Word: altmans
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...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...
Given that he depends on the Hollywood establishment to help make and sell his movies, his undisguised contempt for certain Hollywood big shots is also something to behold. Earlier this year, when The Player was being shown to prospective distributors, Altman got in a public spat with two top studio executives over what he considered their disrespectful attitude. Ask Altman innocently about his 1985 movie that Sam Shepard wrote and starred in, and he cannot stop himself. "Fool for Love . . . I mean, I can't abide Sam Shepard." As an actor? "As a person. I just...
...Altman says that beginning last winter, "about the time all the studios saw ((The Player))," he started being courted by the unlikeliest of people. "Even Disney wants to do something with me," he marvels. Of course, being Robert Altman, he only wants to make the not-obviously-commercial films that interest him. For most of the past decade, he tried and failed to develop a script about the Paris haute couture scene, and now "I'll probably get it done next year -- I imagine directly as a result of the heat on The Player." He is negotiating a development deal...