F for Fake

Orson Welles:
I started at the top and have been working my way down ever since.

Orson Welles:
Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

Orson Welles:
For my next experiment ladies and gentleman, I would appreciate the loan of any small personal object form your pocket. A key, box of matches, a coin - ah, key it is, good sir. Hold it up 10 feet over your head and watch out for the slightest hint of hanky panky... and behold before our very eyes a transformation! We've changed your key into... a coin. What happened to the key? It's been returned to you. Look closely, sir, you'll find the key back in your pocket. May we see it please? What's that, sir? Did I used to be a magician, sir? I'm still working on it. As for the key, it was not symbolic of anything... this isn't that kind of movie. You'll find the coin in your pocket now, sir. Keep your eyes on that coin sir, while it's returned to you... as your key. Should we return you to your mother? Is this your mother? No, of course not. Open your mouth wide... and we'll return you your money. And by the way, have you ever heard of Robert Houdin, speaking of magicians, I mean. Oh no, of course not. But of course, you do know my partner Francois Reichenbach. Houdin was the greatest magician who ever lived. And do you know what he said? "A magician, he said, is just an actor-Just an actor playing the part of a magician."

Orson Welles:
Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery, fraud, about lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. This is a promise. For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact.

Orson Welles:
I did promise that for one hour, I'd tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past seventeen minutes, I've been lying my head off.

Orson Welles:
Paris was suffering from August. This happens every year. It shuts down, closes up, and this is the time when an invader could take the country by telephone... if he could get somebody to answer it.

Orson Welles:
[quoting a phenomenal art forger] Do you think I should confess? To what? Committing masterpieces?

Orson Welles:
What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is "art".

Orson Welles:
With your permission, a bit of verse by Kipling: When first the flush of a new-born sun fell on the green and gold / Our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in the mold / And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart / Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, 'It's pretty, but is it Art?'

The Girl:
[Pretending to quote a conversation between herself and Picasso] The best critical opinion is a load of horse manure.

Clifford Irving:
I've known Elmyr for about eight years. We met when I was broke. When I was writing fiction. I wasn't selling it very well.

Orson Welles:
His fiction didn't sell. Elmyr's biographer's a highly gifted writer. Does it say something for this age of ours that he could only make it big by fakery?

Elmyr de Hory:
Le grande surprise!

Orson Welles:
Cliff Irving's caper may well be the hoax of the century, but, really, this is not, you know, in any way the century of the hoax. We hanky-panky men have always been with you.

Elmyr de Hory:
That's a fact.

Orson Welles:
What's new?

Clifford Irving:
The experts.

Elmyr de Hory:
The so-called experts...

Orson Welles:
Experts are the new oracles.

Elmyr de Hory:
- are greatly pretentious...

Orson Welles:
They speak to us with the absolute authority of the computer.

Elmyr de Hory:
- pretend to know something what they only know very superficially.

Orson Welles:
And we bow down before them. They're God's own gift to the faker.

Clifford Irving:
All the world loves to see the experts and the establishment made a fool of.

Orson Welles:
Like all Hungarians, he told the best Hungarian jokes. The omelet, you know that, don't you? Sure. It's a classic. It's in our Hungarian cookbook. To make an omelet, it says, first: steal an egg.

Elmyr de Hory:
Well, naturally. To be Hungarian, it is not a nationality, it is a profession.

Orson Welles:
But the truth about Hungarians, which they do try to cover up, is that they are not any more crooked than the rest of us. But not the way they like to tell it! Of all the Hungarian friends I've ever had, I can't remember one who didn't want me to think of him as a king of con-men.