They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

No story has a happy ending unless you stop telling it before it’s over. — Orson Welles

Orson Welles’ spent about a decade on his last film project, The Other Side of the Wind, but never completed it before his death in 1985, having shot the film for over five years and spent several more editing it, or simply tinkering with it, before he lost the rights to the footage in a legal dispute. Netflix has commissioned a completion of the film with what was shot, in line with what’s known of Welles’ plans, as well as a companion documentary about the making of the original project called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. The former film holds little interest to me, for many reasons, but the documentary is one of the most purely entertaining things I’ve seen all year. Morgan Neville, who also had a hit this year with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, spoke to just about everyone involved in the making of The Other Side of the Wind who is still alive, used archival footage from others, footage from the movie itself, plus recorded interviews with Welles and bits of his other films to create an informative and fast-paced look at a slow-moving cinematic disaster.

The documentary covers the period from when he began the project on The Other Side of the Wind in 1970 through the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which, for reasons explained in the documentary, cost Welles control of his project, with a quick run through the last few years of Welles’ life and some of the other projects he left unfinished. Welles appears to have had a general vision for the movie, which was itself a film-within-a-film and had a clearly autobiographical bent that he repeatedly denied, but the script and that vision kept changing, while Welles, strapped for cash, kept improvising on matters of location, crew, and even cast. He tried to use impressionist Rich Little in the film, and later cast a local waitress with no acting experience (or, it would appear, talent) in an important supporting role. He tried to work with a skeleton crew of people especially loyal to him, but the set is described by surviving members as “a circus” where it was often unclear why Welles was doing what he was doing, or if he even knew.

Welles comes off as a narcissist and megalomaniac who openly lies to his cast and crew to avoid any admission that things weren’t going well. He was also a perfectionist, in the worst way that can be, in that he couldn’t bear to let films go, leaving at least four projects unfinished at his death — this one, The Deep (an adaptation of the novel Dead Calm), The Dreamers, and Welles’ adaptation of Don Quixote. The perfectionism meant that scenes were reshot and rewritten many times, often on the fly, while the editing process also took years as Welles, in the retelling of people who worked with him, altered his vision for the film as he edited it – while doing so as a squatter in the house of director Peter Bogdanovich, Welles’ friend and one of the stars of the film.

The documentary doesn’t so much address the question of why the movie wasn’t finished – that’s straightforward – or what Welles hoped to accomplish with the movie beyond making his magnum opus, which is unanswerable. It seems more a study of Welles the character, a man undone by a massive early success in Citizen Kane, subsequent betrayals by Hollywood, a lack of contemporary acclaim for later works – many now seen as great films, as his entire legacy has undergone a total reassessment since his death – and strained personal relationships. There’s even a hint at the end of They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead that Welles’ upbringing played a substantial part in his perfectionism and constant need for approbation, although it’s underexplored, likely because there was no one to interview on camera about it. Instead, Neville seems to ask this question about The Other Side of the Wind: Did Welles ruin his own movie or did the movie ruin him?

The film also includes vignettes from Welles’ personal life in the 1970s and early 1980s that both flesh out (no pun intended) his character while further explaining, or trying to explain, the endless story of the making of his movie. That includes the story of Welles’ friendship with Bogdanovich, which ended, per Bogdanovich’s telling, when Welles and Burt Reynolds mocked him during a television appearances; his longstanding affair with Oja Kador, a Croatian artist and actress who also starred in his film; and his extensive working relationship with cameraman Gary Graver, which crossed into the abusive. Those three relationships were essential both to the making of The Other Side of the Wind and its unmaking as well, as there is no way Welles would have fallen so far down this rabbit hole were it not for the devotion he inspired in his friends and colleagues.

Neville uses some quirky devices to keep the pacing brisk, especially at the beginning, such as using clips of Welles from his films to create a false dialogue with the narrator, Alan Cummings, something that I found amusing but is certainly atypical for serious documentaries. There’s also a clip of his wonderful appearance in The Muppet Movie, likely the first appearance of Welles I ever saw, which forever cemented his image for me as a hefty, silver-bearded man with a deep voice and great charisma on the screen. As it turns out, Welles had a spectacular sense of humor as well, which comes across as a side effect in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead; he had a huge laugh and a quick, dry wit, never evident in his films but very much a part of his persona and likely a reason people in his orbit were so willing to throw their lives into chaos when he called. I can’t say anything here made me more interested in seeing The Other Side of the Wind, but it did remind me of how much I enjoyed his work behind the camera (The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil) and in front of it – especially The Third Man, a film so good that for years I assumed he directed it.