MOVIE SCENE
Maverick director thrives under Hollywood glare

By Andy Seiler
USA Today

Robert Altman, director of the recently released "Gosford Park," is known for creating unusual and distinctive films with his own style, one that doesn't sit well with many in Hollywood. Associated Press

"This has been my office for 27 years," the filmmaker says in the plainspoken tones of his native Missouri. "And I am moving down to 45th Street because I have been evicted after 27 years."

The director of such unorthodox classics as "M*A*S*H," "Nashville," "The Player," and now the acclaimed "Gosford Park," rented his midtown Manhattan office when it was a former hotel. It went back to being a hotel years ago, and they've tried to kick him out more than once and failed.

"But now they want to sell the building," he says, "and they've got me. I'm out."

Out, maybe. But never over.

Altman, who broke through to the big screen with "The James Dean Story," in 1957, is 76. He knows how to hang on. And he has always been a rebel with a cause: creating films that refuse to fit in.

"He makes pictures because he wants to make them," says Julian Fellowes, an actor and writer. "Inevitably, that means that films come out that he wants to see — but nobody else does. But when he makes a film that everyone wants to see, it's very unusual and distinctive because he's not following a market. He's creating one."

Fellowes scripted "Gosford," which is set in 1932 in an English country house and draws on the British whodunit tradition, Jean Renoir's classic "The Rules of the Game" and the TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs" to create something unique.

"Altman thinks of himself as an artist who happens to work in film — and he is," says David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor film critic and editor of the book "Robert Altman: Interviews." "He has his own distinctive style, and he's aware of it: the multiple dialogue tracks, the restlessly moving camera, the zoom lens, the loosely strung stories, the interest in character rather than plot. People are never going to line up around the block at the multiplex for this on Saturday night. But when he's lucky, he attracts a sizable audience of savvy filmgoers. And he's had the tenacity and cleverness to do it for more than 30 years."

The perennial scrapper most recently struggled with handlers who told him he had messed up his chances of winning awards for "Gosford." Altman said what everyone in Hollywood had been trying hard not to say since Sept. 11: People who make movies bear some responsibility for their effect — even on potential terrorists.

"I said that we — and I included myself — have to take a modicum of responsibility because we made the training films," Altman says. "Writers may be sitting up in the Hollywood hills dreaming this stuff up, but people see it."

He repeats that he included himself and recalls that a reporter once accused him of being responsible for the murder of John Lennon because he had a famous singer assassinated in "Nashville." "And I said, 'Well, why didn't somebody pay attention to me if I was so prophetic?' "

There was a firestorm after Altman's terrorist remarks. "Oh, my God," he says. "I'll say! Everybody told me, 'We're trying to get a picture released, and people are saying they hate you.' "

And, suddenly, this man of many contradictions takes the other side. "See, the only chance we've got of this film really succeeding is if we get some kind of publicity or recognition. And usually it comes through all these awards things."

Despite the alarm, "Gosford" has already won director and screenplay awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and has become a critics' favorite.

If Altman did have second thoughts about "Nashville" or any other film, he would never change it, even to create a director's cut or special edition DVD.

"If a film is finished, it's finished," he says. "It's like the birth of a child. You tend to love your least successful children the most."

When told that Steven Spielberg is returning to "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" to better animate the title creature's facial expressions and goose the special effects, Altman compares that work to performing plastic surgery on a baby.

Ouch.

"Bob is not afraid to say anything that's on his mind," says actor/producer Bob Balaban. "He's also not afraid to say the next day, 'Ooh, I shouldn't have said that.' It gets him in an awful lot of trouble. I find it endearing."

Balaban met Altman when he auditioned for the title character in Altman's "Brewster McCloud" (1970). He lost out to his friend Bud Cort but made up for it three decades later. Balaban was the supervising producer on "Gosford" and plays a movie producer in the film.

Between those encounters with Balaban, Altman has been the toast of the town as well as its forgotten man. Though he was nominated for four best-director Oscars — "M*A*S*H" (1970), "Nashville" (1975), "The Player" (1992), "Short Cuts" (1993) — and best picture once ("Nashville"), he has never won. And there were long, dark gaps between Altman's '70s heyday and his '90s comeback.

History has helped him, however. "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," a 1971 Western with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, became a cult classic and eventually showed up on lists of the top 10 films of the '70s. Altman believes it deeply influenced Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning "Unforgiven." Yet, he says, "McCabe" was his biggest box office flop.

If that's true, it has some serious competition. A lot of Altman's movies have barely been released. Ever heard of "Vincent & Theo" or "O.C. and Stiggs"?

"During the '80s, when he couldn't get decent funding, some films were just terrible," Sterritt says. "And I don't think it was just that Altman was playing by his own rules. But in the '90s, he's been making some of his best work."

Best work or no, Altman says his worst experience was in the '90s, with a now-defunct studio that took the John Grisham adaptation "The Gingerbread Man" out of his hands and re-edited it. When he raised a stink, he says, studio bosses let him have his own cut but released the film on so few screens that it was guaranteed to make no impression.

The flip side of the flops? "Popeye" (1980), the big-budget behemoth starring Robin Williams. It has gone down in history as a "disaster," Altman says, even though it was a box-office hit. He calls it "the world's best baby-sitter."

Unfortunately for Altman, however, movie distribution had already started to change by the "Popeye" era.

"In the '70s, we could make a film that wasn't a big hit but could sit in a small cinema someplace and play there for a long time and build its own audience," Altman laments. "Now they can tell you two days after the film opens exactly what it's going to gross. It's sad. But we're in this business of films that are obviously for 14-year-olds, and now it's worse than ever. And before the adults can say, 'Hey, I want to see this,' it's gone. And then they say, 'I'll wait, because I'll see it on video.' That's the market that we face now.

"It's all video now. People see these things between their feet. Especially grown-ups."

He has much more to say about Hollywood than he included in his 1992 satire "The Player," which he calls "a very, very soft and tongue-in-cheek indictment."

"Oh, there's so much more evil in Hollywood," he says. "The people calling the shots are big-business corporations that don't care doodley squat about the longevity of the film or whether the film's any good or not. They look at the bottom line. If a company's not making money, they say, 'Make more money.' So they research how to make money and, of course, all research can only go into the past. You can't research the future. Everything settles down to the lowest common denominator."

And that hurts Altman in more ways than one.

"Bob's big secret is that he looks like the toughest guy in the world, but inside he's a baby," Balaban says. "He's way too vulnerable for his own good."

Still, Altman should be feeling little pain these days. With "Gosford," he tried something different and grabbed back the grown-ups' attention. The very American filmmaker abandoned his rough and ragged Yankee ways, hiring such stellar British actors as Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi, Kristin Scott Thomas, Clive Owen and Alan Bates.

But "Gosford" retains trademark overlapping dialogue, huge cast, promising plotlines that sputter out.

"Instead of this being a whodunit, it's a who-cares-whodunit," Altman says. "Nobody seems to really care that one of the characters is murdered — twice. A lot of people said, 'I liked the picture, but it wasn't a very good plot because I got it right away.' Well, if you pay attention, you'll know who did it right off the bat. But that's not what the film is about.

"I look at these things like murals, like paintings," he says. "Most of my films aren't very successful or have a cult following because you have to see them twice or three times or four. The second time, you can start looking at the corners and see the detail, which to me is the most interesting part: the nuances, the little things from minor characters. That's the joy for me."

Altman could have pursued a different path when he left Kansas City, Mo., for Hollywood in the '50s. He had his future sewn up when he directed some of the first episodes of "Bonanza," but he soon walked away. He walked away from a successful TV career to make movies.

But when he loves something, he never walks.

It's not just the office that he has held onto for so many years. Altman has been married to his wife, Helen, "for 43 years, or something like that." (They have six children and 11 grandchildren.) And however he may denigrate Hollywood, he has no plans to stop making films. He's working on four or five right now, he says, but he has no financing and no distribution deal and won't reveal details.

He sure plans to make them, though.

"I'll keep going until I can't answer the bell," he vows. "I'll keep going till they make me stop."