In the mid-'60s, after Robert Altman quit renting his directorial skills to TV series like Bonanza and Hawaiian Eye, he held near-daily shooting, editing, and screening parties with his friends. That sense of joy in creation, combined with a willingness to try the unconventional, fed the remarkable string of dream-plays and genre inversions that Altman began helming in the early '70s.
For years, Altman has been underrepresented on home video: While major films like M*A*S*H, Nashville, and The Player have been easy to find, the likes of Brewster McCloud, Kansas City, and Come Back To The Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean have drifted in and out of print. But earlier this year, Altman's work on the cult TV series Combat! was preserved on two DVD sets, and his surreal 1977 comedy 3 Women and his faltering 1985 Sam Shepard adaptation Fool For Love also recently made the jump to DVD. By the end of the year, three films that arguably belong in the all-time Altman Top 10 will be available on disc: the free-ranging, sweet-and-sour 1974 gambling comedy California Split, the hazy 1984 Richard Nixon confessional Secret Honor, and the 1993 Raymond Carver mosaic Short Cuts.
The last two arrive courtesy of the Criterion Collection, which is also responsible for a sparkling DVD edition of one of Altman's underseen triumphs, Tanner '88—an 11-episode HBO series with Michael Murphy as a naggingly vague Democratic candidate jockeying for the party's 1988 presidential nomination. Just in time for the spookily similar 2004 presidential campaign, the original Tanner '88 creative team returns for the four-episode Sundance series Tanner On Tanner, in which Murphy's character becomes the focus of a documentary, allowing Altman (with writer Garry Trudeau) to comment on the proliferation of political commentary in the popular media. Altman recently spoke with The Onion A.V. Club about Tanner, his own controversial politics, and his tumultuous history with TV and film production.
The Onion: Why bring Tanner back now?
Robert Altman: Because we could. Sundance bought the rights to the original Tanner '88 and asked us to shoot some lead-ins. So we brought Michael Murphy and Pam Reed and Cynthia Nixon back as the same characters 16 years later, and Sundance was so taken by those that we thought maybe we should do a couple new episodes. We agreed to do three, but once we got into it, we ended up doing four. What we actually did is a movie, in four parts.
O: It's striking how much Tanner '88 relates to politics today.
RA: Well, it's been a great frustration on our part that we could never get anybody to run it again after the first time. "Oh, that's yesterday's news. That's old hat." It isn't old hat. It's very relevant. But nobody would go for it until Sundance did.
O: As a candidate, Tanner is sort of an empty suit, answering honest questions with sound bites and seeming uncomfortable around anyone who's not on his staff. Of the current presidential candidates, who's the Tanner, Bush or Kerry?
RA: Oh, I think Kerry.
O: Does that bother you?
RA: No, it doesn't bother me. I can't help who Kerry is or who Bush is, even if I'd like to.
O: Has there been a good presidential candidate in your lifetime?
RA: Adlai Stevenson.
O: And since then?
RA: Adlai Stevenson. [Laughs.]
O: Do you think it's possible in this era for a good candidate to emerge?
RA: Probably not. Bush would have to win again, and then maybe a good candidate could come out of the ashes, if anything could come out of those ashes.
O: In recent years, you've been in the public eye as much for your political statements as for your work. Many conservative commentators put you on the list of "anti-American Hollywood types" with Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, and others.
RA: I'm very proud to be in that group. You always want to be picked as the leader of your class.
O: Do you get tired of having your promise to leave the country when George W. Bush was elected thrown back at you?
RA: Well, I've been out of the country a lot. I don't think it makes any difference where you live. The isolationism of America is very archaic, I think.
O: In Tanner '88 and in your last feature film, The Company, you seem to resist the idea of a figurehead. Even though The Company was a script that you were hired to direct after other people had developed it, it fits with your other work in that it's about collaboration. Would you agree?
RA: Yeah, well, I made the film, so it's naturally going to have my silhouette, my shape. All films are like that. They start out as some germ of an idea, and when it gets to me, I can't help but have my skin rub off on it.
O: Why do you think you're drawn to stories about big groups of people sharing the same space? Did it have anything to do with growing up in such a large, close-knit family?
RA: Possibly. I don't know. That's a little too cerebral for me. I'm not much interested in stories anyway. I'm more interested in reactive behavior.
O: You mentioned that your films have your shape no matter what the material is, but your films don't necessarily contain your own biography.
RA: That never interested me. My biography is rather ordinary, and consequently rather boring.
O: You're not inclined to do a Federico Fellini-esque interpretation of your upbringing?
RA: No. You might see smatterings of it here and there, but nothing that could be readily recognized.
O: What originally prompted you to move from Kansas City to Los Angeles to make movies?
RA: My first move from Kansas City was into the Air Force. I was a B-24 pilot during the Second World War, and when I was overseas, I started writing stories. When I busted out, or whatever you call it, I headed straight to California and sold a couple of pieces to the movies. Then I just followed that track, you know?
O: You spent about a decade working in television, from the mid-'50s to the mid-'60s.
RA: I did miles of television.
O: Some of those shows are being made available on DVD now, like Combat! You said on one of the commentary tracks that some of your episodes were as good as any feature film you've made.
RA: I did. I think that "Cat And Mouse," among all of them, is really good.
O: Unlike in your film work, didn't you have to deal with a lot of compromises, working on television?
RA: Well, sure, but you always have to compromise. Whatever you're making has to fit the shelf that it has to go on.
O: Do you work differently when you're directing a TV series like Tanner '88 versus directing film or theater?
RA: No. To me, it's just different mediums. I'm about to go off and do an opera now, based on an old film of mine called A Wedding. I'm going to do it at the Chicago Lyric Opera Company. On November 1, we start rehearsals. I'm directing it.
O: So if your job is fundamentally the same whatever the medium, then what is that job? Shaping performances? Shaping the look?
RA: It's really the whole thing. I don't have too much to do with shaping performances. I see what the performance is, but I can't really influence it as much as people think I can. I just try to put all the elements that I see up there in such a way that they have relevance.
O: In film and television, though, you have the added elements of post-production and editing.
RA: Well, it's all equally important. You have to baste the turkey, or it's dry. The basting is as important as anything else.
O: There's a story that in the mid-'60s, when you were doing a lot of commercial work and trying to get a feature off the ground, you once took a random strip of film and a random piece of music and synched them up as a way of proving that cinema is a medium that thrives on accident.
RA: I don't recall that, but it sounds like me. [Laughs.]
O: So if almost anything will work on film, how do you make choices?
RA: It's mostly instinctual. I giggle and give in. I go with the flow. I really try to do what occurs to me at that moment. I don't really overthink it. Once it's done, it's history. We're all in a river. You look up at the bank, see something, look away, look back, see something else. All these films, all this television, all this opera, all this performance, all this stuff, it's locked and frozen in the past. They're Michelangelo's Prisoners, you know? Half-carved out of the rocks. They'll never get out.
O: Well, if you can bear to look back at those rocks for a moment...
RA: Oh, I don't mind.
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