Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  ROBERT ALTMAN: They were all first-generation Europeans. There wasn’t anybody who spoke Texas: “Howdy, pardner.” That didn’t exist.

  JOAN TEWKESBURY: So, if I wanted to, I could be the script girl. By the time I got there, he had forgotten who I was, as only Bob can do.

  Bob’s idea about the script was that the church was the focus of the town—the town’s name was Presbyterian Church. The film was originally going to be called The Presbyterian Church Wager. At the end of the movie, he knew he was going to burn the church and what people would discover was that there was nothing in the church. It wasn’t a sacred place. There was just this guy, the preacher character, who was half crazy, living inside this shell.

  COREY FISCHER: He gave me the role of the preacher, the Reverend Elliot. The preacher was clearly nuts, a fanatic, an obsessive. He was like McCabe’s shadow, something from McCabe’s unconscious rearing up.

  I think Bob was disappointed with me because the biggest moment for that character was when he hauled that cross up to the church, that tremendous shot. That wasn’t me. That was a stuntman. I have a terrible fear of heights. No way was I going up there. Bob had a macho side. He tried to shame me into getting up there, but no way. Nobody knew the difference, certainly not the audience, but he knew. I know he was disappointed. I always joked that after that I was replaced by Jeff Gold-blum as the tall young Jew. I never really saw Bob again.

  KEITH CARRADINE (actor and songwriter): I was told there was a role for a young cowboy. He was supposed to play the banjo and Robert Altman was going to be directing it. Did I play the banjo? As all young actors will say, I said, “Absolutely.” Well, I didn’t play the banjo. I played the guitar and piano and harmonica, but I’d never picked up a banjo. Immediately I went out and bought this really cheap Kent banjo and a banjo book, and I started learning to play. I was told I was going to have a meeting with Robert Altman and I was told to go to his offices, which were the Lion’s Gate offices in Westwood. And they occupied this little office suite off of Westwood Boulevard, south of Wilshire Boulevard.

  I went over there and I went to the main reception and they told me, “Oh yes, Mr. Altman is upstairs.” So I went up the stairs and I knocked on the door, and at this point I had done one part. I had done my first movie, which was a gunfight with Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash, but I was still sporting my long hair because I had just come off of a year in Hair on Broadway. So my hair was probably about eighteen inches long at that point. I was a hippie. And I walked into Bob’s office. It was actually an apartment that he had where he would stay if he decided not to drive home at night. I opened the door and he was standing at the foot of his bed and he was unwrapping this brown-wrapped package, and he was wearing a bathrobe and a T-shirt.

  He said, “Hi, you’re Keith.”

  And I said, “Yeah.”

  He said, “I’m just unwrapping this—I just came back from the Cartagena Film Festival in Colombia.”

  And I’m thinking, “He’s unwrapping a bale of dope.” But in fact it wasn’t dope. He was unwrapping some pre-Columbian art that he had bought down there and had shipped back. He sort of looked at me as he was looking at his stuff.

  He said, “So, we’re going to do this movie.”

  And I said, “Yeah.”

  He said, “We’re going to shoot it up in Vancouver and it’s a Western and there’s a part for this kid who comes into town. Basically he comes into town because he’s heard there’s a whorehouse.”

  And I said, “Yeah, yeah. I heard about it.”

  He said, “So, do you want to do it?”

  I looked at him like, “You’re asking me if I want to do the part?” I didn’t say that. I said, “Sure.”

  And he said, “Okay. I don’t know about the hair. Maybe we’ll keep the hair. I think the hair is good.”

  Which was a great relief to me, because at that point I was nineteen, twenty years old and my long hair was my identity. It was my badge.

  That was the beginning of my working relationship, friendship, love affair with Robert Altman. That was how he worked. He cast essence. He wanted pure behavior and he wanted the essence of people and that was his genius. You didn’t have to audition for him to know if you were the right person for the part. He didn’t really cast actors so much as he cast people. He loved actors and he stood in awe of actors. He didn’t understand how they could do what they did and he found it a baffling mystery and a wondrous thing and he just loved to create an environment where he could take people who did that and give them the freedom to do that in their own inimitable way.

  Thank goodness that’s the way he worked because that really was the beginning of my validation in Hollywood terms. He validated me because I was chosen by Robert Altman. That gave me a credibility in the community that I could not have gotten any other way, a particular kind of credibility.

  When I first got there, they had a big trailer set up, a makeup trailer, and Bob came over to me and he said, “Come on, let’s go in here.” He put me in the makeup trailer, he sat me down and he said, “Cut his hair off.” He saw my look in the mirror, you know? And he said, “Kid, if that’s where your ego is, it’s in the wrong place.” I’ve never forgotten that.

  * * *

  RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: I learned a big lesson there about Bob and why you should never read a script of a film that Bob is about to direct. It’s a waste of time and it’s counterproductive to you as an actor. In the script, my character, the bar owner, Sheehan, was supposed to come upon Warren Beatty’s McCabe and find him wounded and finish him off. I remember Bob taking me aside and saying, “We’re not going to do that.” That was deep into the film. I was deeply disappointed because I thought that completed the arc of the character. I was heartbroken, but that was stupid. I think it’s his best film.

  JOAN TEWKESBURY: Ideas were discussed with Julie or with Warren and they would go off on drives or would come over for dinner. Everybody would come over for dinner. And members of the chorus—who were really members of the repertory company—they would be included. Half of Bob’s work was always done over dinners or, in quotes, parties or those kinds of preparatory things, where everybody would get to meet one another or talk to each other. As those relationships would form they would inform the story they would tell. Julie had one of her friends there, and she and Julie were rewriting dialogue for Julie. There would be Saturdays where I would go to the house and Bob would dictate scenes, and that would be the work we were gonna do the next day or the following Monday. Then Warren would bring in his stuff and then there would be times when Bob and Warren would come together and do stuff.

  MICHAEL MURPHY: When you weren’t in his movies it was upsetting because you knew there were a lot of people out there having a hell of a good time and you weren’t. That was the big draw. In the usual manner, I get a call from Bob one day.

  “Murphy, you want to be in this film, this movie?”

  And I said, “Yeah.”

  He says, “Okay, I need my car up here. I’ll give you six hundred fifty a week.”

  So I drove his car up to Vancouver from L.A. It was a nice trip, too, up that coast. I went up to work on McCabe & Mrs. Miller for a few days and I stayed for months just hanging around. He cast me as this young guy who comes into town with the older man, a partner in the business, to offer McCabe money. We want to buy him out. We represent the industrialists, the movers and shakers. We offer him, I don’t know, fifteen hundred dollars or something and he passes. He’s bluffing. He wants more money, and so then we send in the killers, to wipe him out. We were just talking one night and I said to Bob, “What do you think about this guy?”

  He said, “He’s somebody’s nephew” [laughs]. That was all the direction he gave me. It was perfect. I knew exactly what he was talking about. You know, send the kid on this job, see how he does dealing with this rube out in the middle of nowhere.

  JULIE CHRISTIE (actress): He gives you a little clue—like when I had to say a whole lot of stuff a
bout numbers and money. I couldn’t remember it because I’m innumerate. He made me look for something I’d lost on the ground. He solves his problems with actors quite practically, very often with physical stuff.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: I sent to Warner Brothers for wardrobe. I told them to send up a truckload of clothes and things for a Western for that period. I told the actors, “Okay, everybody, go to the wardrobe truck and pick out your clothes. You can have one pair of pants, you can have two coats of different weight—one that you can put over the other. You can have one shirt, a pair of boots, a pair of pants.” Of course the smart ones picked out the most distressed stuff, the clothes that had the most character. And then I said, “Now, you’ve got to live in these clothes in this fucking weather, so you’d better get out there and sew those holes up.” So they all went out and repaired their own clothing. And they picked out little artifacts that made their characters more real. I said, “These are yours. And you can’t have anything else in the picture, and you can’t get rid of these. You have to take care of this stuff.” So the cast and the wardrobe were terrific because there was a reality to it.

  Speaking with Julie Christie, as Mrs. Miller

  The set designer, Leon Ericksen, was a genius. He was a big, big influence on me in terms of how to approach that kind of reality. Just to walk on the set and have there be trash in the trash can. He’d have stuff in the drawers, whether or not those drawers were going to be opened. There was a museum quality to it. He was the purest of all the people that I worked with, other than occasionally actors. He taught me how to deal with artifice, with sets. I was doing these films inside this reality that Leon created. In McCabe, we shot the film in sequence as the town was built. All of the carpenters, all the workmen, lived there. They actually lived in the place and they were all hippies. They were all Leon’s friends.

  JOHN SCHUCK: You walked through these two wooden gate doors and you were back in the 1800s. There was no question about it. We got behind schedule in building the town—it grew as the movie went along—because the guys were throwing away their power tools and wanted to do everything by hand.

  KEITH CARRADINE: The sets for that movie in West Vancouver were up above a housing development. It was right around the corner from where the newly built houses stopped and the road sort of turned to the left and there was a little gatehouse and there was all this parking out there. You left your car, you walked through this gate, and about twenty or thirty feet after you walked through the gate, you went around the bend and it was 1901. It was absolutely magical.

  He had all these carpenters and craftspeople and artisans from Vancouver that came up to work on the set and build the place, and they were invited to stay. All you had to do was put on period clothing and you could hang out here and keep working on the building you’re building and that’s how he had this incredible atmosphere of a town sort of rising out of the mud. It was a living place. People would spend the night there. They would sleep in their tents or their tepees.

  MICHAEL MURPHY: So then the actors come to town and they wanted to live in it, too. René wants to live in a saloon. The crew guys are like, “Goddamn actors.” They had to go find another place to live. The actors would live in the place two nights and decide they don’t want to do that anymore, they want to go back to the Hilton [laughs]. Then you’d go to work. You’d shoot and the next day you’d go to work and the whole town would be framed. Every time you’d come to work the set looked different—fifty new townspeople had moved in. I don’t think there are a whole hell of a lot of guys that could shoot a picture that quickly and keep that working as well as Bob did. When you have those big changes on a location, it really freaks people out. The reason he could move the way he did was he always had the picture cut in his head.

  * * *

  VILMOS ZSIGMOND (cinematographer): That was the luck of my life, actually, to do McCabe & Mrs. Miller. I was shooting in Santa Fe, and he calls me up and says he had this movie, it’s an old Western. He described it in images, very old, like antique photographs and faded-out pictures, not much color.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: I had seen something. I think it’s in my dreams. Or I’d seen a Western in which the way the buildings were built or the way the people walked looked real. And I don’t know when I saw it, or where I saw it, or even if I saw it. But I had that look in my mind.

  VILMOS ZSIGMOND: I said, “Bob, I have the right thing to do. I just read an article about it and I will make tests about flashing the film.” He said, “How is that done?” I described flashing the film and what does that do to the film. It makes it sort of grayish, very grainy, especially if you underexpose it and push the film, and you are going to get this old look that way. He said, “Yeah, that’s fine, that’s great. We are going to do that.”

  He made the test before I even got to Vancouver. I described what to do, and then he actually hired the standby, and told him how to flash five percent, ten percent, fifteen percent on the test. That’s how we decided fifteen percent of flashing would be just perfect for the movie. But he loved this whole process.

  The studio hated it. It was Warner Brothers. Some executives said, “This guy doesn’t know how to expose film! Everything is underexposed, it’s grainy, we have to reshoot everything!” And Bob said, “No, no, no, understand something. We have a new lab here in Vancouver. They don’t know what they are doing. The film is going to get to Hollywood, it’s going to be great. You’ll love it.” So they left us alone. He was conning them. He didn’t want interference from anybody. Any studio executive, he could not stand them to come on the set and watch what he was doing because he would not let that happen. So this way we basically escaped letting the studio correct us and go back and reshoot things to make it look like all those movies in those days with Technicolor, saturated colors. We loved so much the way it looked, but the studio hated it. They didn’t want anything new.

  I don’t think we ever really had a real argument. I loved him so much. I listened to him and I learned a lot from him. I learned how to use the zoom, because he really used the zoom way before anybody else was using the zoom—the way he used it in McCabe, for example. Because he loved to dolly and zoom at the same time he could actually create live, dramatic moves. I mean that was the whole idea. He showed me a couple of times, the very first week I was there to learn what he wanted. After the week was over, he let me do it. He realized that I learned what he wanted—to tell me what it should look like as far as composition goes, as far as the camera moves go, and then from that point he hardly ever even looked into the camera.

  Afterwards I used the zoom lens all the time because it’s convenient, it’s fast, you get everything that you want. Yes, it’s not as sharp as regular lenses, but who wants sharpness anyhow? I was always on the soft side of things. I liked it not as brutally sharp as many cinematographers do.

  * * *

  ALAN RUDOLPH (director): Bob wants everybody to come to dailies for the collective energy, the collective thrill. But it’s more than that. He wanted a democratic sense where everybody was rooting for everybody else, where you didn’t bring your ego to dailies. If you’re sitting there and you watch some minor character doing something—’cause Bob’s camera would find that person doing something kind of clever—even if you were the big star you’d support it, you’d love it because you knew it was going to be part of the fabric. There was this camaraderie, this spirit, so that nobody felt more important than anybody else. He really wanted it to be a team rooting for each other instead of about me and mine.

  VILMOS ZSIGMOND: He always liked to have a lot of people see dailies. Sometimes he had forty people. Everyone from the actors to the crew to the extras. And their children. Dogs, cats, roaming around in the screening room. It was like a happening every night. And we had drinks, you know. Some people were smoking. Bob was into Scotch and everything. Those were really, really glorious days. It was the end of the sixties, basically.

  KEITH CARRADINE: He expected you to be there. That was a
part of the communal experience of filmmaking as far as he was concerned. You’d show up on the set and you do your work and also you come and you watch everyone else’s work. They’re going to watch your work and you’re going to watch their work and we’re all going to watch each other’s work and it’s all going to be great. Julie didn’t go. She didn’t like to look at herself. Somehow she got away with that. I know there are people who would not go to dailies because they just—they were afraid it would affect how they approached their work, and Bob would grudgingly accept that, but he didn’t really buy it.

  JULIE CHRISTIE: I don’t like parties, for a start, especially when everybody is more or less congratulating themselves. These are congratulatory parties. I can’t bear watching me do things all wrong. I can’t bear it. He’s someone whose approval everybody sought. I think he made it clear when his approval wasn’t wholly there. I think I could have sucked up to him more by being at the rushes. But I just hate them, so there’s no point in doing that.

  * * *

  JULES FEIFFER (writer and cartoonist): Within a few miles of each other, these two marvelous films were being shot at the same time—McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Carnal Knowledge. As different styles as possible, because Mike Nichols organizes everything and knows everything that’s going to happen and plans it all; that’s the way he thinks and that’s the way he works. Altman works in a pigpen.