Film Interview: Mark Cousins on The Eyes of Orson Welles

It’s a rainy August morning in Edinburgh and inside a room at Summerhall, the former vet school turned arts and festival venue, Mark Cousins is pointing at a big abstract self-portrait of Orson Welles. “It’s a 4K blow-up of this one,” says Cousins, guiding me to a display case housing the original. The painting – part of the first ever exhibition of Welles’ rarely seen artwork – is more impressionistic in its smaller form. It shows him as an old man, Lear-like and reflective. “This is Orson Welles at his most self-aware,” Cousins says. “He dappled it with a toothbrush and see that eye there?” – he highlights its haunting blankness – “If you look over there, that’s it blown up massively.”