MY LUNCHES WITH ORSON: CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN HENRY JAGLOM AND ORSON WELLES

MY LUNCHES WITH ORSON: CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN HENRY JAGLOM AND ORSON WELLES Edited by Peter Biskind. New York: Metropolitan, 2013, 336 pp.

My Lunches with Orson, which presents a remarkable series of conversations between directors Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom, is not the first, nor will it be the last, of its kind. Publisher Faber & Faber has even serialized the "director-on-director" conceit into its own series (e.g., Burton-on-Burton, Gilliam-on-Gilliam, Scorsese-on-Scorsese). Yet 1967's Hitchcock/ Truffaut has always been the gold standard of director-on-director film discussion. Essentially journalistic in nature, the book was the result of a fifty-hour-long interview containing more than five hundred questions on Hitchcock's career. Organized by the chronological progression of his films, Truffaut offered extraordinary insight into Hitchcock's directorial career-even if Hitchcock's love of wordplay and misdirection sometimes insinuated a bit of untrustworthiness into the proceedings.

In the introduction to the 1985 revised edition, Truffaut states that he was "emulat[ing] Oedipus' consultation of the oracle" by interviewing Hitchcock: he wanted to understand the true parentage of his own filmmaking. Unlike Oedipus, who murders his father, marries his mother, and finally gouges out his own eyes, Truffaut was not destined to bring about his own ruin through these meetings with his cinematic oracle. Welles and Jaglom's conversations in My Lunches with Orson diverge from the legacy of the Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews on this very point: ruin.

In conversations conducted...