Time and chance and many, many other vicissitude
would take us over half of Italy, to England for the mixing of the sound,
to Africa, especially to Africa, and specifically to Morocco.
Now Othello's story has nothing to do with his own native land,
but our story was very much involved in it.
We were all over Morocco, and in a minute I'll tell you why.
Just here I'd like to mention how it came to pass that
we entered the lists at the Cannes film festival
under a Moorish flag...
appropriately enough I'd say for a movie on the Moor of Venice.
But this, like so much else was not a clever plan of mine,
but a mere whim of fortune.
We started off, by losing the French part of our official nationality,
at the end we had no nationality at all.
Othello was a movie without a country.
Which meant of course that there was no legal way to export or import it
from anywhere to anywhere.
At the festival, it meant that pile of film cans
that I'd come lugging into town with had no status,
And thus no chance of joining the festival, much less of winning it.
Morocco then was a flag of convenience, like Liberia for a ship owner.
I guess it's the first film, Othello, certainly the last entry to the Cannes
that had no national delegation. There was just me and those film cans.
And we did well anyway.
And here is how I found out that we'd won the grand prize,
a little sooner than one is supposed, I mean, found out sooner.
Because officially that sort of news is broken the way it is with Oscars,
only when the winner is publicly named.
But several hours before the big event, when I was up in my room
in the Cannes hotel
sweating it out, waiting alone, there came to me somewhat breathlessly
the big boss of the festival himself and he looked distracted.
He wasn't there to give out any information, but to get it.
"I don't know who else to turn to," he said, "My God!"
"Can you tell me what is the Moorish national anthem?"
The winner, you see, gets his anthem played for him when he takes his bow.
That's how I learned that Othello was the winner.
I didn't know Morocco's anthem any more than anyone else,
so the band played something vaguely oriental
from one of the French operettas.
The audience stood solemnly to attention
and with the international propriety that's observed,
festival officials could breathe once more.
Well...
That's an anecdote, but not, I think, of
not of a degression because the deal was straight, the sort of contrary which
changed, not just the lives of those who assumed made the picture,
but changed the style,
character and the picture itself.
Maybe that has something to do with what we were praised for,
in other words, mere chance, losing as we did,
more than one nationality and forced as we were to adapt ourselves
to a whole series of sudden alterations and violent retreats,
all sober planning had to be scuttled and the making of the film...
whenever there was money enough to continue
was pure improvisation.
Trauner's beautiful paintings had to be abandoned right at the beginning,
by the end he made me a couple of walls and three pieces of furniture.
We were never able to afford to build anything, so nothing was designed,
everything had to be found,
hence all that globe-trotting.
Iago steps from the portico of a church in Torcello,
an island in the Venetian lagoon,
into a Portuguese cistern off the coast of Africa.
He's crossed the world and moved between two continents
in the middle of a single spoken phrase.
In Othello that happens all the time.
A Tuscan stairway and a Moorish battlement
are both parts of, what in the film,
is a single room.
Roderigo kicks Cassio in Mazagan and gets punched back in Orvieto,
a thousand miles away.
And that jigsaw,
pieces were separated not just by plane trips, but by breaks in time.
Nothing was in continuity. I had no script girl.
There was no way for the jigsaw picture to be put together, except in my mind.
Over a span, sometimes, of months, I had to hold each detail in my memory.
Not just from sequence to sequence, but from cut to cut.
And I had no cutter!
I had a whole series of cameramen,
because of the delays while I went searching for money, or
took on jobs to earn it.
The cameramen themselves found work, so I'd be picking up,
in the middle of a scene, even a sentence, with a new cameraman,
who'd seen nothing of what we'd done before. Well,
of course all that was bound to
to affect the shape and form and stylistic substance of the film, itself.
half a year of careful planning had to be thrown away
and a whole new conception built up, virtually over night.
I was already in rehearsal of the actors when the news reached us.
You see, working together hard over all those months, we designed
a physical production in such a way
that the entire picture would've been photographed in a relatively small
number of camera set-ups.
A whole scene,
sometimes several scenes would've been played without a single cut.
But that method of shooting,
absolutely requires the full resources of a movie studio.
You need sets that break invisibly apart, to allow for camera movement.
You need... well, why go into it all?
Enough to say that everything that sort of filming calls for
belongs to the discipline and technology of the sound studio.
But don't think I'm speaking against real locations.
No, stone... is better than cardboard.
And our new real locations were just fine, as far as they went.
Let me tell you about the Turkish baths.
I don't need to be told that there's no Turkish bath in Shakespeare.
But there is in Micheal MacLiammoir's fascinating book
on the subject of our making the movie, which is called, Put Money in Thy Purse.
A quotation from the play and very apt indeed it is and very funny the book is.
Tells a lot of our troubles, and it tells for one thing how it happened that
we found ourselves at the beginning...
of shooting, that is,
in the fascinating city of Mogador on the coast of Africa, Atlantic coast.
Why were we there? We were there because we had to have real locations
and the best one we could find for Cyprus was, naturally not Cyprus,
movies being what they were, it was Mogador, way down there,
with the marvelous long battlements, on which a lot of
important material was photographed.
But when we got to Mogador
with our large Italian crew, it was an enormous one,
under the distinguished Anchisi Brizzi, one of the greatest of Italian cameramen
and heaven knows how many people. There must be 35 or 36 other men.
Our full complement of actors, there we were in Mogador, arrived by plane,
checked into our modest lodgings, and they were indeed very modest,
because that's all there was in those days, in that town, and started to wait.
We waited for our costumes, and they didn't come.
Why didn't they come? They didn't come because
as it turned out, Montatori Scalera was broke!
Mr. Big of the Italian movie industry had gone bankrupt
while we were in a plane on our way from Paris to Mogador.
We found that out after a while,
and we had no costumes. We had a lot of actors, we had an enormous crew and
obviously the thing to do was somehow to make the movie.
Well, I had a little money,
So I could keep us going for a week or two, and in the meantime
some people scuttled around Europe looking for ways to sell
portions of the movie to Cyprus or...
or Venice, or more likely Japan or Turkey or something,
and get a few thousand dollars advanced.
While that kind of frantic operation was going on,
hoping to get more money, hoping to be able to put money in our purse,
and to be able to continue the movie.
While we were sitting there in Mogador,
the idea came to us, that maybe we could make our costumes,
which had never been made in Rome, or if they had,
they were being held by the Sheriff.
But we could make our costumes by using the local Jewish tailors,
of which there were several.
There was a big Jewish quarter in Mogador,
and they lived, incidentally, very happily with the Arabs
in those happy by-gone days.
So the Jewish tailors were hired
then pictures of Carpaccio gentlemen and ladies were shown to them,
and pretty soon the costumes slowly began to be made,
but they wouldn't be ready for ten days. And what could we shoot?
Well...
there was the big scene of the murder of Roderigo,
And what can you shoot in a costume movie without costume?
There's only one place you could possibly be,
that is with a lot of people.
If there's just two people, there's an obvious solution.
But when there's a crowd of people,
there's only one possible place where people could be nude,
and that's a Turkish bath. So we invented the Turkish bath.
No reason why not.
There were Turkish baths then, rather more than there are now.
And all we had to do was put towels around the heads of our characters
and photograph them from the waist up.
We borrowed a lot of incense from the local cathedral,
filled up the Turkish bath with steam,
and the Turkish bath itself wasn't a Turkish bath, it was a fish market.
So to the sound of puffing incense and to the smell of decaying fish,
we made that,
overture, runs more than a reel and a half
that very involved and adventurous sequence of the murder of Roderigo.
After that the costumes began to get ready and we had a big Army of people
gathered all in armor.
And you can't see because of the way it's photographed,
but all the armor is made out of sardine cans.
Hammered out and hung around the necks, believe it or not.
The banners were homemade, too. Everything was homemade.
Anyway, we got going, but after a little while,
the little money we had saved and were able to raise ran out and we had to stop
and then run to another part of the world and make some more. So it went.
And the history of it all, as I say is very divertingly,
to be found in Micheal MacLiammoir's book, he's Iago in the movie.
And his book has been reprinted, and I commend it to you.
Now...
I have some footage here, not from Othello, but about it.
A few excerpts from a luncheon party, a reunion really,
between three old friends.
Micheal MacLiammoir on the left, and Hilton Edwards next to him.
Edwards played Brabantio,
in the film that's Desdemona's Father. MacLiammoir, of course was our Iago.
Some time has passed since then. A quarter of a century.
More we've been friends a lot longer than that.
We've heard the chimes at midnight.
I should explain that Edwards and MacLiammoir
are together the founders and directors of the famous Gate Theater in Dublin.
If you love the theater, then you know all about the Gate. If not, there's not
much I can say about it, so I'll just begin,
because there's too much to say, and I wouldn't know where to stop.
Let me just say, that these two men together, have written,
and as I speak these words, are still writing, theater history.
Then, having dismissed their immense achievement with a single phrase,
I'm going to take a bit longer on the subject of myself.
The subject of this program, being as it is, my own film of Othello,
there's no way I can think of to avoid
these lapses into autobiography.
I'm obliged to tell you that the Gate Theater's
where I started my professional life.
I was just a boy, and Hilton Edwards was still a very young man,
but he was already...
a master.
Since then as an actor in theater, radio and films, I've worked for what must be
hundreds of directors. Some were good, some middling good, many of course were
mediocre, if not downright bad and a few, two or three perhaps,
could be called great.
Of these, Hilton Edwards
was easily the first, and certainly was the best of teachers.
God only knows, that asking him to play Brabantio in the picture
was a feeble enough indication of my gratitude.
Hilton was also a distinguished actor, and Brabantio,
God only knows, is an undistinguished part.
The truth is
that he came along with Micheal to keep us all company,
and help out with the crowd scenes.
He kept a sharp director's eye on just about everything,
and after the day's work was over, we'd hash it all out together,
burning the night away with talk.
Here 25 years later, it's a bit more of the same.
Some 46 years ago, when I first joined his theater,
Micheal MacLiammoir was playing his first Hamlet.
By general consensus one of the finest in living memory,
surely the best I've ever seen. He's played it often since,
I once produced him in America, and he's played Iago since
since he did it in my film and played it very differently. He's also played
Othello, and that often and differently, and with
Hilton Edwards as his Iago and as director.
I mention these things...
so you will appreciate how well our two luncheon guests
are equipped for this discussion.
I also believe that in every Shakespeare play,
there was ones over other theme, so it's simpler one.
And I kept the feeling that in Othello,
it was the question of the black man, and the white woman.
But although we know that the Moors were really Arabs...
Yes, but they were Blackamoors.
To my mind,
it was a black man in Shakespeare's mind, and the white woman...
But...
Does Shakespeare give us the ordinary jealous husband?
No, he gives us an extraordinary outsider.
In other words, he gives us a foreigner,
a glamorous and strange savage, however he's played.
And there are thousand ways of playing.
- You were too young, and I was too old. - Oh no. You weren't too old.
You weren't old at all. You weren't 28 years old,
but Shakespeare says Iago is.
That doesn't matter at all. Othello...
The age of Othello, I'll admit that's... that's a fault of the film.
It's a fault of my performance. I should have been older when I made the film.
'cause I would have known more about the part, and I should have
seemed older, I should have played it older,
I think it's true that Othello's in general, should play Othello
as older than they usually do, because age is,
first of all, it's indicated in the text, and secondly,
it distances... Othello and Desdemona,
and anything that does that - age, race
or culture - any of those things are very important to the film.
But Iago...
if I'd let the fact that you weren't precisely Shakespeare's age for the role
be a consideration, I...
ridiculous, I would have denied myself an extraordinary performance.
But, no, that...
That isn't flattery, it's the truth.
But we come to Iago's character,
And...
and the whole question of what Coledridge called
`the motiveless malignancy of Iago'.
We played him, in my head had that idea of the impotence.
It was really not so much a key for the audience as a clue for our performance.
A way to justify a certain reading of the role.
My idea was that he was impotent.
There's nothing in the script to contradict your theory...
Therefore we're free to do it. That's the great thing about Shakespeare.
And it's a darn good motive.
I don't know but I have a theory in myself, that Iago was evil,
as I think we won't, any of us can argue about that,
but evil like art in [?] period was for its own sake.
But there was evil as we see, when we see a cat catching a mouse.
Or a cat playing with a rabbit or something.
What looks evil to us, but it's nothing to them.
It's quite natural.
And that's what's so terrifying.
In other words, you are saying
that it is possible to have an unmotivated villain.
We don't need Dr. Freud at all. There is such a thing as a natural born villain.
The true love of evil.
Yes. He has a natural pleasure of evil, a pleasure in it.
And all the efforts of the theorists,
all the head doctors who've written the books
and all the directors like myself who've tried to find reasons
are probably wasting their times
I'm quite happy with that
I think that although there's the question that...
Don't be polite to us, come right after where you're going.
There's feeling that there's a motiveless feeling of evil
but I've got a kind of feeling that there's nothing without a motive.
In spite of what the scholars may say, I have a great fate in Shakespeare,
having, as you say, your great instinct in acting
is that it's even greater for to learn classically,
I think that Shakespeare built a much more direct person not a simpler person
that we knew already on these unconscious mind,
and I think the theme of jealousy was supposed to throw this argument.
We have Othello being made jealous of Cassio.
Now who is he made jealous by? He's being made jealous, by a jealous man.
We have Iago who is jealous of Othello, being in a superior position to him,
and being a black man, whereas he's a white Venetian.
He's also jealous of Cassio. There's no question about that.
Cassio is given the superior position,
and in Cyprus he sees to it that Cassio is stripped of his... Lieutenancy.
To me the great thing is jealousy, jealousy, jealousy.
How does that apply to Brabantio, the part you played.
I think Brabantio is jealous of anybody who
should be loved by his daughter more than he.
I get the impression of a whole community which is poisoned by a
a neck sting or a bee sting of jealousy,
in varying degrees, to everyone of them.
This is why I would say, as you originally suggested,
the main theme of Othello is jealousy,
which motivates all the action, throughout the play.
Iago is the mystery of that play, but you know they say,
many people I know who've read Shakespeare say,
and seen those Shakespeare and sometimes acted in the Shakespeare,
"there's no such person as Iago," I have met him.
three times in my life...
- I have met him.,, - Your lucky if you've only met him twice.
One real life Iago is enough in any one life, because we've all met several.
I guess we're all agreed that
this noble play, this noble...
tragedy is...
essentially concerned with the most...
ignoble of all passions.
Isn't that what jealousy is?
The most humiliating, the most agonizing and the most piteous
I think it's self-pity,
That isn't a passion, is it?
it's a disease. It's a result of a passion, yeah.
It's also more terrible now by being after passion.
Do you really think that in this permissive age
we're going to do away with jealousy? I don't think so.
But why do we laugh at jealousy?
- Do we? I don't. - No, I don't either, but people do.
Ah, but who are people? The public.
Those are harsh words, sir.
Thank God for them.
Thank God for fun.
We don't think as they do, or we wouldn't be up on the stage,
painting our faces pretending we were somebody else.
The hardhead we are not, the hardhead with it would be all assertive.
the longing to be somebody else, that drives us up on the stage.
- Of course, it's that. - Or it's a cockerel with the dragging
plumes that everybody else has been dying to avenge himself upon
it seems the plumes dragged in the mud
had all come kicked down on him like that
That's a part of it, nothing with jealousy,
there, but for the grace of God, go I.
- You don't laugh at jealousy? - Oh no, I don't even laugh at seasickness.
I would draw jealousy is the seasickness of passion.
Not just like this biter to admit,
the feeling of jealousy being not a comic
reaction, in my mind, but a tragic one
When I think of women being jealous, I'm so curious,
it less moved. I'm ashamed of this.
And it's never been treated as a tragic subject in dramatic literature.
I don't think so.
I would say the reason for that, is that all dramatic literature we know about,
has been written under patriarchal male dominated societies,
for males, in which the final decision in all matters belongs to the male.
What can be the problem of a woman?
If she is jealous or not, since she's owned.
Therefore, I should be sympathetic with the public attitude
of laughing at the trouble.
Because the public is partly female, and the public sees the essential comedy
in the situation...
of...
of jealousy.
Because of other females?
Yes, because women when they're jealous, and we just asked one now between takes
and she said,
"yes, I would be jealous, but I would translate it immediately into hate."
Othello is a perfect male type,
kills Desdemona adoring her. Now isn't that male?
Isn't that enormously masculine, to murder this girl, adoring her.
No woman would do that.
She would forgive the man, or forget his crime, or kill him,
but she would never kill him loving him.
the hypocrisy, the poetry, and the absurdity of the male condition.
The man kills where he loves, the woman only kills what she hates.
Remember this is, it seems off the beat, maybe it is.
Jean Cocteau said, "whereas the blind man is a tragic figure,
on the stage, the deaf man is a comic one."
You know that
Oedipus, tragic,
- How wonderful! - What? What? What? is funny
- And there's no difference. - But
But you meet a blind man, and meet a deaf man,
and the deaf man is much more tragic in real life.
Of course he is.
He's cut away entirely, he can see everybody, and he can't communicate.
It proves the point very well. It shows that the point of absurdity,
which is the difference between comedy and tragedy,
and the question of jealousy, between the woman and the man's attitude,
is in itself, without any logic, whatever.
As long as the woman is any form of slave,
her role in drama is always going to be very limited.
I'm not speaking about whether she should have it or not.
Yet all the best parts,
in plays about lovers, with lovers, it is the woman part.
Why? Because there is nothing more fascinating to play that of a slave,
and get more sympathy from the audience,
because the man is responsible for the pleasure in physical lovemaking.
She is not,
he's responsible.
His failure is the tragedy, comic and otherwise,
there's nothing funny about a woman's feeling.
Speaking of Othello's own view,
about what made him jealous of Desdemona.
But he was poisoned by Iago,
He must've been poisoned more than Iago,
but he had an overwhelming passion for the beauty and purity of this girl.
inseparable from his mind.
And he denies that he's going to be made jealous by these
little drops of minor poison of Iago, dropping in to him.
And he says "Tis not to make me jealous, to say my wife is fair, feeds well,
loves company," "sings, plays, and dances well.
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous."
And then he gets his nightmare again that she's Cassio in her arms.
Haven't you put your finger on the whole thing? We're dealing with a puritan.
Over and over again, Othello speaks of her virtue.
The fact that she's fair, or the rest of it is secondary.
It's her virtue. That's very much a puritan preoccupation, isn't it?
And Shakespeare understood that preoccupation
he was anything but a puritan, but he understood them,
after all they're the people who closed his theater eventually.
I don't mean to say that Othello was one of those fellows in a funny hat.
But the
The puritan idea, the puritan strain runs through the English character
from the early days, long before the puritans ascendancy and
That kind of...
Englishness is in the Moor's character.
That preoccupation with...
purity,
as an abstract idea.
Another thing he can't give her, is what the 19th century theater always forgot.
In her, Desdemona, who is one of the most interesting characters to me
in the whole wonderful, terrible play,
is that she is not the little pious, obedient drip
as she is conceived of in the 19th century particularly.
She is anything but. A Venetian girl, who would walk out with a negro,
and marry him.
And certainly Desdemona is no cringing blonde. She's not a born loser,
and if she dies a loser, it's no fault of hers. But
Just a little quibble here,
we've been returning constantly to the idea that
jealousy is the centric theme of the play, but isn't there another nuance?
perhaps something else entirely, close to, but different.
What about envy? Don't you think there's perhaps easy distinction?
But to me there's a great distinction.
And that what Iago feels for Othello is envy of his position.
And Othello was tortured by jealousy.
So envy is what? Something you wish you could have,
and jealousy is something you fear you are losing.
Almost I think I heard you express it once, and saying that
envy was a desire of having, and jealousy was the pain of losing.
Or a fear of losing, you could be jealous for no reason.
And yet the curious thing is,
Maybe one loses something the minute one is jealous.
even though there's no infidelity. Isn't that perhaps the moral?
And I'm certain [?] used a terrible word of Othello.
There could be, there's an ignoble feeling about being envious,
but there's not the same ? heart-rending humility as there is in jealousy.
- That awful feeling. - Demeaning...
It lowers one to where [?]
- That's a feeling of self-unworthiness, a feeling of inadequacy. - A failure.
The pleasure of the pain.
The pleasure of putting the tongue upon the painful tooth,
you know, that hurts one.
And doesn't Othello express itself with that?
With self-pity.
I wish I could agree with you that there's some
evil faint, perverse pleasure in the feeling of jealousy.
I've known it.
I didn't say that is, because I don't, I have never...
You're wondering was there.
But isn't worse that that is?
Isn't there a kind of self-love involved in jealousy.
There is self-love involved in every human emotion.
That's how it begins and that's how it ends.
We're all ignoble savages,
I think, really enough...
whether we're black or white, or Moorish, or
or Blackamoor or Spanish or Venetian...
Self-love is the beginning and the end of the human tragedy, I think.
- I agree entirely with you. - You do agree? Then I must be wrong.
I was only wondering...
I have been terribly jealous in my life, and you? - I have been.
And isn't it about the worst experience?
I agree and yet without mentioning names, the person I envy most,
I have no feeling of bad pain about it at all,
I envy, not mentioning any names at all,
I can pick up two people that I envy.
Not very wrong, you know, it can be.
If you go on like that, I might even tell you and that'll ruin everything,
- however - Who?
I envy Michael, his languages,
I envy you, your capacity,
you described it to me many years ago about another actor who said,
he had a wonderful capacity for displacing air.
Believe you me, no greater cubic capacity of air
has ever been displaced by any human being, as is being displaced by you
at this moment.
You said something of the sort to me, when I auditioned for you 300 years ago
at the Gate Theater. That I was a bloody bad actor.
I always knew you were a potentially good actor.
If you're a politician, you're in Congress
and you wish you were in the White House, that's envy.
If you think the President is making love to your wife, that's...
jealousy.
But he cannot be just the lie from a desire for possession, he's all for
All for desire to entirely possess the whole and justify what is,
if I might quote the phrase, 'Each man kills the thing he love.'
Yes, and if you dare as Othello did.
I was just...
going back in my mind to that
that business of Othello's age, and wondering how many other
mistakes, how many other misinterpretations I was guilty of,
that you were too nice to mention during the shooting.
There was never one direction you gave me which I disagreed with personally,
never one.
- Oh, that's very nice. - Never one single... one except...
"take the cloak and go!"
Oh, yes...
I think I'd better explain. That's a family joke. There was a scene in which
you were supposed to take up your cloak and...
yes, and go!
And I disagreed passionately. I wanted to make the most of that.
Well, yes, whenever I wanted to
to simplify the action or the business, or whatever it was, to eliminate
superfluous declaration, I'd just repeat that privately famous line.
"Will you take the cloak and go." That's all you had to do, you said.
Which you did it eventually, and very nicely too. Let's drink to that.
And here
our luncheon party comes to an end.
We didn't run out of food or wine, and we certainly didn't run out of talk.
We just ran out of film.
Why, I wonder, does MacLiammoir say that Iago is a mystery?
What he means, I think, is that,
the Shakespeareans often call him that
and what worries them, I think what worries all of us,
is the mystery of evil itself.
Now there's a tendency today
to deny the existence of evil, not to believe in it,
to call evil a sickness.
And you'll say, I suppose, that our notion of
playing Iago as sexually impotent is a very
modern sort of trick. Well if it is a trick,
and I hope it isn't,
at least we didn't impose it very heavily on the film itself.
Now I do believe
quite fervently in the existence of evil and certainly Shakespeare did.
and just as certainly Iago is the embodiment of evil,
more so even than Richard III, whose actions were evil,
but who was motivated by ambition.
Iago has no ambition.
He hates Cassio, that's due for having been given a
military title, that he might have had, but he would have hated him anyway.
His envy, all of his brand of jealousy
is an excuse.
Of Cassio he says,
"there is a daily beauty in his life, which
makes me ugly."
You see,
Iago is a slave.
He has the heart of a slave, he has the special
cunning and all the artful hypocrisy of the slave who revels
in the condition of slavery.
Dostoyevsky says,
"the secret consciousness of power
is more
insupportably delicious,
than open domination."
And Iago says,
"we cannot all be masters,
nor all masters cannot be truly followed."
The irony is... satanic.
The whole key to his character, and another key,
comes again from Iago himself, who says,
"I am not what I am."
All the other people in the story are people of feeling.
Iago is the intellect.
He is pure intellect, and as Emerson says,
"Pure intellect is the pure devil.
Pure and cold."
Iago's is the terrible alliance of pure intellect
and hate and this is damnation.
The worst of all Hells in Dante's Inferno,
is the Hell of ice.
Iago, of course, is incapable of love.
He's forever protesting his love for Othello, to Othello.
And Othello believes him, he is after all, honest... honest Iago.
Those words, honest Iago are heard often.
The word honest is heard even more often.
Everybody speaks in the play, describing Iago as honest.
Desdemona does, Cassio does, Othello does, and Iago does, interminably.
The point is that Othello believing Iago, believing him honest,
believes his blameless wife is dishonest.
It's the supreme irony.
But I think it's easy enough to understand, when you think about it.
Desdemona, after all,
comes from the gilded, pleasure loving, luxurious world of Venetian aristocracy,
about which Othello knows absolutely nothing, except that it's morals
are notoriously loose.
He is a professional army man, after all.
A stranger in the society of high-born, high-spirited noblewomen.
He's married one of them, they've just married. Now that's very important.
They're just married.
He scarcely knows her at all. Indeed, he never comes to know her.
She dies in his hands... a stranger.
Strangers to each other. Well, Othello knows, or thinks he knows Iago very well
and before anything remember, Iago is honest.
His slandering of Desdemona is done with great subtlety.
There is nothing, apparently to gain by it.
So there really isn't any reason, to speak of Othello, as
as some critics do, as childishly gullible.
No, Desdemona, for Othello
is the bride in a romance. A dream, he scarcely had time to discover what's
flesh and blood, before Iago's poisons have begun the
work in to turn the dream into a nightmare.
Iago is a trusted officer in Othello's commandery, a companion under arms.
Othello's soldier, Othello male and Othello is monumentally male.
His story is monumentally a male tragedy.
Small wonder that the doubt falls where it usually does in life.
Not on the slanderer, but on the innocent object of the slander.
There's certainly a huge simplicity about Othello,
but in trusting Iago, he does no more than anyone else in the story.
They all trust him, as we've seen.
No, the commander of the armed forces
of the great Venetian Republic is no stupid child.
He is no Venetian sophisticated, either. I think he must feel
something close to awe,
in his love of Desdemona, the Senator's daughter, who
fled from the palace in the dead of night, to marry a black man.
Black Othello, the outsider, the mercenary, the foreigner,
and the older man, must feel a certain
insecurity when he contemplates this curious conquest of his.
He has married her, as if by a miracle, but can he keep her?
Might she not turn away from him, as suddenly as she ran away with him?
Now, just for a moment, I'd like to quote from the play itself.
Othello,
along with Iago,
as he's first beginning to doubt, says,
"I swear
"'tis better to be much abused
Than but to know't a little.
What sense had I
of her stol'n hours of lust?
I saw't not, thought it not, it harm'd not me:
I slept the next night well,
fed well,
was free
and merry;
I found not Cassio's kisses
on her lips.
By the world,
I think my wife be honest
and think she is not.
I'll have some proof.
My name,
that was as fresh as Dian's visage,
is now begrimed and
black
as mine own face.
I would be satisfied but Iago says, 'how?
how satisfied, my lord?'
Would you,
the supervisor, grossly gape on,
behold her topped?
It is impossible you should see this, were they as prime as goats,
as hot as monkeys.'
'Give me a reason,' says Othello, 'Give me a living reason she's disloyal'
'I do not like the office' says Iago, 'But, sith
I am enter'd in this cause so far, prick'd to't by foolish honesty and love
I will go on.
I lay with Cassio lately; and,
being troubled with a raging tooth, I could not sleep.
There are a kind of men so loose of soul,
that in their sleeps will mutter their affairs:
One of this kind is Cassio:
In sleep I heard him say
'Sweet Desdemona, let us be wary,
let us hide our loves;'
And then, sir,
would he gripe and wring my hand,
cry 'O sweet creature!'
and then kiss me hard,
as if he pluck'd up kisses by the roots
that grew upon my lips:
then laid his leg
over my thigh,
and sigh'd, and kiss'd;
and then cried
'Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!'"
And then at the beginning of the play, the beginning of the love between
Othello and Desdemona, there's the famous speech to the senate,
which, I think, explains a good deal and
tells us a lot about Othello himself,
as well as that love.
He's brought to the senate,
charged by Desdemona's father with the crime of having seduced Desdemona
by magic spells and this is what he says to the senators:
"Most potent,
grave, and reverend signiors,
My very noble and approved good masters,
That I have ta'en away this old man’s daughter, it is most true.
True, I have married her.
The very head and front of my offending hath this extent, no more.
Rude am I in my speech, and little blessed with the soft phrase of peace,
For since these arms of mine had seven years' pith
till now some nine moons wasted, they have used their dearest action
in the tented field,
And little of this
great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broils and battle,
and therefore little shall I grace my cause in speaking for myself.
Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnished tale deliver of my whole course of love.
What drugs,
what charms,
what conjuration and what mighty magic—
For such proceeding I am charged withal—
I won his daughter.
Her father loved me, oft invited me,
Still questioned me the story of my life
from year to year,
the battles, sieges, fortunes, that I have passed. I ran it through,
even from my boyish days, wherein I spoke of most
disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field, of hair-breadth ’scapes
in the imminent deadly breach,
of being taken by the insolent foe and sold to slavery,
of my redemption thence
And portance in my traveler’s history.
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
rough quarries, rocks, hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak
—such was my process—
and of the Cannibals that each others eat,
the Anthropophagi,
and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.
These things to hear would Desdemona seriously incline.
But still the house affairs would draw her hence,
which ever as she could with haste dispatch, she’d come again,
and with a greedy ear devour up my discourse,
which I, observing, found good means to draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
that I would all my pilgrimage dilate, whereof by parcels
she had something heard but not intentively.
I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears
when I did speak of some distressful stroke that my youth suffered.
My story being done
she gave me for my pains
a world of sighs.
She swore, in faith, ’twas strange,
’twas passing strange,
'twas pitiful,
’twas wondrous pitiful.
She wished she had not heard it,
yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me
and she bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story
and that would woo her.
Upon this hint I spake.
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her
that she did pity them."
That's the speech.
Now...
Last winter,
Last winter they invited me to Boston,
for a special showing of the film of Othello,
the audience stayed on after the screening.
A movie has to have a great opening.
It must command attention.
The opening of Othello is written for an audience that's just getting quiet.
And Like all openings in a play,
because you don't ever want to open a play at the top of your bent.
But a movie should open at the top of it's bent, it must,
because this damn thing is dead.
The only living thing are the people sitting out here. It's a projected image
and you cannot bring the thing alive
unless you seize the people at the beginning.
The riderless horse has to come in.
The funeral of Othello and the lynching of Iago, is the riderless horse.
Just as simple as that.
May I ask a question which at first blush may sound silly?
Is Roderigo's dog a terrier?
- The reason I ask, well, - Yes, why are you asking?
Well, if you consult the Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage Portrait,
you'll find in addition to the circular mirror which you used in this film,
that a terrier is a symbol of marital fidelity
and it seems to be at the heart of the film
and I was wondering if that was why you selected
- such a dog. - I like your opinion.
This is a kind of a question I love,
because if I'd known about the question before, I would've been able to pretend
that I had indeed used a terrier
because it is a classic symbol of marital infidelity.
Oh, fidelity. That's just what I said.
But since I didn't have notice of this question, I haven't got time to con you.
I'll have to tell you the truth.
The terrier was not a terrier.
It was a Tenerife, which is a very rare kind of dog,
because it is the lapdog used by the dandies in all the Carpaccio paintings,
and Carpaccio was the source
of the costumes and the general aesthetic of the movie.
That's the answer to that one.
I was wondering, sir,
in Olivier's production of Othello,
he seems to stress the vanity of the man much more than in your production.
Would you comment on that?
You see, the themes of Othello were set down first by Shakespeare,
and of course there's a difference
in every Othello, depending on who makes the film, or theatrical production.
Because there are so many ways of doing it, there isn't
one right way of doing it.
If I could make Othello again - first of all
I've done it in the theater since then,
when I did it completely differently, as an actor and as well as a director.
We took an entirely new
line on everything, because that's the great opportunity that you have.
The minute you have a great piece of material, like a Shakespearean play,
or any other thing of that kind, you are free to make
almost anything you want with it.
You could go so many directions and still be true to
the essential job.
Yes, sir.
The role of Iago in this production of Othello seemed somewhat straightforward,
to be largely envy, but in some of your other movies,
specifically "The Lady From Shanghai," the motives of Arthur Bannister
seem much more obscure.
Nobody ever works in a big organization,
whether it's military, or business, or
theatrical or anything else, without running into a few Iago's.
Now,
there are all kinds of ways of doing it.
When Olivier did Iago with Richardson,
years ago, they did it as a homosexual relationship.
When Othello were played by Richardson and fell into his fit,
Iago kissed him passionately on the lips.
I don't know how that worked, but I know that they did it.
There are many different efforts.
In the case of this film,
I took the line that
Iago was impotent,
and that his malice
was the malice of impotence.
Something else,
Sir...
You took the set design from your Harlem theater companies...
How do you know that?
Because I taught a course on your films a few years ago.
You used the set design from the Harlem theater company staging of...
Haiti.
Only the basic plan, not the set design.
You set it in Haiti, right, and you eliminated the palm trees
from the film set.
It wasn't that simple, no.
Alright, I was just wondering why you chose
to make that a one-shot experiment and never repeat the effort of making a film
quickly, as you said, to inspire others,
- to tackle difficult projects in a short amount of time. - exactly.
I don't know if you all heard that in the back.
The point is that Macbeth, which was made in a very short time,
it was actually, the actual principal photography was nineteen days,
with two days more for
inserts and things like that, so it was a real quicky.
And the basic set had the same plan which I had used in the black Macbeth,
which I had done in Harlem, in the theater, some years before.
It wasn't the same set.
but it had the same basic plan, because it worked before
and we were in a great rush.
And the question was why
have I not repeated the experiment of making quickly
serious or difficult subjects like Shakespearian plays.
And the answer is that I was gambling on Macbeth being a great success,
the American critical press for Macbeth was very bad at the time.
The European press was very good.
When you've got the film shot,
and you're sitting in the editing room, putting the film together,
can you tell us what
is the question that's going through your mind as you select things?
What applicable questions for each scene makes you select one shot over another?
or as you're having the camera pan through a room or something you want
to cut to somebody's expression or whatever.
I have done a great deal of that editing,
while I am filming.
I visualize the editing, while I am filming.
And when I change that idea,
it is a deliberate change.
What's the difference between that what you preconceive in before you shoot
and that what you actually do after you shoot.
The difference is bigger than I'd like to admit,
and I do admit it, yes, the difference is pretty great,
because actors teach you so much.
The scenery, the smell of a thing, you come on a set
in the morning, whether it's Othello, or a modern story, whatever it might be.
And...
If you have a master plan for what you're going to do,
exactly where the camera is going to be, exactly what the scene
is supposed to state,
if you are locked into that, you are depriving yourself
of the divine accidents of moviemaking.
Because everywhere there are beautiful accidents.
The actor
says something in a different way than you ever dreamed it could be said.
She looks differently,
there's a smell in the air, there's a look
that changes the whole resonance of what you expected.
Then, there are the true accidents,
and my definition of a film director is the man who presides over accidents,
but doesn't make them.
I'm going to stop just here,
not only because our time is almost up,
because at this point in the discussion,
the Boston film buffs veered away from the subject of Othello.
If I've evaded any of their questions, or any of yours,
it's not by design.
Maybe I should have read into the record some of the
things that critics have said against Othello.
You might have found that informative.
I would have found it depressing.
Then I'm very much afraid that under the banner of fair play,
and the interest of what's called a balanced judgment,
I couldn't have resisted reading you some of the good stuff as well.
Anyway it's an argument that still goes on and on.
I spared you both sides of it, and I don't know if I was mistaken.
Maybe an anthology of critical reviews might have been rewarding, but
after all this is supposed to be my voice on the subject, so
that's what you've had.
I've tried to be as candid as I can.
You won't have expected me to be objective.
I started by calling this a conversation,
but I'm afraid what you've had most is a scrambled, disjointed series of notes.
I've been coming at our subject from every
conceivable direction of the compass,
There might have been a better shape to this if I had relentlessly
pursued a single theme, but that
would have neglected all the other themes. I just don't know.
Trying to say too much, I may have said too little.
Now...
of course...
my film did not do justice to the play.
It is my film and
Shakespeare's play.
No film, indeed, no stage production could ever do true justice to that play.
No actor ever did full justice to the part.
I ask myself now, if I've done justice here in my own movie.
Talking to you, I don't mean in the value I may sometimes
rather coyly have placed upon it. I just mean this discussion.
Let's try to sum it up.
how the picture was made. That story.
You remember, an Italian producer dreaming of Verdi's Otello, and
neglecting to mention that he was about to go into bankruptcy,
stranded our whole company in a small town off the coast of Africa.
With a little money of my own, all I had and absolutely
no costumes whatsoever, we improvised our way for awhile,
and had to stop for awhile and I had to go to work as an actor in other films,
earning money enough to continue with my own and that went on and on,
and repeated itself several times, and it meant
that Othello was made so to speak, on the installment plan.
This and other circumstances did impose a method and a style of shooting,
which was contrary to what had been carefully planned.
And for a description of the finished result,
I've drawn tonight on a few of those critical appreciations, which
correspond fairly closely to my own ideas.
Some thoughts on the interpretation
have come from a couple of the leading actors, with some additions of my own.
All judgments having been avoided,
I leave you with this confession.
This hasn't been as easy as I could have wished.
There are too many regrets,
too many things
I wish I could have done over again.
If it wasn't a memory, if it was a project for the future,
talking about Othello would've been nothing but delight.
Promises are more fun than explanations.
With all my heart, I wish that
I wasn't looking back on Othello,
but looking forward to it.
That Othello
would be one hell of a picture.
Goodnight.
Subtitles: coloraday @ KG