"This was a force of nature that came in, a creation that wiped the slate clean from the type of films that preceded him. There was never any gray with him. He told Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland, 'Let's do everything they told us never to do.' The low angles and deep focal-length lenses, the structure of the story, the flashbacks, the overlapping images—no one had ever seen anything like it."
A version of this article appeared in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Fast Company magazine.
