Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
79 Q4 2018 / CINEMONTAGE so I can introduce you to 10 producers who would be very, very happy to work with you,'" recalls the editor, who guided Welles to work with Dominique Antoine (who indeed became one of the film's producers). "They had a deal," he says, "so that's how I started the adventure of The Other Side of the Wind." First, however, came the question of where to edit Wind. After plans to cut in Los Angeles and Madrid were aborted, Deschamps was requested to return to Paris to work at a facility called Auditel. "The problem at Auditel was that there was a 26-step staircase, which was torture for Orson," he remembers. "He was something like 340 pounds at that time. He was so heavy that his legs couldn't work very well." In the end, Welles set up shop at LTC, where Deschamps, fellow editor Arnaud Petit and a number of assistants manned five editing machines over the course of about six months. "We used to put on each machine the material of a reel he wanted to work on," the editor explains. "He went from one to another one to make the marks with a pen on the cellophane, saying, 'I want this part and that part of the shot.'" The director assembled select rolls consisting of takes he preferred, but he delayed in making a commitment. "He could have three, four, ten times the same line," Deschamps recounts. "He kept the things a long time together until he finally chose one. It's a wonderful editing method, but a very long one." Although Welles may have been focused on individual bits and pieces of Wind, Deschamps says that the filmmaker never failed to have the larger project in mind. "He always had in his head all the cuts of the film and the arc — the dramatic arc, the rhythmic arc, the musical arc — of the film," he offers. "When he looked at one moment, he was thinking of 2,000 other moments." For his part, the editor often found himself cutting in the dark. "When we started to work, I asked Orson if he could give me a script, and he said, 'Oh, no, no, no — you don't need any script. I have it in my head,'" Deschamps reveals. "I understood later that this was the first manifestation of his paranoia. He didn't want somebody to know what he was trying to tell." Seeking to better grasp the film, he later examined all of the material, further angering Welles. In fact, Welles had grown wary of Orson Welles napping in the backyard of the Beverly Hills mansion in which he was editing The Other Side of the Wind in the mid-1970s. Courtesy of Steve Ecclesine