Robert Altman: Legendary Director With a Rebel Spirit

During our on stage interview at the Hamptons Festival, I asked Altman about his health. He'd had a transplant a decade before, receiving the heart of a woman in her thirties. "I've got at least forty years left on this thing," Altman said, "it's the rest of me I'm worried about." It was my turn to tease him. "Did you keep the heart?" I asked. That got the Altman laugh, a unique snort that turns him into a boy again. "Sure," he said, not missing a beat. "I know those Hollywood clowns I fought with all my life would want proof that I had one. So I keep the damn thing in a jar and my wife Kathryn waters it every day."

That afternoon, we talked about his entire career, from his days in television working with Alfred Hitchcock to the fun he had with Lily Tomlin and his new favorite Meryl Streep on Prairie. He recalled old grudges, with Warren Beatty on McCabe and Mrs. Miller and with Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, who went behind his back to try to get him fired on M*A*S*H. "I never worked with Sutherland again," he said. But he did work with several times with Gould. What happened?. "Simple," said Altman. "Elliot apologized." And what about the demon weed that reportedly upped the high of being on an Altman set? "Not true," he said, "we used whatever drug was popular at the time."

We also talked about things he hadn't previously made public. That health reasons had forced him to use a backup director on in his last few movies, just in case. Paul Thomas Anderson was happy to sign on for Prairie, watching his idol at work being no hardship. And Stephen Frears, now winning raves for The Queen, did the honors on Gosford Park. Frears had only one condition: "Damn it, Bob, don't you dare croak before you finish the scenes with Maggie Smith. She scares the hell out of me."

Another laugh. Another chance to recall the good times. But Altman was never one to live in the past. He was always on to "the next one." That was to be Hands on a Hard Body, a kind of model for an Altman movie with lots of his usual crew, plus Streep and maybe Billy Bob Thornton. The story is about a group of Texans who enter a contest to win a truck by keeping their hands on the thing for days at a time. The last one holding on gets the truck..

Altman couldn't hold on for the next one. Like the voice on the loudspeaker says at the end of M*A*S*H, "that is all." But what an all. The Academy handed him an honorary Oscar in March as payback for nominating him five times -- it should have been ten at least -- and never awarding him the golden goose. Somehow it seems right that the ultimate outsider never made it inside that very private, very conventional club.

And so we have Altman's films to get lost in over and over. There's nothing linear about them, they just seem to drift, stopping at places that fascinate the director and moving on when there's something new to pull him and us in. Maybe that's why Altman films rarely feel dated, they're fresh, curious and timeless, the opposite of trendy. And you can almost imagine Altman behind the camera, giggling at the joy of doing what he loved best, confounding expectations.

The last laugh I shared with Altman onstage came when he was discussing A Prairie Home Companion. He said he had upset Garrison Keeler, who thought of the film based on his radio show as a light romp. Altman shook his head and said, "No it's not, it's a film about death. Virginia Madsen plays an angel who keeps picking people off. By the end of the picture she's practically taken the whole cast with her." In retrospect, Prairie feels even more like an elegy for a time past that won't come back. But Altman wouldn't go in for eulogies. "It's just death," he said, "nothing to be afraid of."

Like I said, Robert Altman never got respectable.