Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
81 Q4 2018 / CINEMONTAGE Following Deschamps' departure, Dubus and Welles reunited, working on Wind for about six months in Rome, as she recounted in a 2005 interview for this author's book, Orson Welles Remembered, published in 2007. "It was always very long because he didn't want to change the scenes, of course, but nevertheless he changed them because sometimes he cut with a lot of close-ups, sometimes he re-cut with very wide shots," said Dubus, who died in 2012. "So each time was a different film, a different feeling of the sequence." The French editors' experiences on the film may have been fitful or frustrating, but their work paid dividends; by the mid-'70s, Wind was nearing the finish line. "When he finished with Marie-Sophie after Rome, Oja told me that Orson considered the film almost finished," Deschamps recalls, referring to Welles' companion (and Wind co-author and co-star) Oja Kodar. "Some reels were already mixed. I thought at that moment that the film was 90 percent finished — maybe between 80 and 90 percent finished — and it was very close to the end." ON THE MOVE IN LA Steve Ecclesine, who served as an editor for Welles from 1974 to 1976, confirms this view. Currently a producer in film and television, he worked with the director on Wind as the two hopscotched across Southern California. "Too many people knew where he lived; too many people had his phone number," Ecclesine confides to CineMontage. "In the very beginning, it was a mansion in Beverly Hills. When it was time to leave there, we would go and hide out at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in one of the cabanas for a week or two weeks until another place had been located. We ended up at Bogdanovich's place, which was in Bel Air." During his stint on Wind, Ecclesine remembers that Welles was still shooting Jonathon Braun in the early 1980s, around the time he was editing The Other Side of the Wind with Orson Welles in LA.