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Robert Altman
Finally ... the veteran director Robert Altman will receive an honorary Oscar this spring
Finally ... the veteran director Robert Altman will receive an honorary Oscar this spring

Still up to mischief

This article is more than 19 years old
Robert Altman's films are much beloved, but they do look like chance happenings. That's because they are, he tells Suzie Mackenzie. And the bits he likes best are the mistakes - which, at nearly 80, is pretty much his credo

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. No one was particularly concerned. As is customary on Altman productions, viewing of the dailies had been open to all involved, and it was generally known that things were going well. Besides, it was some cast, some dinner party. As Altman says, for this film he had had the pick of the British acting establishment. "I saw everyone, and I was very careful to get it right."

So they gathered, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Eileen Atkins 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." There is something in the way that Altman speaks that doesn't incline you to complacency. It's not that he is circuitous, it's more a kind of ellipsis, or maybe an ambush - anyway, he keeps you hanging on. "Everyone is doing very well," he continued. "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. Get a group of people together in a room and, most likely, a hierarchy will emerge, everyone will fall into a line and act accordingly. Gosford Park, a 1930s period thriller set in a stately home, is all about hierarchy - upstairs, downstairs - in which everyone is expected to play their allotted role, butler, maid, grande dame, parvenu, etc. It is a genre movie. Subverting the rigidity of structures such as this has become, over a period of nearly 50 years, Altman's craft. He first approached Tom Stoppard to write "an Agatha Christie-style thriller" for him. The way Altman tells it, Stoppard suggested he get someone else to write it and give him $1m to rewrite it. Instead, he hired Julian Fellowes, over the phone: "He said, 'I can do it.' If someone tells me they can do it, who am I to say they can't?"

Altman is often described as a maverick, an iconoclast, idiosyncratic in his film-making. 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. Typically, they will contain overlapping dialogue, people speaking at the same time. That's because, as he says, it is what we do in life. 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. "Isn't there some quote that goes: what people die of eventually is a creeping common sense, a realisation that the only thing they don't regret in their lives is their mistakes?" And, for him, they are the stuff of art. "I am not an expert. That is someone else's job. If I were expert, the approach would be all wrong. It would be from the inside. I am a blunderer." Blunder on is his creed. "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. Open it up. 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." So he's prepared to block your view in order to make you look more closely. 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 - Brewster McCloud, say, and Three Women. He once compared his films to his kids. "It's the least successful ones that you love the most." It is what he produces, the films, that are the point. "I've been in this business long enough to have acclaim and disclaim, and to know the acclaim means no more than the disclaim." So he views the two impostors as the same.

Take a look at any Altman movie, and you will find a blunderer somewhere at work. And, usually, they are the sleepers - the ones you don't see coming. In The Long Goodbye (1973), a reworking of the Chandler novel, it is the main character played by Elliott Gould, a private detective and a moral man who finally realises he has been deceived by his best friend. You were always a loser, his friend says to him at the end. You are right, says Gould, as he shoots him squarely between the eyes. In Nashville, it is the kid with the violin case who turns out to be the assassin - camouflaged by the soap opera clichés of the country and western world. In The Player (1992), it is the invisible poison pen writer who ends up masterminding the script. It is every single character in Short Cuts - Lily Tomlin's character, who kills a child in her car and doesn't even know she has done it.

Blunderers in Altman are not fools, they are the catalysts, the ones who swoop everyone into confusion - 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 worked with Altman in what some regard as his most perfect film, the sad frontier lament, McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) - Christie played the madame, Warren Beatty the stranger, a gambler and businessman who enters the town of Presbyterian Church as its saviour and dies, riddled with bullets, in a snow-filled ditch. That it is a metaphor for contemporary America is clear from the establishing shot - the town in 1970, now a crumbling ruin, before we go back to the bustling and struggling community it was in 1895. This, then, is where the juggernaut of the 20th century has led us. Christie recalls, with a "great affection and admiration", Altman's coolness. "Robert's cool is part of his belief system," she 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." The actors weren't "dressed" - "We picked our own clothes out of big baskets." They wrote many of their own lines. "It was outstanding, his lack of fear of losing control." And that lack of fear transmits to his actors and produces "actors that look like real people. That is his special magic. It's what I noticed the first time I saw an Altman film - a very early film, on a plane, without the sound." Christie adds, "Robert has an unusual acuity about politics, the workings of capitalism, the surreal hypocrisies of that, which contributes a lot to the anger he has and to the cutting edge of his films. He never goes at something head-on - he'd die rather than play it straight. There is something sideways about him." It doesn't make him easy, she says. "It makes him dangerous. And it makes his films interesting." It makes him, in other words, a kind of agent provocateur.

The agent provocateur was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in the early spring of 1925, the eldest child of BC and Helen Altman. His father was a wealthy insurance salesman, and a gambler. His mother he rarely speaks of, though he did once observe that the family maid, Glendora Majors, was more important to him than his mother. His childhood, he has always insisted, was determinedly ordinary. "There were no real bumps my entire life ... nothing traumatic, it all seemed very logical." His family was Roman Catholic, his mother a Christian Scientist who converted to Catholicism on marriage, and he was educated first by Jesuits and then, at 16, was sent away to military school. From there, "aged 17 or 18" and having never previously left the two states of Missouri and Kansas, he went into the second world war, as a copilot, flying B24 bombers over the Dutch East Indies.

The day he left home, he remembers his mother and two sisters putting him on the train with the words, "Thank God you've got your religion. You're going to need it now." From that day, he says, he never went to mass again. "At home, you had to. Then, when I left the family, I stopped." He flew 46 missions in all and says that, though looking back that seems "a helluva thing", at the time he didn't think much of it.

He did think enough of it, however, on receiving his discharge aged 20, to refuse to go into the reserves. For three days he was detained while the army tried to persuade him. "They put a lot of pressure on." Had he signed up again, he would have been sent to the Korean war - the scene, of course, of his first commercial film, the antiwar comedy M*A*S*H (1970). "But I resisted." There was no big principle involved in his decision. "I had no reasons, noble, humane. I just didn't want it. I'd had my freedom taken away once ... all I wanted then was to get down to the corner and blow whistles at girls." Still, it's worth noting that by the age of 20 this whistle- blower had resisted two of the most powerful institutions - church and army, both. He is an atheist, "And I have been against all of these wars ever since."

For the next 25 years - up to the huge and unexpected commercial success of M*A*S*H - he married (three times; his current marriage to Kathryn has endured over 45 years), had children (five) and worked, first for the Calvin Company of Kansas City, making over 60 industrial films, and, after the mid-1950s, for network television. In 1957, after the making of his first feature The Delinquents ("Pretty dreadful," he says), Alfred Hitchcock picked him as one of the directors of his suspense series. But Altman wasn't very interested and made only two half-hour shows. He also directed classic series such as Bonanza and Route 66, becoming one of the most successful television directors of the 1960s. Series clearly suited his personality - by definition, they have to be open; they don't begin each time at the beginning, they roll on. All of them things that would later become Altman's signature.

It is a piece of movie history that Altman got M*A*S*H, a script written by Ring Lardner Jnr, only because 14 other "more acceptable" directors turned it down. Wrongly - it was the movie of its time, the third highest box-office take 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 came out at a time when American morale about the Vietnam war was at an all-time low. Desertions had increased, everybody wanted out. Indeed, within a year, the US had cut its troops there by half - one of those to come home was the now prospective Democrat candidate, Senator John Kerry. M*A*S*H - which was one of the first features to use overlapping sound, which was the first studio feature to use the word fuck, which contained lines such as, "Nurse, get your tits out of my face", and which, apart from its stars Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, involved many actors never seen before - shocked the Fox executives, who immediately predicted disaster. There is a story that Sutherland tried to get Altman fired because the fool had his cameras following the extras around. It received five Oscar nominations but was awarded none. To this day, despite nominations, Altman has yet to receive an Academy Award. He waves around his office, at the numerous statuettes. "Look at this shit. It's nice to have for your credentials. But it's like anything else, lasts as long as a kiss."

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." Every one of his films is about the debunking of prevailing power structures. He is a Democrat and a strong supporter of Kerry's candidature. "Probably one of the first exposures Kerry had was here in this office, about a year ago, when I invited 60 or so people to hear him. I supported him from the beginning." He is contemptuous of Ralph Nader, "because what he did was not democratic. If you have a system where the president is chosen from one of two major parties, and then you get a third party that comes in and takes the votes principally from one of those two ... If Nader hadn't been in the race in 2000, Gore would have been president and we would have had a very different world from the one we are sitting in now."

He is an outspoken critic of Bush, too, but he is aware that the power Bush has comes from the 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."

He admits that he is not without flaws. "I am not very patient, particularly when working, but that is because I have all these people who have got to do something in little time and I am very aware of that." So he sometimes gets impatient with the crew. "I remember on the set of Dr T And The Women, I didn't get on with the cameraman. What made it worse was that he was my choice over other people's objections. Anyway, I shouted at him in front of everybody and Richard Gere, the lead actor, took me into a corner and said, 'You don't embarrass people in front of other people. You shouldn't do that.' And he was right. So I try not to do it. Then I find myself doing it."

But he doesn't shout at actors. "No. And in my entire career I have never fired an actor." Actors, he says, have the hardest job. "I admire them, though I don't understand them at all. To get in front of an audience of strangers, and to be yourself. I could never do that. I have a vivid fear of exposure."

"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. Already, he cannot walk home the few blocks from his office.

A nd then there's the business of other people. "You don't realise yet how other people deal with your age." In his dream, he'd like to go back to being 55. It's a bonus, he says, a long life, but when you start to realise all the things you can't do ... But what the fuck: "I always knew it would be this way. 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. Never been ready to give up the fun. This summer, he hopes to start work on a film called Paint, another of his forensic examinations of a closed culture - the New York art world - but it's not certain yet. "Money's always hard."

His latest film, The Company, a year in the life of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, opens this week. When he was given the script by Neve Campbell, a former dancer who had to retire through injury and re-emerged in Wes Craven horror movies, Altman said no. "Absolutely not." Dance didn't particularly interest him. But what did interest him was the world of dance and the contradiction between what is seen on the stage and the arduous physical process, the physical humiliations of the dancers. And, of course, the hierarchy - every dancer in a company knows their place. There is one small scene where a lead dancer arrives late for class and goes straight to his proper place at the barre. Just one look and the novice dancer moves away.

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 the part of Antonelli I never thought of anyone else." And McDowell is hilarious - spiteful and camp on the outside, but soft as silk underneath. It is a "small film", Altman says. Small in scale, but not in ambition. There is nothing lazy in Altman. And its subject, you could say, is the definitive Altman subject - choreography. The integration of the individual with the group.

Altman loves partying, he enjoys dinner parties and, though he some time ago gave up booze, he still likes to smoke marijuana. He lit up a joint after our interview. So he was pleased to be invited to the musician Dave Stewart's house during one of his long periods filming in England while making Gosford Park, which was eventually released in 2001. He was even more pleased to be seated next to Jerry Hall, with Mick at the other end of the table, and opposite the prime minister. He found Jerry great and Blair charming, and he thought Blair must be enjoying himself because, when Cherie left early, he stayed on. "We were sitting there smoking grass," Altman says. Not Blair, of course. "He was sitting across from me, so I thought he was pretty cool." Later, he was "disappointed". "I sort of wanted to like Blair. This was at a time when Bush was first elected, and he and Bush didn't get on. I know they didn't speak, it was very icy. Apparently, there was one phone call and something was presented to Blair that made him change 180 degrees his attitude to Bush. And overnight he was for this war. To this day I don't understand it and I suppose I never will."

Altman made a mistake about Blair, he is saying. He took his "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. Maybe it is his mischief that makes him repeat it. In which case, we could do with more of his kind of mischief

· The Company is released on May 7.

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