F for Fake (1973)

Orson Welles: Self - Narrator

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Quotes 

• Orson Welles : Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

• Orson Welles : That's how I started. Began at the top and have been working my way down ever since.

• Orson Welles : With your permission, a bit of verse by Kipling: When first the flush of a new-born sun fell on the green and gold / Our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in the mold / And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart / Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, 'It's pretty, but is it Art?'

  [from "The Conundrum of the Workshops"] 

• Orson Welles : Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery - and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of - lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really *true* and based on solid facts.

• Orson Welles : What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is "art". Picasso himself said it. Art is a lie. A lie that makes us realize the truth.

• Orson Welles : At the very beginning, I - did make you a promise. Remember? I did promise that for one hour, I'd tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past seventeen minutes, I've been lying my head off.

• Orson Welles : [quoting a phenomenal art forger]  Do you think I should confess? To what? Committing masterpieces?

• Orson Welles : Paris was suffering from August. This happens every year. It shuts down, closes up, and this is the time when an invader could take the country by telephone... if he could get somebody to answer it.

• [first lines] 

  Orson Welles : For my next experiment ladies and gentleman, I would appreciate the loan of any small personal object form your pocket. A key, box of matches, a coin - ah, key it is, good sir. Hold it up 10 feet over your head and watch out for the slightest hint - of hanky panky. Behold, before our very eyes - a transformation. We've changed your key - into a coin. What happened to the key? It's been returned to you. Look closely, sir, you'll find the key back in your pocket. May we see it please?

  The Girl : Back to the old tricks, I see.

  Orson Welles : Why not? I'm a charlatan. What's that, sir? Did I used to be a magician? Sir, I'm still working on it. As for the key, it was not - symbolic of anything. This isn't that kind of movie. You'll find the coin, now, in your pocket, sir. Keep your eyes on that coin, sir, while it's returned to you - as your key. Should we return you to your mother? Is this your mother? No, of course not. Open your mouth - wide and we'll return you your money. And by the way, have you ever heard of Robert Houdin, speaking of magicians, I mean. Oh no, of course not. But of course, you do know my partner François Reichenbach.

  Self - Special Participant : Hello.

  Orson Welles : Houdin was *the* greatest magician who ever lived. Do you know what he said? "A magician," he said, "is just an actor."

  The Girl : Well, good luck to you,

  Orson Welles : "Just an actor playing the part of a magician."

• Orson Welles : Like all Hungarians, he told the best Hungarian jokes. The omelet, you know that, don't you? Sure. It's a classic. It's in our Hungarian cookbook. To make an omelet, it says, first: steal an egg.

  Elmyr de Hory : Well, naturally. To be Hungarian, it is not a nationality, it is a profession.

  Orson Welles : But the truth about Hungarians, which they do try to cover up, is that they are not any more crooked than the rest of us. But not the way they like to tell it! Of all the Hungarian friends I've ever had, I can't remember one who didn't want me to think of him as a king of con-men.

• Orson Welles : I didn't go to jail. I went to Hollywood.

• Clifford Irving : I've known Elmyr for about eight years. We met when I was broke. When I was writing fiction. I wasn't selling it very well.

  Orson Welles : His fiction didn't sell. Elmyr's biographer's a highly gifted writer. Does it say something for this age of ours that he could only make it big by fakery?

  Elmyr de Hory : Le grande surprise!

  Orson Welles : Cliff Irving's caper may well be the hoax of the century, but, really, this is not, you know, in any way the century of the hoax. We hanky-panky men have always been with you.

  Elmyr de Hory : That's a fact.

  Orson Welles : What's new?

  Clifford Irving : The experts.

  Elmyr de Hory : The so-called experts...

  Orson Welles : Experts are the new oracles.

  Elmyr de Hory : - are greatly pretentious...

  Orson Welles : They speak to us with the absolute authority of the computer.

  Elmyr de Hory : - pretend to know something what they only know very superficially.

  Orson Welles : And we bow down before them. They're God's own gift to the faker.

  Clifford Irving : All the world loves to see the experts and the establishment made a fool of.

• Orson Welles : I'd fallen in with François and on the island of Ibiza, we'd fallen smack into the biggest series of scandals in the whole history of hoaxing. It was a pretty queer experience to start making yet another movie and end up making yet another with a storyline *rotten* with coincidence. For instance, that the author of "Fake", a book about a faker, was himself a faker, the author of a fake to end all fakes - that he must have been cooking up when we were filming him. Well...

• Orson Welles : Her name: Oja. Oja Kodar. This, by the way, is another film. A sequence on the fine outdoor sport of girl watching. Our sneaky crew of cameramen, hidden away in camouflaged trucks and packing boxes, arranged for her to act. To act as bait. You see how it worked. The entire cast, all the performers, except one, acting away like crazy for us without getting paid for it. Without even knowing they were movie actors. Simple larceny. Well, maybe not simple.

• Orson Welles : In the world of the jet setters, among us beautiful people, everybody knows Elmyr. But, Elmyr what?

• Orson Welles : In case that mumbo jumbo might it seem like there's going to be some trickery in this film about trickery, we'll repeat our promise - in writing.

  [scrolled on the screen: FOR THE NEXT HOUR EVERYTHING IN THIS FILM IS STRICTLY BASED ON THE AVAILABLE FACTS] 

• Orson Welles : A fake is a fake and Elmyr himself - is a fake faker.

• Orson Welles : Value depends on opinion. Opinion depends on the experts. A faker, like Elmyr, makes fools of the experts. So, who's the expert? Who's the faker?

• Orson Welles : Elmyr was a good teacher, if only by example, his most valuable lesson was this: don't be spooked by the experts.

• Orson Welles : [from Kipling's "The Conundrum of the Workshops"]  And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart, The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "It's pretty, but was it - Art?"

• Orson Welles : [from Kipling's "The Conundrum of the Workshops"]  The tale is old as the Eden Tree - as new as the new-cut tooth - For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth.

• Orson Welles : I too was once a hungry painter. But, not here in France. No, I was hungry in Ireland. I'd come there to paint. Bought a donkey and cart, filled the cart with paints and canvases, and went traveling. At night I slept under the cart. It was a very nice summer. But, then when I got to Dublin, the donkey had to go up for auction. So, did I. My paintings were gone - all given away to the Irish farmers who'd given me food. I'd run out of paint - and money. I was 16 years old. My career, as you might say, was at the crossroads. Winter was coming in.

• Orson Welles : The super secretive celebrity went all out for world fame, won it, and then got to be more famous trying for privacy. Maybe he's a loser, after all. A lady from his past once told me, that's part of his charm. But this lady killing, wheeling dealing, death defying, life defying, mystery man supreme, has a strange habit of winning somehow. Sometimes, anyway.

• Orson Welles : Now that he's out of prison, what'll we do? We give a party. Another party.

• Orson Welles : I find I need something - to believe. I must believe that art, itself, is real. If it is not, Señor?

• Orson Welles : A friend, another friend, once showed a Picasso to Picasso, who said, no, it was a fake. The same friend brought him yet another source, another would-be Picasso and Picasso said, that too was a fake. Then, yet another from another source, also fake, said Picasso. "But, Pablo," said his friend, "I watched you paint that with my own eyes." "A ha," said Picasso, "I can paint false Picasso's as well as anybody."

• Orson Welles : This has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man, perhaps, in the whole Western world. But, it's without - signature. Chartres. A celebration to God's glory and to dignity of man. All that's left, most artists seem to feel these days is - man. Naked. Poor. Forked. Ravaged. There aren't any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know, it might be just this one anonymous glory, of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gayety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose, when all our cities are dust, to stand in tact. To mark were we've been. To testify to what we had on a list to accomplish.

• Orson Welles : All the Goyas and most of the Grecos.

  The Girl : And the Monet. And the Manet...

• Orson Welles : Reality? It's the toothbrush, waiting at home for you in its glass. A bus ticket. A paycheck.

• Orson Welles : Time for a confession.