Sort of interesting I guess. You can watch them on the Criterion Channel. At least the outdoor scenes were dubbed but they recorded live sound to aid in the dubbing. So they didn't care that you could hear the camera running in one take. In another it sounded like a plane was going by but they didn't let that bother them.
Remember when Christian Bale went berserk because a guy was walking around while he was doing a scene? At one point Orson Welles says cut and points at a guy off camera who wasn't standing still. They cut it short, so maybe Welles ranted at him for several minutes, who knows.
They were more careful with the sound in an interior scene. They film all of Welles' lines at once. He had the script in front of him and we hear him turning the pages as he reads each line. In the other scenes we hear the other actor off camera reading his lines.
He directs other actors while filming scenes, being quite specific about what he wants. They repeat a brief bit of dialog several times without stopping.
"Chin higher, don't look as far to your right," Welles tells the Paola Mori.
I don't know if it annoys actors when directors do this. When Welles appeared in Catch 22, he reportedly never memorized his lines. To conceal how unprepared he was, he told Mike Nichols to just tell him each line the way he wanted him to say it---it would be so much quicker and easier and he'd get what he wanted that way.
And I saw one interview where Welles talked about a director he worked with. They would shoot retake after retake but the director never told them what he wanted. He would just shake his head after each take and say, "Noooo, noooooo."
I always liked Mr Arkadin. But it was seen as a failed attempt to translate Citizen Kane into a European setting.
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