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I remember seeing him bleeding together some of the scenes on the set of Gosford Park. “Altman was a genius,” Clive Owen tells me. What a waste when there are so many illuminating stories waiting to be heard. “Expect the unexpected,” offers the late Robin Williams.
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“Kicking Hollywood’s ass,” says Bruce Willis. Mann hauls fine actors before the camera to provide nothing more than a definition of the term Altmanesque. Meanwhile, an excerpt from Nashville manages to deliver an almighty spoiler for anyone yet to see that film.
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A negative TV rant against Popeye by a forgotten nobody of a reviewer takes precedence over the glowing critical notices the director received for other films it’s as if Mann is trying to reframe Altman as even more of an outcast than he really was. Every summer vacation the kids were on set.” There is certainly plentiful footage here of Altman’s baby grandson, at the expense of anything on collaborators such as Shelley Duvall, Warren Beatty or Elliott Gould. “Stephen rues the day he said that!” she huffs. I ask Mann about this discordant note and he passes the question to Kathryn. Home-movie clips are included for no reason, it seems, other than to take the edge off some of the comments by Altman’s son Stephen about his father’s absences (“For the most part, we were not his priority”). “So he does this far-out little film with unknown actors about a boy with a bird fixation. “He could have done anything after M*A*S*H,” Mann says.
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It was all one long movie to him and he just wanted to discuss his next picture.” That was Brewster McCloud, which gets Mann’s vote for Most Underrated Altman Movie. Everyone was all over him but even though he was there with M*A*S*H, he had moved on. “Never boring.” She tells me about a trip to Cannes in 1970, where M*A*S*H won the Palme d’Or. I ask what daily life was like for the wife of such a prolific director. Sitting beside him, lips pursed, is Kathryn, who is in her 90s and was married to Altman for 46 years. His work matters more than ever now because it stands in contrast to all the sequels, the comic-book adaptations, that Hollywood makes to sell lunchboxes.” “If people come away wanting to watch Bob’s movies, then I did my job,” says its director, Ron Mann. That’s one reason to welcome the new documentary, made in collaboration with Altman’s widow Kathryn Reed Altman, even if it doesn’t do more than provide a précis of his career. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstarĭespite the regard in which he is held by younger film-makers, there is still the danger that Altman could fall off the radar of modern cinema audiences. Well, there had to be a downside, a cloud to offset all those silver linings.Įlliott Gould in The Long Goodbye. Even Downton Abbey, conceived by Gosford Park’s screenwriter Julian Fellowes as the “child of Gosford”, would not have existed without Altman. The influence also extends to Richard Linklater, Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach and Michael Winterbottom, none of whom would be making quite the same films had Altman not preceded them. “I’ve stolen from Bob as best I can,” admitted Anderson, who later dedicated There Will Be Blood to him. It resides most obviously in the work of Paul Thomas Anderson: Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Inherent Vice are virtual cover versions of Altman. It’s a sensibility: anti-establishment, individualistic, raucous, humane.Įven those who have seen none of his films will have felt his impact. The word “Altmanesque”, though, evokes more than just a style. Then there was his greatest innovation, the tiny microphones picking up dialogue from each actor, that Altman then mixed together into dense, overlapping ambient noise. These superficially dissimilar pictures shared key traits: slow, inquisitive zooms from multiple cameras, improvised scenes that strayed far from the script (“Good disintegration!” Altman would tell his cast approvingly). There were iconoclastic assaults on genre (the anti-western McCabe and Mrs Miller, the wayward detective film The Long Goodbye, the who-cares-whodunnit Gosford Park), sprawling ensemble pieces ( Nashville, A Wedding, Short Cuts) and dazzling anomalies such as the psychological mystery 3 Women, the Hollywood satire The Player, the musical Popeye and the jazz thriller Kansas City. Over a 50-year period, he bashed out almost 40 films. With a career in television and a spell as a fighter pilot behind him, he had a jump of nearly 20 years on those upstarts by the time he achieved his breakthrough in 1970 with his fifth film, the spiky Korean war comedy M*A*S*H, made when he was 44. R obert Altman, the grizzly-bear genius of American cinema celebrated in the new documentary Altman, first found success at the same time as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, but he was no movie brat.