Oja Kodar

Biography

She was born Olga Palinkaš. Her father was Hungarian, her mother Croatian; the girl grew up in Zagreb. The stage name was invented for her by Welles: her sister Nina called her “Oja”, and the Croatian “k’o dar” means “as a present”.

They met in 1961 in Zagreb, where Welles was shooting scenes for “The Trial”. The director was forty-six and was married to the Italian actress Paola Mori. The relationship, which began soon after they met, lasted until his death in October 1985; the Italian press reported on it in March 1970.

Almost her whole film career is tied to his projects, many of which were left unfinished. In 1966 the couple returned to the Yugoslav coast, and Welles began shooting “The Deep”, based on Charles Williams’s novel “Dead Calm”; Kodar played one of the main roles. Money and technical difficulties halted the work. Decades later Kodar explained the failure by the unwillingness of her jealous co-star Jeanne Moreau to dub her own lines, while the editor Mauro Bonanni claimed that Welles abandoned the film when he realised that the novice was ill-suited for the lead. Which of them is right is hard to check. In the documentary “F for Fake” (1973) she was an uncredited co-writer and played herself; the film received mixed reviews and has since grown in reputation, chiefly because of its editing. With Welles she acted together in the Yugoslav film about Nikola Tesla and co-wrote the script of the political thriller “The Big Brass Ring”. In 1980 she collaborated on the script of “The Dreamers”, based on stories by Karen Blixen. Test scenes with her in the main role were shot in 1982, but Welles never found the money for the film; the Munich Filmmuseum edited the black-and-white and colour footage into a short film.

After Welles’s death Kodar sold the rights to the book “Dead Calm” to the Australian producer George Miller for a film of the same name, released in 1989. The deal nearly fell through until the producers told her they would hold her liable for damages. At about the same time she made her debut as a director of feature films: she produced “Jaded” (1989) together with Gary Graver, who was also the cinematographer; some scenes were shot in an artist’s loft in downtown Los Angeles. She also supervised Jess Franco’s assembly of unedited footage from Welles’s “Don Quixote”, released in 1992 and mostly poorly reviewed.

Her second work as a director, the war drama “Vrijeme za…” (1993), was made from her own script, and its action takes place during the war in Croatia of 1991–1995. The film was a co-production of the state-owned Croatian studio Jadran Film, the Italian television channel Rai Tre and the company Ellepi Films. In 1995 Kodar co-directed and co-wrote the German-French documentary “Orson Welles: The One-Man Band”, for which she compiled unused footage shot by Welles over the last twenty years of his work; it also tells of the three unfinished films on which they worked together.

The chief of these was “The Other Side of the Wind”. Welles began shooting it in 1970, and the idea goes back to the early 1960s. It is the story of a film director’s seventieth birthday party, a caustic portrait of Hollywood in the 1970s. Kodar says she wrote the screenplay together with Welles, and she herself appears in the film in a role the crew called “the Indian” or “Pocahontas”. For a long time the film’s reels were split between Iran, where the financiers were, and a vault in Paris, so Welles never managed to edit the film.

Then came decades of negotiations. Many investors and lawyers who had dealt with the film since 1999 told a similar story: Kodar broke deals, changed terms and negotiated in parallel. A lawyer for the Boushehri family, co-owners of the film, wrote in a 2007 memo that it was impossible to reach a deal with her. The directors Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom and the author Joseph McBride, all participants in the film, confirmed that she had more than once obstructed its completion. Kodar herself has described her position differently, and I would not settle that dispute for her. In October 2014 she agreed to a plan by the producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall, but the agreement fell apart and was resumed only in February 2017, when the deal with them and with Netflix was signed.

In March 2017 the negative was flown from France to Los Angeles. In the spring of 2018 Kodar watched a rough cut and suggested changes, above all that the scenes of the film within the film be lengthened; according to the editor Bob Murawski, she had fewer notes than expected. In July 2018 she admitted she was undecided: at first she had wanted to make a documentary about all the problems of “The Other Side of the Wind”, but now she thought that perhaps it was good that the film had been made after all.

She did not attend the Venice premiere in 2018; her letter to Rymsza was read out from the stage.