Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Rita Kempley, review in The Washington Post, October 22, 1993: “Short Cuts” is a cynical, sexist and shallow work from cinema’s premier misanthrope, Robert Altman, who here shows neither compassion for—nor insight into—the human condition. This long, sour and ultimately pointless film allows Altman, the debunker of Hollywood and Nashville, to put the screws to the common folk of Southern California. … Basically, Altman’s here to tell us that life stinks and there’s not a damn thing to be done about it.

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  Robert Altman, from his introduction to a collection of Raymond Carver’s stories published in 1993: Raymond Carver made poetry out of the prosaic. One critic wrote that “he revealed the strangeness concealed behind the banal,” but what he really did was capture the wonderful idiosyncrasies of human behavior, the idiosyncrasies that exist amid the randomness of life’s experiences. And human behavior, filled with all its mystery and inspiration, has always fascinated me. … Raymond Carver’s view of the world, and probably my own, may be termed dark by some. We’re connected by similar attitudes about the arbitrary nature of luck in the scheme of things—the child being hit by the car in “A Small Good Thing;” the marriage upheaval resulting from a body being discovered during a fishing trip in “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Somebody wins a lottery. The same day, that person’s sister gets killed by a brick falling off a building in Seattle. Those are the same thing. The lottery was won both ways. … When I first spoke to the poet Tess Gallagher, Ray’s widow, about wanting to make this film, I told her I wasn’t going to be pristine in my approach to Carver and that the stories were going to be scrambled. She instinctively recognized and encouraged this, and said Ray was an admirer of Nashville, that he liked the helplessness of those characters and their ability to manage nevertheless. She also knew that artists in different fields must use their own skills and vision to do their work.

  TESS GALLAGHER (poet and widow of Raymond Carver): I’d always admired his work and so had Ray. He began to look more closely at the stories and to try to see what was available. It turned out that a filmmaker named Jill Godmilow—she’s done some small films—she had optioned a good number of stories. Bob had to choose from what was left. There were a lot of complaints about Bob having chosen the darker stories. The reason he hadn’t chosen others was they weren’t available. It wasn’t Bob saying, “I’m going to choose the toughest, meanest stories Carver wrote.”

  I had seen Nashville with Ray. I found it so affecting the way that the characters were willing to chance everything. They so wanted to follow that dream, even if they were not terribly talented, that they would put themselves in untenable situations. They were so fragile, yet they were so invested in the dream of what their life can be, that they didn’t see themselves. We saw them, we felt them, we cringed when they tried to sing and couldn’t sing. I think that we feel something similar for Ray’s characters, how fragile they are, how unprotected, how out there, how they don’t know how to do it right, so they cause themselves more harm and they can’t figure out how to get out of their snarl. But we stay with them because we’ve been there. You don’t get through life with everything going the way you think it will or you want it to. Life gets away from you. Like the baker in “A Small, Good Thing.” You wake up and find yourself a brutish character who is making those terrible phone calls. That’s not who he set out to be. But you would never have found the tenderness in that scene without Carver. Carver was in there. Carver was working on Altman. People say Altman was working on Carver. Well, it worked the other way around, too.

  I think Bob and Ray really connected on the basis that in Carver’s stories every moment is fragile. … You will be on safe ground with somebody and then a word or a notion or something from the past will be brought up and everything is changed. Suddenly the ground has dropped out from under you. We go along as if we know how the people around us are going to behave and we think we know their motivations, but we don’t. We don’t always know what is going to be brought to bear, what the possibilities for that person really are. Altman thinks everything comes out of who the character is, and I think so does Ray. The characters are maybe less set in Ray. I think they are even more unpredictable in Ray’s work.

  ALAN RUDOLPH (director): When Chris Penn’s character hit that girl with the rock and she went down, that was one of the most brutal things I’d seen in my life. I remember the first time I saw the screening of it—it was a rough cut.

  Bob said, “What’s wrong?”

  I said, “Man, I wish there was a way you could do that without showing it.”

  He said, “Oh, you’ve got to show it.”

  I saw someone bolder than I could ever be. Because I would have wanted to be overtly liked more than that. Bob just didn’t care if you liked it as long as you had to deal with it, because out of having to deal with it on his terms comes respect. And out of respect you can change people.

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  Peter Travers, review in Rolling Stone, October 1993: Stuart Kane (Fred Ward) … and his pals Gordon (Buck Henry) and Vern (Huey Lewis) had just walked four hours to their favorite fishing spot when Vern, pissing in the stream, found his urine trickling on the beautiful and dead body of a girl. It’s only after Stuart comes home and makes love to his wife Claire (a never-better Anne Archer) that he tells her how he and his friends made the decision to leave the body in the water for another day and keep fishing. She was dead, wasn’t she? Claire is shattered; she attends the funeral of the girl but can’t salve her conscience.

  ANNE ARCHER (actress): I loved playing that part because it had a tragic poignancy. I instinctively knew who she was. She was this woman who felt immediately victimized by what he did because she saw herself as everyone. So this woman lying in the river could have been her, this woman who was treated as a piece of meat. It took all the love out of the relationship because it could never be undone. It showed such a lack of care of the things that would make you want to be in a relationship with a man. It was a very sad, tragic feeling that I felt as that character. It throws her world into disarray.

  Yet that’s also the fun about Bob. Just as you start to moralize he won’t let you do that. That’s why he creates such interesting, complex characters. You don’t dislike Fred Ward’s character. He’s not an evil person. He did a thoughtless thing. It’s just that the woman he’s married to is a very sensitive person and takes it very personally.

  TESS GALLAGHER: Altman likes taking the opposite view from Ray. He was really in a dialogue with Ray. When Ray is pointing all the emphasis on the woman in “So Much Water So Close to Home,” Bob is saying, “I’m going to focus on the guy.” I talked to him about that. Ray really did this from the point of view of the wife. But Bob didn’t want us to think that it was all the guy’s fault, the husband who continues to fish after finding the body of a dead girl. He wanted to move the two of them closer together so we cannot rest in a pat judgment about what the guy did. When you bring the poles closer together the friction is very moving. It’s very unsettling. And you can’t tell who is going to come out of it right as easily as you thought you could. Of course, those readers who were very fond of the woman’s view weren’t happy about having to consider that this fellow, this seemingly good fellow, makes a bad judgment and is really in trouble.

  When you have the moment when the guy is pissing onto the body, this was horrible. I instinctively thought, “Oh, God, he’s way over the line.” But he wouldn’t give that up. Not that I asked him to, but I think Kathryn did. He was looking for the image that could show the carelessness, the despicable carelessness of the American male in that situation—where they’re all out there, men being men together, and the body of the woman suffers a desecration. He doesn’t come on and say this body has suffered a desecration, he leaves that for you to feel. Bob had him do that because he knows what everybody’s going to feel. He didn’t do that to be a smart-ass.

  Robert Altman, to Peter Travers, review headlined “A Robert Altman S*M*A*S
*H,” Rolling Stone, October 1993: “I don’t think the husband did a bad thing,” says Altman. “People say to me, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t do that.’ I say, ‘I would do that.’” The movie allows for both points of view, which is Altman’s purpose: “It is not my business—nor was it Carver’s business—to moralize about these things. I resent in art the definitive explanation for people’s behavior—there isn’t any.”

  ANNE ARCHER: I think Bob is right in that sense. He doesn’t like it when you make things morally right and wrong. He loved the foibles and the charm of different characters. He didn’t create these dark characters that depressed you. He created these flawed characters that amuse you. He could create a flawed character that would somehow mix it up just enough so you would have to get off your moral soapbox and sort of go, “Well, there’s a little bit of that in me.” You sort of have to forgive them.

  Bob was nonjudgmental. Actors are always being judged. They’re being watched, they’re being looked at, everybody has an opinion, everybody judges the width and breadth of their talents, or lack thereof. Everybody is always judging artists and it’s the worst thing you can do to an artist. It’s the thing that kills them. There’s an active plot to get the artists. Bob doesn’t do that. Bob loves actors, and all artists, whether it’s the set designer or the lead or the cinematographer.

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  Dialogue from Short Cuts:

  (While getting ready for a dinner party, Ralph Wyman, played by Matthew Modine, confronts his wife, Marian, played by Julianne Moore, about an incident at a party three years earlier.)

  RALPH: Your lipstick was smeared when you came back.

  MARIAN: How would you know? You were drunk. [Marian spills wine on her skirt]

  MARIAN: Goddammit, I wanted to wear this. Shit. [She removes her skirt and rinses it under the faucet. She is naked from the waist down]

  JULIANNE MOORE: Unfortunately, the way Bob asked me to be in Short Cuts, I literally got a cold call. I got a call at home—I was standing in my kitchen—and he was like, “Hello, Julianne. This is Bob Altman. Do you know who I am?”

  Which is crazy. I assumed that it was somebody making fun of me. I thought it was a friend of mine making fun of me because they knew what a huge fan I was of his. And I said, “Oh, come on. This isn’t Bob.”

  He goes, “No, no. It’s Bob Altman.”

  Julianne Moore, as Marian Wyman, in Short Cuts

  And just, I was shattered. I just didn’t—I said first, “How did you get my number?” And I just couldn’t believe he was calling me at home.

  And he said, “Well, I have this movie and I have this part I want you to do.”

  And I said, “Yes. Yes.”

  He said, “No, no, no. You really—you have to read it first.” He said, “Because there’s something—there’s some nudity and it’s not negotiable.”

  And I said, “Yes, yes. I don’t care. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

  And he said, “Well, sweetheart, really, just think about it. But I’m glad that you’re enthusiastic.” So he said the nudity, you know, the part, it’s bottomless.

  And I said, “That’s fine. I’ll do it.”

  Bob claims that after this—I don’t remember saying this; this is the unfortunate part—I may have said, in my excitement, “Guess what, I’m a real redhead.”

  I don’t remember saying that. But Bob never forgot it. And then the story got bigger. It morphed into—”And then she said, ‘I have a bonus for you, I’m a real redhead!” This is at the very, very beginning of my film career when I’m desperate to be taken seriously.

  So basically, I would do a movie and they would call people you worked with and the first person they would call would be Bob. And Bob would say, “Listen to this story. … She said, ‘I have a bonus for you. …’“

  And I’d be like, “Oh, my God!” So this story was in The New York Times, the L.A. Times, Rolling Stone, Premiere magazine. Basically, anybody who’d talk to Bob, he’d tell that story.

  So I didn’t know what to do because then people would say to me, “Can we call Bob and ask him for a quote?” And I’d go, “Please don’t call Bob, please don’t call Bob.”

  And I thought, “This is ridiculous. I can’t, I can’t go on like this. I love him. And he means more than anything to me.” And I thought, “Just get your courage up, Julie.”

  And I called Bob. And I felt like such an ass. And I said, “You know, Bob, about that thing that you always say about my being a real red—”

  He said, “Oh, yeah, about how you said, ‘I have a bonus for you.’“

  I said, “Well, Bob, I know it’s funny. But I’m kinda sensitive about it, and maybe—maybe you could stop talking to the press about it.”

  And he said—and in the most gentle, humane, you know, way possible—he said, “Of course, honey, whatever you want.”

  It was so moving because that’s who Bob was. You know, whatever you wanted was great. Whoever you were was great. You never made a mistake with Bob. Bob made you feel that everything you were doing was perfect. He made you feel, once he had cast you, you were what he wanted. He made the decision in the casting and therefore nothing you did on set was going to be wrong because you were bringing your whole thing to it. He didn’t want anything different than what you decided to do. So you felt insanely comforted by that because he was so gentle. You know, all this talk about Bob being this kind of irascible, difficult kind of person? Well, he was never that way with an actor or with a creative person that I saw. Never, never, never. He saved all that for the money people.

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  I remember being really nervous doing that stuff in Short Cuts. I said, “Do you want me to do it again? Is there anything else you want me to try?”

  He said, “No, you’re doing absolutely everything you need to do. You’re doing it perfectly.” He was so reassuring. But the funny thing was, after I finished, I’d done the big scene, we were in a place called Baldwin Hills, and it was way, way high up in these mountains, so they were counting on all this light coming in. I did all the stuff and it was all emotional and everything and Bob had this tradition that everybody went to dailies. Whoever was working with him that day usually went with him in his car, which was incredibly sweet.

  He said to me and Matthew Modine, “Come on, you guys, let’s go. Let’s get in the car.” He said, “I’ve got some news for you. We have to reshoot that. We lost the light.” I was like, “What?”

  He said, “Don’t worry, you can do it again.”

  I mean, I was like… I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the fact that I had to do it all again the next day in the morning after spending the entire day doing the most emotional part at the end of the day. And Bob was completely calm about it and completely certain that it would happen again. He always gave you an enormous amount of freedom. So much freedom within a boundary. Which is the best situation you can be in. People always assumed with Bob there was all this free-for-all, that there was endless improv and people did whatever they want. I mean, that was only true up to a point. You improvised, but then you’d need to hone it. You were free, but it was Bob’s set. He never lost sight of the movie he was making and what your place was within it. It was that sort of thing. You don’t want rules that restrict you, you want rules that aid you, that guide you. That’s what he was able to do because he knew what movie he was making. Always.

  MATTHEW MODINE: The scene is about so much more than Julianne having her pants off. You just know these characters have had this conversation a few times before. You can feel it in the text. Tonight he’s going to make his cocktail and sit down in his chair and ask her to tell him what happened. That’s what’s going to be so unnerving—he’s not going to be chasing her around, berating her.

  JULIANNE MOORE: So many people asked me about doing that scene.

  MATTHEW MODINE: I felt so embarrassed for her when we did press for the movie. The reporters reminded me of President Bush. He always looks like a guy who just hea
rd a really dirty joke and he wishes he could share it with you. So reporters would be sitting there with Julianne and they had this stupid smirk on their faces and they’re like, “So, you’re a real redhead.” And Julianne would handle it, just say, “Well, yeah.”

  I only wish I had my pants off, so they would have talked about my pubic hair as much as they talked about Julianne being a real redhead.

  JULIANNE MOORE: When you read a piece of literature it’s a very internal experience. You can talk about the characters’ feelings and whatever. But when you’re trying to translate that into a dramatic experience, you have to find a way to translate that kind of intimacy and that thought process. So the feeling of being incredibly intimate and knowing somebody, knowing their body, of a marriage, he was able to communicate that in that scene that way, and it was shocking to people. And really, really upsetting because he communicated that in a flash.

  So, anyway, it might not have been the last time I had dinner with Bob and Kathryn, but it was after we’d had this conversation about my bush. And we were sitting at the table: my husband, me, another couple, and Bob and Kathryn. And somebody was asking me how Bob and I had met, and how I had ended up in Short Cuts and what had happened.

  And then Kathryn said—I will never believe what she said—”And I have a bonus for ya!”

  And Bob said, “Kathryn, we’re not supposed to talk about her pussy anymore.”

  But you know what? I’m really glad he did. I loved him.

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