There are few encounters more daunting than meeting auteur icon Robert Altman at a lavish London cigar bar for a one-on-one interview. This for his critically acclaimed period social satire Gosford Park.
Throw in Academy Award- winning British screenwriter, Julian Fellowes, and you have yourself stimulating company and an inferiority complex. But a combination of Altman’s hypnotic Southern drawl (he hails from Kentucky) and Fellowes’s English enunciations quickly establish an ambience of sharp satire and quirky repartee.
Gosford Park tells the story of a patriarchal family (circa 1932) who gather relations and friends for a shooting party at their opulent country estate. As the guests assemble in the magnificent drawing rooms above, their personal maids and valets join the house servants in the crawling kitchens and corridors downstairs.
Culminating in a murder, the film is part comedy of manners, part mystery. Its subtle deconstruction of the English class system through a multi-layered narrative saw it sweep the board at this year’s Golden Globes and garner a variety of Oscar nominations (including one for Altman as Best Director) and a winner in Fellowes’s sublime screenplay.
Altman, now in his 70s but with the energy of a circus juggler, adds the murder mystery genre to his
impressive list of work that includes M*A*S*H, The Player and Short Cuts.
“I love to take genres and turn them over a little bit, look at them differently. I didn’t really want to do a ‘whodunit’ but rather a ‘that it was done’, ” he remembers.
As is so often the case with an Altman ensemble, the cast grew to embrace a wealth of talent, this time from Britain’s cream of the crop including Maggie Smith, Richard E Grant, Helen Mirren, Alan Bates, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jeremy Northam and Emily Watson.
Fellowes recalls how the seed for Gosford Park was first originated, “Bob [Altman] and producer Bob Balaban had decided to explore the English class system by taking a fully staffed English country house in the 1930s and exposing all these desperate lives with desperate agendas”. Altman counters: “We called it Ten Little Indians meets Rules of the Game.”
When Balaban introduced Fellowes to Altman as a potential writer of Gosford Park, he found himself drawn to the idea’s potential and the collaboration.
“I think that what interests Bob for movie projects are narratives wherein people arbitrarily have to share a geographical position, and not by emotional choice: the gathering of a family wedding, for example [as in A Wedding], or the variety of individuals employed by a Hollywood studio [as in The Player].
“They are brought together, not necessarily because they want to be together, and therefore they almost always have entirely different agendas.” Altman wryly responds to Fellowes’s observation: “I never looked at it so analytically before but Julian may have discovered my Achilles heel for storytelling.”
Altman and Fellowes plotted the narrative in such a way that the story is seen very much from the point of view of the servants. “Very early on we decided on this convention that you would never see an upstairs character unless a servant was present,” comments Fellowes.
Fellowes’s rapid jumping from one insightful reflection to the next also draws comparison to the strict
system that resides in both the upstairs and downstairs environments, and how the servants actually took it more seriously. “The upper class could abide by or abandon their own rules as they wish, but the servants absolutely lived by them.”
When probed about his role in Hollywood’s evolution, Altman is quick to dismiss the correlation: “I was never part of Hollywood. Ever. I was always an outsider. I could not tell you the name of any person who heads a Hollywood studio. I don’t know them. I’ve never even hung out on Hollywood Boulevard. We’re in a different business. They sell shoes and I make gloves.”
Despite Altman’s disassociation with Hollywood, there is little doubt of the impact he has had on the
industry, with rising auteurs such as Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights), Alexander Payne (Election) and Wes Anderson (The Royal Tennenbaums) citing him as a major influence. It’s of some comfort then that there are still grand men around of the cinematic tradition such as Altman and Fellowes who continue to push the boundaries of film in new and exciting directions.
As I gracelessly try to wrap up with the worldly duo, Fellowes leans over to me, hat teetering on the edge of his head: “You liked our film then?”
Altman stops me before I have a chance to answer yes … “Julian the man hasn’t even finished his cigar yet.”