A key element in the recreation of the 1937 movie period was the skill and experience of the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Richard Pope.  “I had a great meeting with Dick,” remembers Linklater, “and I just saw him as a kindred spirit.  He had that wild attitude – he seemed like a kind of mad scientist. And what you want in that position is enthusiasm – and skill, obviously, that goes without saying.  Other than that, it’s a personality match. He seems in the spirit of the film and he said he fell in love with it when he read the passage in the script where one of the actresses, Muriel Brassler, played by Kelly Reilly, is talking about lighting and gels and about getting a little butterfly shadow under her nose.  He just thought that was so amusing.

“I think people maybe know him for his Mike Leigh films, but it’s some of his other films that are, I think, just as impressive. It’s been really fun within this film for both of us. You rarely get the opportunity to recreate theatrical lighting. With most films, even a stylised period piece, you bend a little towards naturalism. But when you are recreating the exact lighting of this highly dramatic, very theatrical stage show, it’s just fun.   It was like shooting an old studio film with high contrast lighting and it’s probably the only time I will ever get to do that. The story goes that the great cinematographer Gregg Toland saw this production of Julius Caesar and when he heard that Welles was going to Hollywood to make “Citizen Kane” he told him he wanted to work with him because of the lighting he had done for the play.

 To establish the look of the Mercury Theatre, costume designer Nic Ede researched the Fascist imagery of the original Caesar production.  “Thank goodness, there is a lot of visual reference, a lot of photographs and a lot of people wrote about it.  When we were on the Isle of Man filming in the Gaiety Theatre, I looked at the way Dick Pope had lit it and the way Laurence had done the set – identical to the original – and it sent a shiver down my spine.” 

In addition to reproducing the uniforms on stage, there was the small matter of costuming the audience for Nic Ede and his team.  This required clothing some 570 extras, who also needed to be fully made up and coiffed by Fae Hammond and her assistants, for the scenes involving a full theatre.  “I love huge crowd scenes,” says Ede.  “I don’t know what it is – something rather perverse. It’s playing at make-believe and that’s always a great, great thing to do.  The joy of filming, from my point of view, is to create something that the audience will look at that they absolutely believe.  Every extra that comes into the fitting room is a bit of a challenge.  You want to make them into a character, it’s not just a body to put clothes on, it’s somebody to represent… a fishwife… or a sweetcorn seller….

“The thing that was exciting for me in this film was the fact that in the thirties, leisurewear was much more accepted in America than elsewhere. I don’t think it existed in Europe in the same way and certainly didn’t unless you were rich and were wearing beach pyjamas!  It made a change from the usual 1930s stuff I have done which is pretty upper class and extravagant, whereas this was a chance to do real people leading real lives.  It’s interesting, trying to achieve totally believable people through their clothes and their make up and hair.”

Crucial to the success of the enterprise was finding a theatre that could play the interior of the Mercury itself.  By a stroke of good fortune CinemaNX, the production company, is based in the Isle of Man and there in the capital, Douglas, is the magnificently restored Gaiety Theatre, an almost exact contemporary of the Mercury.  “I don’t think we would have been able to make the film if we hadn’t been able to shoot it there,” says Marc Samuelson.  “It was just the most fantastic set for us.  It worked really well, looked great in the film, was just the right size – in every way it fitted the bill.”

The theatre opened originally as a large pavilion in 1893 and following a redesign by Frank Matcham, it re-opened as an opera house and theatre in 1900.  After early success, years of neglect began to take their toll and the building was acquired by the Isle of Man Government in 1971.  A comprehensive programme of restoration was launched in 1990 and completed in 2000.  One of the last elements to be restored was the famous Corsican Trap, the only known original version of this classic stage effect. 

 “I really fell in love with the place,” admits Linklater. “It was almost too nice, too ornate, but I thought if we brought it down a little bit and didn’t look up at the beautiful domed cathedral-like ceiling, it had similar proportions to the Mercury Theatre in seats and size.  The stage was about the same size and the below stage area and its trap door arrangement with locks and pulleys was far more complex and interesting than you would ever be able to realise if you were building your own stage. So all of that felt great, and to shoot on the Isle of Man for those weeks was just kind of perfect. Some films are just meant to be.  It just feels like it lines up and it’s meant to happen.”

Finding Orson: Christian McKay

"So we had a script and were really excited about it,” says Linklater, “but I said, before we start doing budgets and schedules and trying to go further, let’s get an Orson, because we are not going to do this thing at all unless we can get the right guy to play him.  To me, that was the biggest piece of the puzzle that had to fit, before it even had the possibility of moving forward.  We thought of all the usual Americans, but we weren’t really getting anywhere. And I remember theorising, ‘you know who our Orson Welles is? He’s in London right now, probably doing Shakespeare. I bet that’s where he is – or there’ll be some great unknown British actor who kind of looks like him’.

 “A few months later, Robert Kaplow sends me an e-mail saying that there’s a guy performing in New York at this 50-seat theatre I had never heard of, performing a play called ‘Rosebud: The Lives Of Orson Welles’ for just a couple of weeks. And so I flew to New York and went straight to the play. I’d just had shoulder surgery and I had this brace on, I could barely move, it was really uncomfortable. My only test was, do I believe this guy is Orson Welles? Christian McKay just had that kind of Wellesian manner and he had clearly studied him closely. So I talked to him after the show and I got back to Austin just thinking about him and felt ‘let’s take this to another level’. So I flew Christian to Austin and we did a sort of old fashioned screen test.

“We did three scenes from the movie: I cast some people, did period wardrobe, we had an old car and we did a scene in the back; Christian came in and we worked together and hung out for a couple of days. After that, I didn’t even need to look at the footage. I just knew the kind of guy he was and thought the film Gods were making a very special offering, as they sometimes do. And I remember telling him we don’t have money, we don’t have anything – it may never happen, but we’d try. We started sending the script out and the good news was many seemed intrigued by it, but one of the stumbling blocks we had was a Welles who was unknown. Can you get a bigger name to play Welles?  Ours was always the same argument: no, this is Welles!”

Christian McKay, graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and accomplished concert pianist, is an established theatrical all-rounder, but has been aware of his resemblance to Welles since his student days.  “People said that I resembled him a little bit.  I only remember Orson as this big, gargantuan iceberg of a man and at drama school, whenever they said ‘you look a bit like Harry Lime’, I really thought they were having a go at my weight!  So I’d be very anti-Orson – I used to think ‘I’m not that big….’  Mind you, I must be the only actor who had to lose weight to play Orson Welles!”

“Christian’s performance is a revelation,” enthuses Marc Samuelson. “He’s a sensational actor, enormously talented in many different ways and it’s a fantastic, delicious secret that nobody knows about this, but they’re all going to.  He’s not only a fantastically good, properly trained, really serious actor, who could do anything, but he is an absolutely extraordinary musician and he’s also an unbelievably intelligent person.  He’s a great writer – it’s nauseating – but he’s a terrible dancer, which is good to know. Seriously, I think he’s going to be one of the great discoveries.”

Fellow producer Ann Carli agrees: “We did a reading in London, just so we could hear the script with actors. And it was also a way to have Christian interact with some of the other actors who have a lot of film experience.  So we’re all sitting around the table and here’s this guy, an unknown British actor – how did he get this plum role?  You can just feel the other actors thinking that.  And then he gets into character and the room is mesmerised.  It’s like… ‘holy cow, that’s Orson Welles’!”

Dialect coach Judith Windsor is full of praise for the newcomer: “Christian is an extraordinary man and an extraordinary actor and it’s been a great, great pleasure to meet him and to work with him and to envisage what his future may be.  He may develop into, or may very well now be, what Welles said of himself – that he was a ‘king’ actor.  A great deal of Christian’s performance comes from his musicianship.  The fact that he is such a glorious pianist is a great help to him vocally in shaping the line and in getting the way Welles uses phrases and, of course, in terms of Welles’ very specific accent.”

With the Orsonian hurdle out of the way, the rest of the casting could proceed.  The other key element, without which the project would be unworkable, is the leading role in this coming-of-age story, 17-year-old Richard Samuels.  As Linklater points out, “He is very active. Even though he is the observer of the movie, he’s really the motor, so I needed to find someone who could pull that off. It could come off totally wrong, if he wasn’t likeable and sympathetic.”

Zac Efron as Richard Samuels

Someone mentioned the name of Zac Efron, whose image adorns the walls of teenage bedrooms across the world, following the success of ‘High School Musical’.  “Frankly,” admits Linklater, “at that point, I had just seen ‘Hairspray’ and my first impression was that he’s almost too good looking. But in my experience, you can’t judge the full range of an actor based on what you’ve seen them in – so we set up a meeting.  A minute or two into the conversation, I knew he would be the perfect Richard Samuels.

 “He really responded to the script and got it. Zac’s got so much going on, he’s a natural song and dance man – he really does kind of have a song in his heart and a little dance in his step and he’s really intelligent.  But he’s young and there’s still a wide-eyed, it’s-all-ahead-of-him kind of vibe that’s perfect for Richard. He’s got a rare quality that you don’t see very often. Just photographing him, you go ‘wow, that’s a once in a generation kind of thing’. I just think, with his level of talent, he can go in a lot of interesting directions. He’s been great to work with, I can’t imagine anybody else playing it.”

 Producer Marc Samuelson was equally impressed: “We know he can sing and dance and that he’s a decent actor. The revelation is going to be that he is a really first class dramatic actor and this film will reveal that to the world. Zac’s the real thing. He’s going to have a magnificent career – he’s got it all and he’s very serious about it.”

 Zac found he had a lot in common with Richard Samuels: “He’s just a kid at school in Jersey, he’s very into the arts and theatre and music, he plays certain instruments and, yeah…it’s kind of funny, we are parallel in that way – I think Richard is pretty typical for a Jersey kid in New York at his age in 1937. He’s not the coolest kid in school: he has a tough time with the ladies. He’s got a mischievous side – at one point he almost ruined the theatre!  It’s just a wild adventure. He’s taken from being just a kid at school in Jersey.  He’s given a week with Orson Welles and it’s the most magical week of his life. He falls in love, he stars on Broadway, he gets in a fight with Welles. How many people can say that they have done that?

 “It’s fun being an actor playing an actor playing an actor. Being in a play is an experience that I got to have quite a bit when I was a kid and there’s no feeling like it. Portraying that in a film is pretty surreal.  I can totally relate with Richard on so many levels.  Being in a play, thinking you know your lines – but maybe you’re a word off and the director comes down on you really hard.  And finding romance during a play, that happens!”

 Zac’s presence in the Isle of Man during the theatre scenes caused something of a local stir, as Christian McKay recalls: “These young girls were outside, screaming like banshees and he stood up and said ‘I’ll go out there.’  I said ‘you’re going out there? It’s terrifying!’  But later, when I went outside, there was this ten-year-old, who had met her hero and the great thing was, her hero had turned out to be everything that she wanted him to be and she’ll remember that for the rest of her life.  He’s like that with everybody.”

Claire Danes as Sonja Jones

When casting his female lead, Sonja Jones, Richard Linklater remembered auditioning a teenaged Claire Danes for a role in “Dazed And Confused” in 1992.  “She was too young for that part, a couple of years too young, but I think she was one of the best actresses I met, she was so good. Even as a kid she was just so natural and real, so I always followed her career and was really lucky that our paths finally crossed. And she remembered that audition too. It’s just great when you hook back up with someone you admire. She’s such a good actress, a really good person and it’s been really fun to work with her, she’s a real trouper.”

 “Sonja is an equivocal character,” says Marc Samuelson.  “There’s no question that you’re not just supposed to go along with Zac and fall madly in love with her.  You should have a slight sense, and maybe not quite realise why, that you’re not quite sure about this woman, her ambition is so completely focused and so enormous and she’s tough as old boots, so you perhaps hold back a slight level of sympathy.  Claire’s such a clever actress because she manages to get across all the charm and the fun, and yet there’s just something……”

Claire agrees: “Sonja’s very ambitious and capable and thinks that she’s savvier and more mature than she really is. So she’s very charming, but she’s very critical of others and she doesn’t see her own weaknesses, ever.  I loved the script. It’s incredibly charming and witty and has a really surprising tone.  It’s very light, but very intelligent.

“This production of Julius Caesar was radical, because it was a comment on the fascism that was starting to eat away at the world. Welles made it really relevant and urgent and fresh.  Shakespeare, up until that point, had been performed in a much more studied, careful way. He just blew all of these conventions out of the water.  This film does have a historical dimension that is fascinating and worth considering and exploring. Orson Welles is a hero of mine and a hero to so many people. It’s great to take a moment to admire everything that he achieved.”

Ben Chaplin as George Coulouris

Starring as the prickly and pessimistic English actor George Coulouris is Ben Chaplin.  “In the States we think of him as a romantic comedy guy, but working with him on the film we got to see that he’s got tremendous range as an actor” says producer Ann Carli.  “He’s amazing.  I just said thank you for every arched eyebrow, thank you for every hurt and indignant pause – thank you for all of that.” 

Chaplin who surprisingly, despite his extensive stage experience, had never performed Shakespeare before, enjoyed the opportunity to recreate Welles’ legendary production. “I listened to a recording of Coulouris doing the funeral oration – ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’.  There comes a point where you’re representing him, but you’re not discovering the speech for yourself, you’re not feeling it as an actor.  In the end I thought I just had to go for it, as I would if I were doing it.  And then I just slipped in bits of George, because nobody will know how he did it – most of the people who saw it are now dead. It’s really strange, because you’re playing a good actor acting – it would be a lot easier to play a bad one.”

Zoe Kazan as Gretta Adler

Zoe Kazan was delighted to be cast by Richard Linklater.  “I had known a lot of people who had worked with him and all of them had had nothing but the kindest things to say and they all turned out to be true.  He’s very easy-going and he’s really hands-on as a director.  He doesn’t hold your hand or baby you, he let’s you do the interpretation on your own and tells you what he needs and he’s a lot of fun to work with.

 “Gretta seemed very clear to me.  Often when I’m reading a script I can tell right away whether or not it will be a character that I can play and I just sort of understood where she was coming from, being young and precocious and excited about the world.  She loves to read and she’s just very intelligent and interesting. I also liked her because she doesn’t seem like a person of substance the first time you meet her, she’s the way that very young people can be. She’s a little in awe of everyone around her and in awe of her own ambitions and then she actually turns out to be an artist.”

 As an accomplished stage actress and a self-confessed history buff, she would have loved to have seen Welles’ “Caesar” – “that kind of ambition and charisma and balls – quite a package.  My hope is that the film will educate a younger audience about Orson Welles and about what the 1930s in New York were like.  It’s a very accessible and entertaining story.”

Eddie Marsan as John Houseman 

Eddie Marsan appears as what Marc Samuelson calls “the solid centre of what’s going on in the madness.”  John Houseman’s late career as an actor makes him more familiar to many cinemagoers than some of the other characters in the film, but his particular appeal to Marsan was as “a Romanian Jew who reinvented himself as the quintessential Englishman in the New York theatre circuit and who continued to reinvent himself for the rest of his life.  Houseman described his relationship with Welles as that of a father, a friend, somebody who had to be very firm with him and someone who was also at times in awe of Orson.  We’re filming a story about the theatre company, so all of those dynamics are on the film set, as well as being in the company.

“I’d like people to get a growing awareness of theatre in this period, because it was fascinating and it actually informed acting.  The people of this period became the acting teachers for people like Brando, Paul Newman and Benicio del Toro. All the great acting schools in New York and Los Angeles came from these theatre projects, which were publicly funded at this time. So I want people to realise the genius of Orson Welles, which is under-appreciated, and also I want people to realise what it was like to be around someone so creative.  Sometimes they can be so compassionate, you can fall in love with them, but also they can be so brutal.”

Kelly Reilly as Murial Brassler

Rising stage and screen star Kelly Reilly enjoys playing Orson’s temperamental leading lady, Muriel Brassler: “It’s fun, because you like to think that you are playing somebody so different from you.  I hope I am, because Muriel is from New York and she can be quite difficult, but only in the way that she is very concerned with how she looks, so everything is all about her. But if you think about this time in the ’30s, women really were still second to the guys, they just had to look good. And she knows that, so she uses it. But I think she was also a very, very competent actress, so it’s nice to be able to delve in. There’s also the funny side – behind the scenes. We see this façade of actors but we never really get to see what their process is. And it’s quite nice to see the silliness of it all – ‘how do I look?’ – looking in the mirror backstage before she goes on.  You see her nerves and insecurities and then she goes on to create this world, to create this illusion.”

James Tupper as Joseph Cotten

Canadian actor James Tupper was the last member of the principal cast to join the production, as Orson’s friend and regular collaborator Joseph Cotten.  He auditioned on a Sunday, was hired on the Tuesday and on the Wednesday he found himself on a plane to Europe.  Familiar to television audiences from his role in the popular “Men In Trees”, he has extensive stage experience and found the milieu of the story fascinating. “The script was wonderful when I first read it, because I think it had so much of the spirit of doing theatre.  It’s joyful, you know, people come together and take a risk, pretending to be somebody else in a play, speaking other people’s words and you end up forming a kind of family when you do it. 

“When I read the script, to me that was a lot of what it was about.  It was about a moment that took place a long time ago and it was also about the joy of creating theatre, which is weird in a film.  Rick Linklater did a really wise thing, because he put us all in one rehearsal room for a period of time and we did the scenes over and over and over again.  And I think, in a weird way, we formed our own company.”

All of the cast felt the same way.  As Zac Efron puts it: “We were in the Isle of Man for a while and so the whole cast pretty much just had each other to talk to and hang out with and we had a lot of fun. We became a pretty tight troupe, a squad……a family.”

 

The screenplay for Me and Orson Welles by Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo is based on the novel by Robert Kaplow, a thoroughly researched piece of historical fiction, set in the heady world of New York theatre.  A teenage student, Richard Samuels, lucks his way into a minor role in the legendary 1937 Mercury Theatre production of “Julius Caesar”, directed by youthful genius Orson Welles.  In the words of Kaplow’s protagonist: "This is the story of one week in my life. I was seventeen. It was the week I slept in Orson Welles's pyjamas. It was the week I fell in love. It was the week I fell out of love."

He remembers the origins of the story: "I was sitting in the basement of the Rutgers University Library, looking through a copy of 'Theatre Arts Monthly' from 1937, and there was a photograph from Welles' production of “Julius Caesar” which featured Welles in a dark coat and black gloves, sitting at the edge of the stage.  Next to him was a young man playing a ukulele tricked up to look like a lute.  My first thought was: the real story here is the kid.  What does this moment feel like from the kid's point of view--to bear witness to a celebrity creating himself right in front of your eyes?  Investigating the history of this theatrical moment, I discovered the young actor from 1937, Arthur Anderson, was alive and living in New York .  He was an invaluable source, and he still has the ukulele, which he played for me at his kitchen table in a remarkable moment that felt as if I were melting through time.  Linklater's film astonishingly recreates this photograph with heart-stopping accuracy."

In the summer of 1937, Orson Welles and John Houseman embarked on an ambitious plan to start a classical repertory theatre in New York City, based on the youthful nucleus of the company they had assembled for their staging of Marc Blitzstein’s controversial opera, “The Cradle Will Rock”, their final project at the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal initiative supporting live performance in the United States during the Great Depression .  The new enterprise was incorporated a few days later as the Mercury Theatre and they eventually found themselves a home in what had been the Comedy Theatre, on 41^st Street and Broadway. 

Built in 1909, the Mercury Theater building had fallen into disrepair, but the company spent a month restoring and preparing the stage area for the first production, Welles’s version of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, billed as “Caesar: Death of a Dictator”, which would open a mere ten weeks after the Mercury Theatre was conceived.  The stage was to appear bare, covered with platforms, steps, and ramps of varying heights and rakes.  These had been acquired from a warehouse which stored lumber from the sets of other productions, hence the lack of uniformity, which Welles and his production team utilised with a particular creative flair. The rear wall of the theatre was left visible, also painted a rusty red, together with its steam pipes and heating ducts.

 Another feature of the production design, which was based on Welles’s original drawings and executed by Sam Leve, was the use of a series of open traps, from which steps led to the under-stage areas.  These hazards were beloved of the director, despite the cast’s apprehensions, although, following a blackout at the first dress rehearsal, the lights came up on the conspirators waiting to assassinate Caesar and one of their number was seen to be missing.  Brutus, played by Welles himself, was found unconscious beneath the stage, fortunately with no lasting damage. 

 Welles’s production was stunningly contemporary.  The Roman senators and citizenry wore Fascist military uniforms or sharp suits with turned-up collars and black hats and the action was accompanied by Marc Blitzstein’s martial music, the thump of the mob’s feet on wooden boards and the forest of dramatic, vertical shafts of brilliance – the so-called ‘Nuremberg lights’ – reproduced by technical director Jeannie Rosenthal.  Pared to an hour-and-a-half without an interval, this “Julius Caesar” lived up to the Mercury manifesto, which had been published in the New York Times on August 29^th, 1937.  Written by Welles and Houseman, it declared: “By the use of apron, lighting, sound devices, music, etc., we hope to give this production much of the speed and violence that it must have had on the Elizabethan stage.”

John Mason Brown described the show as “by all odds the most exciting, most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome and the most absorbing of the season’s new productions.  The touch of genius is upon it.”  The first outpouring of an avalanche of critical praise, this presaged the extraordinary success of what is still acknowledged to be a landmark in the history of American theatre and the anointing of the “boy wonder” who would go on to create cinematic legend.

 

According to producer Marc Samuelson, “one of the issues that you face is that it’s very hard to shoot 1937 New York in New York, so you’re not shooting it in the actual place. New York has changed so completely that everything in the background is wrong, everything in the foreground is wrong, the people all look wrong, every building’s been changed.  It’s enormously difficult.  So you then end up shooting New York in some other North American city which looks vaguely like it did in 1937. By the time you’ve done all of that, you may as well have shot it anywhere.”   

“This movie doesn’t really exist any longer in New York,” says Richard Linklater. “If you go to where the Mercury Theatre was, you would never know. It’s an office building – there’s not even a plaque. That street looks so different, it didn’t really matter to me where we shot the film. As a filmmaker, wherever I could make this film I would, (and I did)”.

ME AND ORSON WELLES based the production in London, where a combination of Pinewood Studios and some imaginatively chosen locations such as the  magnificently restored Gaiety Theatre, an almost exact contemporary of the Mercury on the Isle of Man brought New York to life.

“I really fell in love with the place,” admits Linklater. “It was almost too nice, too ornate, but I thought if we brought it down a little bit and didn’t look up at the beautiful domed cathedral-like ceiling, it had similar proportions to the Mercury Theatre in seats and size.  The stage was about the same size and the below stage area and its trap door arrangement with locks and pulleys was far more complex and interesting than you would ever be able to realise if you were building your own stage. So all of that felt great, and to shoot on the Isle of Man for those weeks was just kind of perfect. Some films are just meant to be.  It just feels like it lines up and it’s meant to happen.”