Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fondness of actors for Altman is legendary. Unlike directors who treat performers like two-year-olds -- bothersome, silly, not entirely rational -- Altman genuinely encourages them to help invent the film, not just do as he says. "I collaborate with everybody," Altman says, "but mostly the actors. You could point out any really good thing that happened in any of my films ((and ask)), 'Whose idea is that?' ((and)) it is almost invariably somebody else's. And I don't even know whose...
...course, writers tend not to share Altman's easy, fungible attitude toward dialogue. And as in almost all things, he remains blithely impolitic in his regard for the screenwriting craft. "I get a lot of flack from writers. But I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing -- I mean, I think it's blueprinting." On Tanner, fortunately, because the story zigged and zagged according to actual events and incorporated real political figures, the writing was necessarily quick, sketchy, Altmanesque. "What Bob makes is a kind of visual jazz," says Trudeau, "and I thought of myself as providing...
...Altman may be a genius, but linear analytical rigor is not his thing. He lives and works amid a genial hurly-burly, with room for all kinds of stray inspirations and serendipitous touches to worm their way into his movies. What Altman pursues is not looseness for its own sake, but surprise -- both for himself and for moviegoers: he didn't know beforehand the tics and shadings performers like Lyle Lovett and Whoopi Goldberg (who play police officers) would bring to their characters, for instance, and the movie-within-a-movie surprise he gives the audience near...
When it works, his seat-of-the-pants filmmaking is grand. Yet it carries great risks. As disciplined and carefully plotted as The Player is, it's still an Altman movie. The end of the movie seems a bit contrived, he is told, not quite consistent tonally with the rest of the film -- and he freely admits, "We had no ending to the picture when we went into it. We had no way to end it that anybody liked...
...While Altman is a big-hearted, risk-taking, pot-smoking, actor-loving paterfamilias (he has five children by three wives, including two by Kathryn Altman, whom he married 32 years ago), he is not always Mr. Mellow. When he thinks a crew member has screwed up or an executive has done him wrong, his anger can be ferocious. Volcanic is the word that two former colleagues use to describe his temper. "It's something to behold," says Trudeau...