“For you, television is therefore a synthesis between film and radio?”
“I always look for the synthesis: it is a job that deeply interests me because I have to be sincere with myself, I am nothing more than an experimenter. True value in my opinion exists outside the law, but I am an experimenter. To experiment is in fact the only thing that interests me. I am not interested in masterpieces, posterity, glory, but only the pleasure of experimenting for the sake of experimenting: it is the only field in which I feel truly honest and sincere. I don’t have any devotion to that which I have done: in my eyes it’s all really insignificant. I am profoundly cynical when confronted with my work and with the majority of the work that I see in the world: but I’m not cynical when confronted with work on a material. It is a difficult sentiment to communicate. We who profess ourselves to be experimenters have inherited an ancient tradition: some of us were great artists, but we haven’t ever turned our muses into our lovers. For example, Leonardo considered himself a scientist who painted, and not a painter who wanted to be a scientist. I don’t want to lead you to compare me to Leonardo, but only to explain that there exists a large flock of people judging their art on the basis of a different hierarchy of values, on the basis of moral values. I do not therefore go into a state of ecstasy in front of art: I find ecstasy in front of the human presence, in front of what we do with our hands, our senses, etc… Once finished, our work has no longer great importance, as the aesthetes would say: it is the act that interests me, not the product, and I am not interested in the result unless it emanates the odor of human sweat, or is charged with an idea”. (A.Bazin and C. Bitsch, Entretien avec Orson Welles, in Cahiers du cinéma, June 1958)