It’s funny how strong festival buzz can be frozen indefinitely as a film jumps through the increasingly complicated hoops of securing distribution — only to be thawed and reheated later. Such looks to be the case with Richard Linklater’s latest, “Me and Orson Welles” — or, to be more specific, its breakout star Christian McKay.
A year ago, the previously little-known Brit was the talk of Toronto for his apparently uncanny interpretation of Welles — even critics lukewarm on the film itself had nothing but superlatives for McKay. (Our own John Foote waxed lyrical here, while Eddie Marsan, who plays Welles associate John Houseman in the film, couldn’t stop gushing about the performance during our interview last fall.)
Oscar talk followed, but as the film sat in distribution limbo, it got pushed far to the back of people’s minds. Now, however, with a recent trailer and a UK release for later this year, McKay is once more receiving some press — though the film remains unsold Stateside. Meanwhile, we have this glowing notice in today’s Independent:
[Welles] is played brilliantly by the young British actor, Christian McKay … Although Welles is only a few years older than his young admirer, he already seems a wildly exotic and outlandish personality. McKay’s performance captures Welles’ pomposity, his absurd vanity, his ruthlessness, his mercurial quality and his brilliance.
Putting Linklater’s film aside for a moment, the bulk of the Independent piece is actually an excellent reflection on Welles’s own genius, inviting opinionss from an interesting selection of film and theater professionals — some of whom are former collagues of the man, while William Friedkin here speaks merely as a wide-eyed fan:
I saw Citizen Kane when I started working as a floor manager at a television station in Chicago … One day, somebody suggested I saw Citizen Kane. I’d heard that this was really a great movie so one Saturday afternoon I found myself with nothing to do and I went to the 12pm screening. I left the theatre at midnight. I just saw it straight through about seven or eight times. I was just flabbergasted. All at once, I realised that cinema could produce a work of art and that one intelligence could inform a film as one intelligence informs a novel or a painting.”
Lovely stuff. Read the rest of the Independent piece here.