Roughly halfway through the filming of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, word went out that the director would like the entire cast to assemble that evening for dinner — there was something he had to say. So they gathered, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Clive Owen et al, all eager for the word. Altman entered looking, as he does, like a grizzled bear that could turn feral at any moment. “Pretty good,” he said. “It’s all looking pretty good … Everyone, that is, except one.” Which one, they all wanted to know once they had regained their composure. “Ah,” he said (and don’t imagine for a moment that he laughed or gave any hint as to his intent), “I couldn’t possibly tell you that.”
It’s a quintessential Altman story — funny, and it provides a clue to the way the man works. Altman is often described as a maverick, an iconoclast, idiosyncratic in his filmmaking. What is usually meant by this is that his films don’t rely on classic narrative technique — a beginning, a middle and an end; they tend to meander around. Often, they will contain a myriad cast of characters — in Short Cuts (1993) there are 22, in Nashville (1975) even more. “The minute you have more than one voice, you have more possibilities opening up. You have all the molecules in all of those bodies and their make-up interacting.”
His films look a lot as if they depend on chance. “Well,” he says, “that’s because they are chance. Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.”
Mistakes, he is saying, are the stuff of life. “I am a blunderer. I usually don’t know what I am going into at the start. I go into the fog and trust something will be there.”
This — apart from the mischief — is what he was saying to the cast of Gosford Park. Don’t rely only on what you know. Question what you are doing; if everyone is uncertain whether they’re the one not doing well, everyone will do better. He makes the same demand of his audience. “I am not going to do their work for them. I like audiences to crane their necks.”
Audiences don’t necessarily reward him — a great many of his 40 films have, in his word, “tanked”. But these tend to be his favourites — like your children, he says, “It’s the least successful ones that you love the most.”
Take a look at any Altman movie, and you will find a blunderer somewhere at work. In The Long Goodbye (1973), a reworking of the Raymond Chandler novel, it is the deceived private eye played by Elliott Gould. In The Player (1992), it is the invisible poison-pen writer who ends up masterminding the script. It is everyone in Short Cuts — Lily Tomlin’s character accidentally kills a child and doesn’t even know she has done it.
Blunderers in Altman’s work are not fools, they are the catalysts. Sometimes there will be resolutions, most often not. He has never been interested in endings, Altman says. “Stories don’t end. If you take Gosford Park, that ending where Elsie, played by Emily Watson, gets into the car with the producer — that could just as easily have been a beginning. Her going maybe to Hollywood, becoming a star.”
Julie Christie, who worked with Altman on McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), says, “He won’t be bound by rules and he doesn’t expect you to be, either. He doesn’t like safety, even in conversation. And he doesn’t expect people to be sheep.” The film was made in Vancouver, which, at the time, was filled with conscientious objectors to the war in Vietnam. Altman used many of these as extras. Christie says, “He liked them because they were resourceful, didn’t follow the status quo.”
Born in 1925, Altman worked in the 1950s for a company making industrial films (he made more than 60), then in TV. In 1957, after the making of his first feature The Delinquents (“Pretty dreadful,” he says), he directed some episodes for Alfred Hitchcock’s TV series, then went on to Bonanza and Route 66, becoming one of the most successful television directors of the 1960s. Series clearly suited his personality — they don’t begin each time at the beginning, they are open-ended.
It is a piece of movie history that, in 1970, Altman got to direct the movie M*A*S*H, a black comedy about the Korean War, only because 14 other “more acceptable” directors turned it down. It turned into the movie of its time, gaining the third-highest box-office of that year. (The other two were Airport and Love Story, which must say something about the disparity in American taste.) Though set in the 1950s Korean war, the film clearly spoke to a nation still fighting in Vietnam.
Altman is not political, he says, “in the sense that I am not an activist. But I deal in political activity. We are all deeply involved in politics, whether we like it or not.” He is an outspoken critic of George W Bush, but he is aware that the power Bush has comes from voters who believe the myth he is peddling — the myth of good and evil. There are no heroes in Altman’s movies. “So what’s a hero? The main character? I don’t have any superhuman people in my films, because there never have been people without flaws.”
“Altman”, he says, means “old man” in German — his father’s antecedents were German; his grandfather dropped the second “n” when he arrived in Kansas City. “And here I am, I have become an Altman.” He will be 80 next year and, with characteristic frankness, says the prospect fills him with gloom.
“I am a realist, I am not a fantasist. I don’t have to like the reality, though.” He’d give himself another six to seven years. “That would be my prognosis.” When he wants to cheer himself up, he remembers the Peggy Lee song, Is That All There Is? It makes him laugh. “That’s life, nothing particular about it. Just an occurrence.”
He is still working. His latest film, The Company, chronicles a year in the life of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. He was given the script by Neve Campbell, a former dancer who had to retire through injury. Altman was interested in the contradiction between what is seen on the stage and the arduous physical process, the physical humiliations of the dancers. It also gave Altman the chance to cast his old friend Malcolm McDowell as the ballet’s artistic director. “I think in the past Malcolm has been cross that I didn’t cast him — not even in Gosford Park. But for [this part] I never thought of anyone else.”
The Company is a “small film”, Altman says. Small in scale, but not in ambition. Its subject, you could say, is the definitive Altman subject — choreography. The integration of the individual with the group.
Altman loves partying, though he has given up booze. He still likes to smoke marijuana, however. (He lit up a joint after our interview.) He said he found British Prime Minister Tony Blair “cool” when, at a party, Altman smoked a joint in front of him. But Altman revised his view of Blair later, when Blair supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Altman says he took Blair’s “cool” for openness when, in fact, it was a pose. It’s what Altman would call bad acting — actors taking orders, not questioning their role. Exactly the kind of thing Altman the director wants to undermine. We could do with more of his kind of mischief.