For more than 30 years, Robert Altman has been one of America's leading directors, working at a near-constant pace that has produced, on average, a movie a year. Among Altman's films, you'll find several frequently heralded as the best ever made (MASH, Nashville), several that should be (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), underrated and overlooked material (Buffalo Bill And The Indians, Secret Honor), interesting failures (Health, Ready To Wear), attempts to expand prescribed genres while working within them (The Gingerbread Man, Popeye), and the outright bizarre (Brewster McCloud). Each is guided by an easily identifiable style (documentary-like camera work, multi-layered soundtracks with overlapping dialogue, improvisational acting, a strong emphasis on character over a traditionally forward-moving plot), and a sensibility that's harder to identify. Nashville, for instance, spends three hours showing a cross-section of humanity behaving at its most selfish and/or vulnerable, culminates in a harrowing climax, and then offers an oddly hopeful ending. It's a move typical of Altman's career, which is capable of containing, without contradiction, the barely tempered sweetness of Cookie's Fortune and the almost unqualified pessimism of Brewster McCloud. Perhaps the best illustration of what Altman does comes from one of his most conventional films. Toward the end of 1992's The Player, Cynthia Stevenson's character, having failed to match the success unscrupulously won by ex-partner/ex-boyfriend Tim Robbins, collapses to the ground in defeat. An expected moment, Altman treats it unexpectedly, lingering for the time it takes to turn the shot from a plot point into a heartbreaking moment, showing the familiar in an unfamiliar, far more revealing way. In recognition of its 25th anniversary, Nashville will be reissued on video and DVD in August, preceded by the long-delayed CD debut of its soundtrack, a collection of the original songs written and performed by the film's actors. Altman, now 75, recently spoke to The Onion A.V. Club about his most acclaimed film and other topics.
The Onion: The ostensible reason we're talking today is the re-release of Nashville, which is often cited as your best film. Do you agree with that assessment?
Robert Altman: Oh, I think the last one I did is. Yeah, I like Nashville. I mean, I like 'em all. They're like children, you know, and you tend to love your least successful children the most. But I don't think there's a best any more than... I don't think things are best. In terms of my own assessment of my work, it's no better than any others.
O: What would you pick out as your most underrated film by that logic?
RA: I don't know. I can't do those things. Emotionally and intellectually, you have to look at these like you do your own children. You're so connected to them. What critics say, and general assessments of these films and this kind of work, is about popularity and what's going on at the time. Right now, there are more movie critics than film critics out there. In other words, they're trying to reflect—which is their job—the popular taste. There are very few critics who go beyond that and treat this stuff as any more than movies.
O: Did you follow the whole affair of James Cameron writing a letter to The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan?
RA: James Cameron, can he write?
O: Apparently, he wrote an extensive letter about how he felt Turan should be fired because he gave a negative review to Titanic, arguing that everyone loves Titanic and Turan was out of touch.
RA: He should get a negative review. It was a shitty picture. For him to criticize anybody for what they say about that picture proves he's as crazy as he advertises.
O: Getting back to Nashville just for a moment, do you see it as being prescient of the current political and celebrity culture?
RA: It's 25 years old. We did that 25 years ago, and it's as politically valid today as it was then. It was the precursor of a combination of Jimmy Carter, who got elected, and Ross Perot, who didn't get elected. But those kinds of candidates weren't heard of at that time.
O: Do you think that movement has sort of died off? Did the Perot candidacy excite you in any way?
RA: I know a lot of people responded to it, just because it was something that wasn't in the machine. But it became part of the machine just as bad as everybody else.
O: It seems like the worst elements of it took it over.
RA: Yeah. Well, they always do.
O: The new DVD version, I noticed, didn't have any deleted scenes. There's said to be hours of footage from Nashville that weren't included. Did you want any of that to see the light?
RA: There weren't any deleted scenes. Almost everything we shot is in that film.
O: Just in shorter versions?
RA: No, that whole thing that has been said for 25 years—that we cut another two or three hours of film, that we could have cut another version—just isn't true. That all stemmed from when we went to network television, because the film was so long at that time. I said we could add footage and put it on two different nights: in other words, make two two-hour films out of it. Because if you're not seeing it all in one sitting, and it's going to be separated by a week, you can afford to do a little reprise and repeat some stuff a little bit.
O: But that never happened?
RA: No, they chose not to do that. Nashville... There's nothing I would do to change it. I'd probably cut it a little bit, but that isn't what it is. Most of the time trimmed is music.
O: In an interview 29 years ago, you said, "Nobody has ever made a good movie. Someday, someone will make half a good one." Have you seen one since then?
RA: No, not really.
O: That quote was in reference to the over-emphasis on narrative. Is that something you'd still like to see movies move away from?
RA: Well, yes. Film, to me, is all based on literature and reading. But film isn't that; it's more like painting. They should be more like murals. They're all too articulate, and everything is told to you too many times. You're not allowed to glean anything from it or get impressions. Once you tell somebody, "Okay, this is red," that's red to them forever. And if they say, "Is this red or orange?," you should say, "I don't know." And then people... Their own brain will work on that answer, because everything is perceived slightly differently by every single human being. No two people are ever going to receive anything exactly the same way. It all has to filter through all the information you have in your computer, your brain.
O: So, by your assessment, the better films are the ones that leave more up to the viewer?
RA: Yeah. They allow them... It's the same way with a painting. The worst thing I hear, and you hear it all the time, is when people say, "Oh, did you see this film?" "Oh, I've already seen that and I don't want to go again." But with paintings, you stand and look at them as long as you want and walk away, and every time you look at them, your own experience is bringing something additional to the information that you're looking at. Music is the same way. But the problem with film is that it attacks too many of your senses. It's become more of a tonic, an escape. It's, "Oh, let's go tune out and watch Charles Bronson." And it's fine—there's room for that kind of material—but we're all just pushed into the same category. If all books were pushed into the same category, it'd be pretty dreadful. And it's getting to be that way anyway. You can't read anymore. But I don't care about that, because I'm in the looking business.
O: Do you agree with the fairly recent notion that the '70s were the last golden age of American filmmaking?
RA: Well, I think probably of film as we know it now, yeah.
O: Do you see that changing at all?
RA: No. I think it's just become all corporate now, and it's mostly run and controlled and ordered by the bean-counters. These guys start a new studio, and they're turning out the same old crap. Except a few individual artists—and they can almost not get financing—nobody does anything dealing with cinema as an art. They deal with it as a money machine. They have to. Every picture is geared toward the 16-year-old mind, because by the time the grown-ups decide to see a film, it's not playing anymore and they say, "Oh, I'll wait and look at it on video." Video is getting better, and the screens are getting larger, so people don't go out. The only people who go out are these kids who want to run up and down the aisle and see this stuff, like this Tom Cruise crap [Mission: Impossible 2] and that Travolta thing he just did [Battlefield Earth].
O: Well, no one saw that, though.
RA: Oh, but they did. They're gonna make money on that film. As long as they do that, as long as they make money on 'em, they're gonna keep making 'em.
O: It seems like a great help to you early in your career was the critics. We kind of touched on this before, but do you feel there's any sort of critical network in place to help filmmakers now?
RA: Not really. Not really. There are very few critics left, the Pauline Kaels and those. There are no real critics left; there's reviewers. And then the [Richard] Corlisses and this guy [Dave] Kehr and people like that. I don't know what they look at when they see a film. I'm always surprised by what I see and what I've heard about a film. Always.
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