Orson Welles died more than 30 years ago, and his last fea­ture film F for Fake came out fif­teen years before that. But we’ll now have to revise our notions of where his fil­mog­ra­phy ends, since his long-unfin­ished project The Oth­er Side of the Wind just debuted at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val in advance of its Novem­ber 2nd release. Shot between 1970 and 1976, a process pro­longed by numer­ous finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties, the film was first thrust into lim­bo in its third year of edit­ing by the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, as some of its financ­ing had come from the Shah’s broth­er-in-law. The light at the end of The Oth­er Side of the Wind’s decades-long tun­nel of own­er­ship com­pli­ca­tions, when it final­ly appeared, took a form even Welles could nev­er have imag­ined: Net­flix.

The Oth­er Side of the Wind stars acclaimed film direc­tor John Hus­ton as an acclaimed film direc­tor named Jake Han­naford, recent­ly returned to Amer­i­ca after years of self-exile in Europe. An old-school rel­ic in the 1970s’ “New Hol­ly­wood” era, a time when a younger gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers like Mar­tin Scors­ese, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, and Ter­rence Mal­ick used the major stu­dios to real­ize per­son­al visions at a large cin­e­mat­ic scale, Han­naford tries to make a come­back with a coun­ter­cul­ture pic­ture of his own. Filled with long takes of vast land­scapes, mod­ern archi­tec­ture, a lone motor­cy­cle rid­er, and gra­tu­itous nudi­ty, this film-with­in-the-film, also called The Oth­er Side of the Wind, takes its cues not just from the New Hol­ly­wood kids but from Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni and the oth­er Euro­pean film­mak­ers then in vogue as well.

The “real” The Oth­er Side of the Wind, of which you can get a taste in the trail­er above, takes a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent tack, using doc­u­men­tary-style shoot­ing, quick cut­ting, and oscil­la­tion between col­or and black and white. This lay­er­ing of dif­fer­ent styles comes with a lay­er­ing of dif­fer­ent eras, each com­ment­ing on the oth­ers: the 1930s and 1940s that shaped Welles as a film­mak­er (and that Welles shaped as a peri­od in cin­e­ma), the New-Hol­ly­wood 1970s, and the present day, when a com­pa­ny like Net­flix has the clout to make projects hap­pen for any direc­tor, liv­ing or dead. The col­lab­o­ra­tion to com­plete the film involved new par­tic­i­pants as well as those who’d worked on it in the 1970s, like Welles asso­ciate Peter Bog­danovich, who played a film­mak­er in The Oth­er Side of the Wind not long after becom­ing a film­mak­er him­self.

Numer­ous oth­er direc­tors also appear in the film, from Gold­en-Age Hol­ly­wood jour­ney­man Nor­man Fos­ter to French New Wave fig­ure Claude Chabrol to coun­ter­cul­tur­al icon Den­nis Hop­per. As for Han­naford, a line in the trail­er describes him as “the Hem­ing­way of cin­e­ma,” the kind of macho artist who had long intrigued Welles, per­haps ever since he met and clashed with Hem­ing­way him­self. “He’s been reject­ed by all his old friends,” Welles once said of the Han­naford char­ac­ter in a pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the film. “He’s final­ly been shown up to be a kind of voyeur… a fel­low who lives off oth­er peo­ple’s dan­ger and death.” He put it more blunt­ly to Hus­ton in a quote that appears in Josh Karp’s book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Mak­ing of The Oth­er Side of the Wind: “It’s a film about a bas­tard direc­tor. It’s about us, John. It’s a film about us.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Orson Welles’ First Ever Film, Direct­ed at Age 19

Dis­cov­er the Lost Films of Orson Welles

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trail­er That Was Nev­er Released in Amer­i­ca

Watch Orson Welles’ Trail­er for Cit­i­zen Kane: As Inno­v­a­tive as the Film Itself

Orson Welles Remem­bers his Stormy Friend­ship with Ernest Hem­ing­way

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

One of the won­der­ful things about David Lynch is that, despite inter­views, sev­er­al doc­u­men­taries on his cre­ative process, plen­ty of behind-the-scenes footage of him direct­ing, and the release of a whole memoir/biography told both sub­jec­tive­ly *and* objectively…despite all that, the man is still an enig­ma. Even when he returned 25 years lat­er to famil­iar ground with the third sea­son of Twin Peaks, there was no sign of self-par­o­dy, and he deliv­ered some of the most bril­liant work of his career. How the hell does he do it?

That being said, if you have read his book Catch­ing the Big Fish or have heard him in inter­views, this short film direct­ed by his son Austin Lynch and Case Sim­mons, and pre­sent­ed by Stel­la McCart­ney, might not be any­thing new. If you are just now dis­cov­er­ing Lynch, then this is a quick primer on his cre­ative process and his devo­tion to Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion as a way to dive into that cre­ativ­i­ty and, even­tu­al­ly, bring peace to the world.

Austin Lynch is one of three Lynch chil­dren to work in enter­tain­ment. The eldest Jen­nifer Lynch direct­ed Box­ing Hele­na and wrote the Twin Peaks spin-off book The Secret Diary of Lau­ra Palmer. Riley Lynch is a musi­cian and appeared in two episodes of the recent Twin Peaks.

Giv­en the pedi­gree, Lynch and Sim­mons man­age to hon­or David Lynch with­out copy­ing his style. The short abstract pro­file also fea­tures very short cameos by Stel­la McCart­ney, Børns, Lola Kirk, and sev­er­al oth­ers.

The direc­tor appears here and there dur­ing the nine min­utes, back­lit by sub­tle col­ored lights in a pri­vate screen­ing room, watch­ing a movie. What movie? It doesn’t mat­ter.

“It’s so mag­i­cal, I don’t know why, to go into a the­ater and have the lights go down,” Lynch says. “It’s very qui­et and then the cur­tains start to open. And then you go into a world.”

The direc­tors link this to a famil­iar Lynch tale of the begin­ning of his film career, when Lynch was paint­ing at the begin­ning of his art school years and the can­vas start­ed to move and make sounds. No mat­ter how many times Lynch tells this sto­ry, there’s some­thing so odd about it. Is he talk­ing in metaphor? Did he hal­lu­ci­nate? Did he get vis­it­ed by a force beyond this real­i­ty? Are his great­est Lynchi­an moments his way of try­ing to make sense of that one episode?

He also talks about the cir­cle that goes from the film to the audi­ence and back, a feed­back loop that musi­cians also talk about, and is the rea­son Lynch still loves the cin­e­ma as an event space. Per­for­mance spaces fig­ure promi­nent­ly in his works, whether it’s the Club Silen­cio in Mul­hol­land Dr., the Lady in the Radi­a­tor in Eraser­head, or the var­i­ous lodges and per­for­mance areas in Twin Peaks. (It’s also why he despis­es watch­ing films on iPhones, apart from the size.)

Lynch explains here how he became a film­mak­er through study­ing med­i­ta­tion, how it saved him from anger and despair, and how these tech­niques led to land­ing big­ger cre­ative fish from “the ocean of solu­tions” and expand­ing artis­tic intu­ition.

Is Lynch enlight­ened? No, but he’s clos­er than most of us:

“Every day for me gets bet­ter and bet­ter,” he con­cludes. “And I believe that enliven­ing uni­ty in the world will bring peace on earth. So I say peace to all of you.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

Hear David Lynch Read from His New Mem­oir Room to Dream, and Browse His New Online T‑Shirt Store

Watch All of the Com­mer­cials That David Lynch Has Direct­ed: A Big 30-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.