Robert Altman: Legendary Director With a Rebel Spirit

A month ago, I introduced Robert Altman at the Hamptons Film Festival -- it turned out to be his last major interview -- by saying why I admired him. Sure I talked about the way he spent the last half century making movies that changed the way the world looked at movies. But what I love most about Altman is that he never got respectable.

The audience of film buffs on that sunny Saturday afternoon knew exactly what I meant. And so does anyone who ever let an Altman movie mess with his head. Cancer may have claimed Altman's life on November 20th, 2006, with his wife Kathryn and their family gathered around his bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. But watch any of Altman's forty movies and the man comes alive again -- ornery, exuberant, ready to share a joint or a contrary opinion, hellbent on busting rules and determined to laugh at the Hollywood kings who stupidly thought they could make him do things their way.

Fat chance. Altman was eighty one when he died, but his rebel spirit stayed about nineteen. Here was a director who spawned his own adjective, Altmanesque. That meant overlapping dialogue -- think of all the characters talking at the same time in M*A*S*H. That meant movies that fit no existing mold -- think of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Three Women, Images, The Long Goodbye, California Split, Thieves Like Us. That meant large ensemble casts -- like the hordes of actors in Nashville, The Player, Gosford Park, Short Cuts and what turns out to be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion, who came together under his direction to create a teeming sense of collective life that no director has been able to match since. Oh, they try. Paul Thomas Anderson came close with Boogie Nights and Magnolia, but Emilio Estevez missed by a mile with Bobby.

I've known Altman for fifteen years. He goaded me unmercifully. At a preview screening of one of his movies, he handed me twenty bucks. When I laughed at the joke bribe, he shot me that evil twinkle that defined him at his happiest and told me that was ten bucks more than he offered Pauline Kael, the late critic who helped put him on the map with her rave review of a rough cut of Nashville in The New Yorker in 1975. There's another thing about Altman: He hated it when you hated one of his movies. He'd pretend to shrug it off, but when he remembered any of the unkind words I wrote about Quintet, Health, A Wedding or Beyond Therapy, I'd get the infamous Altman glare. He felt most protective of his stunted children.

Altman was a cool dude from Kansas City, Missouri. He loved jazz and made movies in the same style, like musical riffs. Cool jazz dudes don't care what other people think. But Altman cared, deeply. At a rough-cut 1993 screening of Short Cuts -- a film of his I particularly revere -- Altman's hands were shaking when he took my hand to say goodbye. But he'd never ask for a reaction. He said he could tell by watching your posture, an unnerving thought when he's watching you watch a three-hour movie. If you gave him a compliment, he didn't know how to take it. He always said all his work on a movie was done with the casting. On set, he'd just let the actors take over. A lie of epic proportions, as any actor who worked for him will attest. And he's directed most of them, from silent screen legend Lillian Gish to party animal Lindsay Lohan.