My Review of "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead is an interesting concept that sometimes makes my mind spin. I've heard of this documentary but never watched it until now. It's a Netflix exclusive that I totally forgot about until I started burning through my list of movies to watch.

This film is actually a documentary about a movie that Orson Welles never completed. That's right the prolific actor and director Orson Welles. He died before ever getting it released and he worked on it for many years. It was just about to be finished until there were complications that prevented him from releasing the film.

They start off telling us who Orson Welles is. They need to do this because of the content of his last film called The Other Side of the Wind. By the way this movie is available on Netflix and I will check that movie out later.

Orson was basically a prodigy. He was able to read and act at an extremely young age and even made Citizen Kane by the time he was 24. That's a hell of a career already! In this documentary they explain how Citizen Kane was a real bane on his existence. It made it seem as though he had plateaued at such a young age. Everything that he created after Citizen Kane would be compared and never reach this greatness. It's a shame because he has made some incredible films afterwards.

They then talk about how he's been a radical all of his life. He's always trying to find new ways of filming and new ideas and concepts to put into his movies. For his last movie he was on a bit of a hiatus because Hollywood had shunned him and had made him even more bitter than he already was.

He had already a troubled past where both of his parents had passed away at an early age. His movies already consisted of some sort of sense of deception whether it be from a good friend or a character lose their moral grounding. This was a common theme to his movies and some even say that Citizen Kane was really a personal film.

His last film would be self funded for the most part and he would beg others to help get it funded. It was a very personal project about the comeback of a famous director but he insists that it was not a biopic of himself. There are tons of people that say otherwise.

Hollywood had changed a lot since his hiatus and he knew this. He still wanted to be a radical and change the way he did things. It kind of worked at the time that he was filming the movie. He had a concept of divine accidents that would create the perfect scene. The movie would be mostly unscripted and they were to fly at the seat of their pants.

Obviously with very little planned and everything in his head there would be complications. There were a lot of hurdles that they had to overcome. It was pretty nuts. Thankfully he has really good friends and his legendary status helped him along the way.

I thought this film was a really interesting dissection of Orson Welles' life and the lives of the people around him. He was such a complicated and artistic person. I never knew how much pressures he had to deal with in order to get his films made and how much influence he really had. There was a lot of politics in Hollywood that I wasn't aware of. It was also interesting to understand the changes in direction of films over the years. I didn't know that 70's movies like Star Wars, Easy Rider and Jaws had such a huge influence in changing the film atmosphere.

Overall, I really liked this documentary as it was really informative and a very good analysis of the trials and tribulations that Orson Welles had to go through. There were a few lulls within the film that kind of dragged so the pacing wasn't the best. I have to give this a 7.5 out of 10. I really liked it and would suggest people that are big into films to check it out as well.