Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you?

A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible.

Orson Welles on the genius in not-knowing: pic.twitter.com/uikbK3Q5ry

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) September 5, 2022

In this clip, Orson Welles talks about making Citizen Kane and the genius of not-knowing:

Q: Where did you get the confidence from?

A: Ignorance! Ignorance! Sheer ignorance, you know. There’s no confidence to equal it. It’s only when you know something about a profession that you’re timid or careful.

Q: How does ignorance show itself?

A: I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed. And in this case I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticized if he failed, and I didn’t know that there were things you couldn’t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.

Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you?

A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible. Or theoretically impossible. And of course, again, I had a great advantage, not only in the real genius of my cameraman, but in the fact that he, like all great men, I think, who are masters of a craft, told me right at the outset that there was nothing about camerawork that I couldn’t learn in half a day, that any intelligent person couldn’t learn in half a day. And he was right.

Q: It’s true of an awful lot of things, isn’t it?

A: Of all things.

The rest of the 1960 BBC interview is worth watching, I think, if you have 25 minutes or so:

What’s interesting to me is how much of this is echoed by the players in Light & Magic, Lawrence Kasdan’s six-part documentary about Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company that George Lucas created for the making of Star Wars. The good lines are right there in the trailer:

Listening to the various ILM artists talk about their work, I was reminded of this bit from Anni Albers I read yesterday in On Weaving, on the cycle of mastery vs. being an amateur:

For anyone who is making something that previously did not exist in this form is, at that point, of necessity an amateur. How can he know how this thing is done that never has been done before? Every designer, every artist, every inventor or discoverer of something new is in that sense an amateur. And to explore the untried, he must be an adventurer. For he finds himself alone on new ground.

Filed under: not knowing