During the next hour, everything you'll hear from us is really true and based on solid facts.

Is what would you say the thesis statement of this film is?

Because it dwells very heavily on the idea that film is itself an artifice, much like painting.

He says early in the movie, by way of an introduction, this is a film about trickery.

He then promises to give people

an hour of, you know, cold, unfiltered facts, a refrain that is repeated throughout the movie

or something like that. You know, we're showing you only, only the truth, images of the grandest

verisimilitude or something, some Wellesian flourish like that. And of course, the whole movie is about how nothing

you're seeing is real. Everything is an artifice. This is a story within a story within a story.

An idea that I know Wells grew particularly interested in later in his life in which his recently

released film, his recently completed film, the other side of the wind dwells on very heavily

itself. But so I suppose

in the kind of surface level reading of what Wells is saying in F for Fake, Wells is conceding that

his entire career has been something of a fraud and that the medium that he's given his entire life

to is all based on artifice and trickery. But since the tone of the film is upbeat,

and since I think we can reasonably conclude, Orson Wells didn't actually think that about his

chosen medium, what would you say the thesis is? There are some kind of affirmative messages

about art and its value buried throughout the film, but the film seems to be in the business

of kind of deconstructing those

somewhat as well. So I'm curious what you think the thesis is. I think one of the things that's

interesting about the movie is how it eludes a clear thesis statement. It's also one of the

potentially frustrating things about the movie. I saw this movie for the first time when I was

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