'I've probably done too many films'
In truth, I have come to pay homage rather than talk. After all, the film company makes conversation pretty difficult – half an hour in a bland hotel room before you get kicked out to make way for the next factory-farmed journo. But it’s worth it to meet Robert Altman, whose movie Nashville is a modern classic, a freeform masterpiece that withstands endless viewing. Add The Player, Short Cuts, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Thieves Like Us, and you have one of the great careers in cinema. That he, like Howard Hawks, has never won an Oscar serves only to confirm the fact.
He has a gammy knee, so he props a leg on the sofa, and sips water. He is gruff but amiable, a little pale after some late nights doing the final edit on his new movie, Cookie’s Fortune, a slight but agreeable shaggy dog story set in the American south, a chamber work compared with the symphony that is Nashville. It offers a portrait of a slightly mad, enclosed, secretive small town in which a miscarriage of justice but I’d better not go on. You might want to see it.
Altman made the movie for the independent production company Moonstone, with a £5m budget that he says was so tight he had to work more concentratedly than ever before – a 36-day shoot spread over six weeks in which the hours were long and the sun hot, more than enough for a 74-year-old with a dodgy ticker. But Altman thrives on work – “it’s something I love doing; I get very excited and childlike about it” – and the betting is that, after a high-rolling life, he’s not yet in a position to live off the pension. I suggest as much and without quite saying yes, he doesn’t deny it either.
He has always been a risk taker, a drinker, a fighter, famed for his ups and downs and his fallings-out. In his 70s, he has slowed down, mellowed out; Cookie’s Fortune reflects that change, lacks the edge of earlier films, is too gentle in its treatment of this bunch of southern misfits. But his views on Hollywood – which has never quite embraced him – haven’t changed. “If you think there’s justice there, you’re just a fool, though artists are always naive.”
Does it bother him that, in spite of four nominations, he has never won an Oscar? “Oh no. My god, look what wins Oscars. Look at that Titanic picture. I would be embarrassed to have my name on that under any circumstances, though if you gave me all the money that went with it I might sell my name. The Oscars are just a private club; they don’t have anything to do with any value. I was nominated for Short Cuts as best director but it wasn’t nominated for best film. I didn’t even go. I said, ‘Well, what did I direct?’”
Altman has seen big-studio support come and go, but he is philosophical about the way he has been treated. “There’s not a film-maker alive today who’s had a better shake than I have,” he says. “The problem is I’ve probably done too many films and that bores people. They wonder why I’m doing one every year, but I like it.”
That is, indeed, the problem. Altman’s output has been extraordinarily uneven. He made a string of unblemished classics in the 70s – Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville – but from 1978 on, when he made the dismal A Wedding, it was hit and miss. Health and Popeye put his career into reverse and the 80s (with the exception of the TV movie Tanner ’88) were a write-off. He even left the indifferent, at times openly hostile, US to live in Paris, where he has always been adored. The Player in 1992 restored his fortunes; Short Cuts attracted admirers and detractors in roughly equal proportions; Prêt-à-Porter re-awakened the doubts; and Kansas City and The Gingerbread Man sank without trace.
He has made more bad films than any good director should, but he has also made a handful of truly great films. Not that he is prepared to accept the verdicts of the critics. Take Kansas City, a jazz-based, typically improvisatory movie which was made in 1996 and barely got distribution. “People just didn’t get it,” says Altman.
“The people who are real jazz fans don’t care about plots in stories, they just want to hear the jazz; and the people who are movie fans don’t want to hear all that jazz, so they didn’t like it either. But McCabe was a terrible failure when it first came out and now, 25 years later, people say it’s a great film.” As for The Gingerbread Man, which he made with Kenneth Branagh, he says that the studio “scuttled, literally scuttled it”.
But surely he doesn’t stand by all these critically mauled movies; can’t he accept that some were experimental efforts which missed the target? No such admission is forthcoming. “They’re what they are. I’ve never been a Kubrick. I’ve never set out to make a perfect film. I don’t think any of these things are going to have any lasting impact on the culture of the world. Some of them were successful and some of them weren’t. Basically, who cares?”
He does, surely? “Yes, I care. If I’m doing something, I always go into a fog. I’m always going into territory where I don’t know what’s in there. It comes out the way it does and the criticism I get for some of these films confounds me. I really don’t get it. In Europe, Short Cuts was a highly successful film; in America, it wasn’t. People say it’s so dark, the characters in it are so terrible. Well, what are you supposed to make films about – a cheery bunch of folks?”
What about Prêt-à-Porter, the star-studded 1994 take on the fashion business that bombed commercially and critically? “I spent a lot of time on Prêt-à-Porter and it was exactly what I set out to do, which was an old-fashioned farce. I had a hard time with the fashion people, but I expected that because they’re in the business of reinventing themselves twice a year and they can’t embrace it. It was weird but it was exactly what I set out to do, and, to me, if you do what you set out to do that’s a success.”
Cookie’s Fortune is free of the bleakness of Short Cuts and the satirical edge of Prêt-à-Porter, but Altman hopes it poses a few questions. “I like going into territory which has been visited a lot, but then finding a different turn on it. Here, I’m looking at the particular culture of the little towns in the south, their social mores, their secrets. Every person in these little towns knows everything that everybody else does, but they never talk about those things.
“We found this town called Holly Springs and rewrote the script to fit it. The whole town became our studio, our set. People moved out of their houses and rented them to us. They weren’t doing it for the money; they were doing it because they wanted to be part of this thing. Glenn Close (who plays the crazed orchestrator of most of the community’s problems) would ride around the town on her bicycle and people would wave at her. We became part of the town, and people would come out with their kids when we’d shoot at night and stand around with their jugs of iced tea.”
I suspect that the down-home nature of the place imposed itself on the picture, which seems too easy-going. My guess is that it won’t do much to boost Altman’s flagging stock, but so what? Even if there are no classics left in the locker, it doesn’t detract from the masterpieces he has made and the way his free-wheeling style changed the face of movie-making.
As for all the bad movies, maybe they will be re-assessed one day. Nothing is impossible; I recently met an apparently sane person who liked A Wedding. After a roller-coaster half-century in films, Altman certainly doesn’t lose any sleep over critical disfavour. “I’ve come to the conclusion that films are like your children,” he says, “and you tend to love your least successful and most dependent children the most. You say, god I wish he was taller, but you know you can’t go back and try to have an operation done, because everything is what it is and its value is its uniqueness.” Good, bad or incomprehensible, Robert Altman’s movies are unquestionably unique.
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