A pop tragedy in the making

A scene from Orson Welles and Me. Photo / Supplied by Madman entertainment

Richard Linklater is kind enough to take no offence when I tell him a film about Orson Welles seems an unlikely project for him.

Although he helmed a couple of mainstream outings (The School of Rock and a remake of The Bad New Bears) and redefined romance in the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset diptych, he's best known for films (from the $30,000 Slacker to the rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly) at what might be called the jagged cutting edge of pop culture. Why then Me and Orson Welles, a period film about the legendary production of a Shakespearean tragedy?

"Weeeell," he drawls down a phone line from his home in Austin, Texas, "this is the pop culture of 1937. What was so interesting back then was that the highest-brow culture was the pop culture: the best music - Cole Porter, George Gershwin - was also the most popular music.

"I think there was less of a division between high culture and low culture. There was opera and ballet, of course, but Orson Welles was on the cover of Time and this play was written up in Life magazine. It was what everyone was talking about."

"This play" was Julius Caesar, which Welles directed for the Mercury Theatre he had just founded with John Houseman. The production dressed its protagonists in the uniforms of Italian fascists - thus setting it in the present day - and Linklater's film, working from the sketchy pictorial record, recreates short sequences from the production with an exactitude that makes it almost as good as being there.

But as the title suggests, this is not Shakespeare on stage. The "me" is Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), a 17-year-old with stars in his eyes who lands a tiny role in the new production. He heedlessly gets involved with Sonja (Claire Danes), a production assistant with an agenda of her own and, before it's all over, he finds out that bathing in the reflected glory of Welles' genius comes at the price of having to stand in his shadow.

"I think I liked that it was behind the scenes, a backstage story," Linklater says. "I don't know if I have a movie in me about making movies, but making a movie about putting on a play was kind of personal. It touches a lot of that creative process, the making of art in an ensemble environment, the artistic troupe. That was kind of fun to dig into."

It's wrong to say that Welles' Caesar invented modern-dress Shakespeare, since there are records of earlier small productions outside New York and London. But its bold approach extended beyond design - characters were eliminated or amalgamated, dialogue was relocated in the text, and even imported from other plays, and Acts IV and V became a single scene - and anything that followed it could scarcely have been imagined without it.

"It gave everyone permission," says Linklater. "It allowed them to rewrite Shakespeare, to make it shorter or whatever. It showed the way for how you can reinterpret Shakespeare and say something very, very contemporary with it."

Much of the attention devoted to the film in the US has focused on Christian McKay, a Lancashire native who was discovered while playing Welles in a one-man show off-Broadway in 2007. His performance is compelling, it must be said, though he does have the advantage of being a dead ringer for the young Orson.

More interesting is the casting of Efron, the teenybopper idol and the star of the High School Musical films.

"Well, who else comes to mind?" counters Linklater when I wonder at the choice. "He's perfect for this part. He has an openness and naivete - though he's also smart and crafty - and he's good-looking enough to think that an older woman would fall for him.

"He's also a natural song-and-dance man. I didn't have to tell him who Fred Astaire was and he knows all his musicals.

"He told me his character is the closest to who he is of anyone he's played. As soon as I sat down with him and started talking I knew that we were off to the races."

For all his love of Welles, Linklater is not one to regard Citizen Kane, the Welles epic that regularly tops critics' All-Time-Best lists, as the greatest film ever made.

"It's one of those films that definitely pushed the medium forward," he says.

"It was so far ahead of its time. The medium itself was only 45 years old and it's kind of incredible what he did at such a young age.

"I think his personality was never meant to fit into anyone else's system. He was always meant to go it alone and the blessing is that he got this little window in which people gave him money and let him do his thing."

LOWDOWN

Who: Richard Linklater, director
What: Me and Orson Welles starring Zac Efron and Claire Danes
When & where: Opens at cinemas on Thursday