CHAPTER 29
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Amy Barrett, Q&A headlined “Questions for Robert Altman; Arrogance Is Bliss,” The New York Times, December 16, 2001:
Q: You’ve made some of America’s most celebrated films. But your last couple have had a markedly different reception. Do you have any sense of how your latest, “Gosford Park,” might fare?
A: I think every one is going to be the greatest thing since hash.
Q: Since hash or since “M*A*S*H”?
A: Hash, I said.
Q: Right, hash.
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Dialogue from Gosford Park:
CONSTANCE TRENTHAM (Played by Maggie Smith): Tell me, how much longer are you going to go on …making films?
IVOR NOVELLO (Played by Jeremy Northam): I suppose that rather depends on how much longer the public want to see me in them.
Gosford Park (2001)
Stephen Holden, review in The New York Times, December 21, 2001: Robert Altman’s film “Gosford Park”… is a virtuoso ensemble piece to rival the director’s “Nashville” and “Short Cuts” in its masterly interweaving of multiple characters and subplots. The film, set in November 1932, takes place on a grand country estate where well over a dozen aristocrats and their servants gather for a weekend shooting party during which their host, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), is murdered. … Hatreds and rivalries abound both upstairs and below, and sexual shenanigans cross class boundaries. … What makes the achievement of “Gosford Park” all the more remarkable is that Mr. Altman is 76. If the movie’s cool assessment of the human condition implies the dispassionate overview of a man who has seen it all, the energy that crackles from the screen suggests the clear-sighted joie de vivre of an artist still deeply engaged in the world.
Bob Balaban, as movie producer Morris Weissman, and to his left Jeremy Northam, as actor Ivor Novello, in Gosford Park. Behind them are Natasha Wightman and Tom Hollander.
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BOB BALABAN (actor/producer/director): I met Bob at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel when he was casting Brewster McCloud. I was just one of a number of young men who might have been right for the part of the boy who flies in the Houston Astrodome. We got to be friendly over the years, twenty-five or thirty years, because of my cousin Judy, whose father used to be the president of Paramount, Barney Balaban. Judy knew everybody in Hollywood. Over the years we just got friendlier, ‘cause he was so friendly and Kathryn was so outgoing and adorable.
I had produced and directed some movies myself and developed some things for television, and I was sitting around one day, going, “What wonderful director do I know who if I came to them with a movie, a movie might actually get made?” And I thought, “Well, there’s Robert Altman. I know him, he does brilliant things, he’s very outside the box, so he won’t mind that I’m not really a producer, exactly.”
I thought it would be really, really interesting to put Robert Altman in a very traditional circumstance, which would mean England. And I came in with only the basic germ of the idea, which is funny because my character—this movie producer—says basically the same thing in Gosford Park. They say, “What’s the movie about?” And basically I just say what I said to Bob the first time we talked about this. You know, a bunch of rich people get together at a country house for the weekend, around 1930. I didn’t say this in the movie, but I told Bob it should have as many earmarks of a traditional Agatha Christie plot as we could muster. Somebody gets killed and they think it’s one of the party guests, but of course it didn’t have to be. And when I said that, Bob was intrigued.
He said, “The only thing is, I don’t really like the upper class too much. How about we just have this take place with all the servants?”
And I said, “Well, obviously you should do anything you want, but if you like this idea, I think you’re going to enjoy being bound by some of the conventions of this traditional murder mystery, ‘cause then you can press against it and destroy the convention if you want. But I think you’re going to enjoy the tension that that creates.”
One of the things Robert loved to do that I thought just worked especially well in this movie was having two worlds going on at the same time. He loved intercutting back and forth. There was such a great energy and a feeling of life when you have two series of lives going on together.
When we got organized to do Gosford Park, there came the point when we needed a writer, and I suggested to Robert that Julian Fellowes would probably be a wonderful choice. So Bob talked to him on the phone. Julian was really aware that this was possibly going to be his big break in show business, which it was. And not everybody is like this, but Julian’s ears perked up immediately. “Okay, I’ll be there tomorrow, I’ll write everything.” He was so accommodating. He wrote a two-page treatment, which immediately meant he knew more than we possibly would know. Because you had to know what happened in a British house in the country when you had these parties there. We didn’t know. We never would have known. Julian came from that world. He knew.
JULIAN FELLOWES (actor and screenwriter): I was a complete unknown. I had a couple of children’s TV scripts made. I thought, “Obviously, this isn’t going to happen.” It’s like something out of a Hollywood musical—a completely unknown actor is invited to write a script and the script gets made and it’s a hit.
BOB BALABAN: We thought we had financing lined up. It was enough to get Bob over to London, and we began to spend our own money—Bob and I financed the screenplay, we financed the preproduction, and it was all very frightening. And he was over there in London. Mary Selway, our casting director, a brilliant, wonderful woman, was calling actors, and everybody wanted to meet with Bob. He would have tea in his hotel and actors would come by and he’d just charm them to death. And they would commit to being in the movie without dates or a contract or anything else.
And it fell apart. And in between it falling apart and coming back together, we tried everything. One of Bob’s old investors said that if Bob would rewrite the last thirty pages and make it be much more satisfying of a murder mystery, he would give us like eighteen million dollars. Well, that’s a lot of money. We could have had salaries. You know, not that it was an uncomfortable shoot, but it would have been nice to have made money. And Bob was like, “No, this is the movie. I’m not rewriting the movie for you.”
So then the investor said, “Well, okay, I’ll give you twelve million.”
At that point Bob said, “We’ll get it somewhere else. I’m not going to make the movie with somebody who tells me how to rewrite my movie.”
And you know, he was right, actually. So we did end up with about eleven or something like that. But in between it was terrifying. I’d be calling Bob all the time. We’d have our lists—you call this one, I’ll call this one. Nobody wanted to invest in it. They didn’t like the script, basically.
JULIAN FELLOWES: For the people putting up the money, it was all terribly frightening. Here was this film about this very arcane world that nobody knew the rules about. For one thing, the servants took their employers’ names downstairs—it was quirky. The executives couldn’t understand it. They said, “Bob, this film already has more characters than the Second World War and now they all have the same name!”
BOB BALABAN: The first thing that struck us, both of us, about the screenplay was the fact that all of the servants are referred to by the name of the person who’s their master. They didn’t have identities, even. And you didn’t even have to comment on it, you know what I mean, it was just like, “Oh, Jesus Christ, these people aren’t even important enough to have a name. They’re just named for the guy upstairs.” That said more about Robert’s take on the world than anything else you could have had in the movie.
What you couldn’t tell when you read the script was the way that Bob would develop these nasty petty little people who lived upstairs, the rich people. Bob was a painter and all of these characters were blips and dabs that all came together, but you couldn’t see it until you stood back and looked at the canvas, really. So people who read it didn’t like it. There were too many characters, and it wasn’t a murder mystery at all. At one point during preproduction Bob laughingly, but seriously, said, “Let’s not solve the murder at all.”
So Julian and I were like, “Um, maybe it would be a good idea to solve the murder.”
And in fact I think it frightened people, the investors, to see Robert Altman directing a movie that you’re used to seeing from Merchant Ivory because it had to be respectful and Bob is not respectful.
JULIAN FELLOWES: Every time they wanted to replace me—”Maybe someone could come in to do a little fixing, a little polish”—Bob just wouldn’t let it happen. You have to be very unafraid. There is something about the film industry that is very castrating. There’s so much money involved, and they’re talking to you, and your whole brain becomes this negotiation party. Bob was stronger than all that. I have absolutely no hesitation to saying that—not just keeping me on as sole writer, but also holding on to the details of this obscure way of life, of this class that had been forgotten, in this country that is tiny—that is one hundred percent due to him.
BOB BALABAN: Everything that frightened people about the movie was the thing that Bob loved about the movie. Bob liked large noisy groups of people. And that’s how he liked to live. And he liked them in his movies. I know people have said this, but in a way Bob’s movies were all one long movie. And it was in some ways like his life. They didn’t come to a lot of conclusions at the end. Sometimes it was very hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys—there’s not a lot of black and white clashing around. It’s all pretty complicated. And he loved large groups of people.
It was fine in the beginning. As we got closer to production and as there was less financing and he was in London and I was here in New York and we were desperately looking for money, the peaks and the valleys were enormous. He could be very quixotic and he could be very temperamental, but it wasn’t without cause. And it was certainly understandable. But in a way, you could say he had two different natures. The nature that kept everything in his head and worried and worried and worried, and he was thinking about making the movie and also holding in his mind the possibility that this thing that he had now fallen in love with might not happen. And there he was in England and practically mortgaging his house, as we were all thinking of doing, and so the strain financially was horrendous.
But you must think of movies as childbirth for Bob, which they were, and they were all his children. There were no stepchildren among them. It didn’t matter what anybody else thought about the movie, they were all equally beautiful and blonde and blue-eyed, all of them. There was that terrifying period when his child might not get born, and he was in love already and it was the thing he lived for. So he was very irascible when it was shaky.
When we were doing Gosford Park I was aware that there were a number of other movies he was also trying to work on. I didn’t want them to fall apart but I wasn’t unhappy when I realized that the laws of attrition were saying Gosford Park is going to be the one that we’re going to have to make. And in fact, he had to make the movie. Nobody in their right mind would go sit in London and meet Maggie Smith and Clive Owen and Helen Mirren and a thousand other people. It didn’t make sense. Why would you go and do that before your financing was set? How could you do that? And yet, he knew that everything was going to help it move forward. So, as scary as it was, as the tightrope walk was getting more and more dangerous, it was imperative that he be acting as if the movie were going to get made because that would help it get made.
DAVID LEVY: We got to London, three of us, Bob and Steve Altman and I, and I believe it was Halloween night of 2000. We went out with this Sri Lankan guy who was allegedly going to finance the picture. We got back from dinner, the three of us, and it was, “Well, this is going to work out, isn’t it?” And I said no. I said, “I don’t care how many times the guy’s banker called him during dinner, this isn’t going to happen with this guy.” Sure enough. So we spent a couple of months in a very tough place while all the casting was going on and key crew was being recruited.
Directing Emily Watson, as maid/lover Elsie, in Gosford Park
STEPHEN ALTMAN: David Levy, myself, and Bob went and lived in a little apartment in London, and he just started reeling in the fish. He had a script and no money and the investors were all fakes or not to be trusted. And it’s, “Hello, Maggie Smith? Do you want to be in this movie?” “Is anybody else in it?” “Well, I’m seeing Michael Gambon tonight.” As soon as those two say yes, everyone is like, “Oh sure, Bob, anything. If you get a movie we’d love to work with you.” Pretty soon he’s got thirty-five superstars, all working on his picture. We would put the actors’ pictures up on the walls when the investors came over. I made a model of the set, which I actually used for the movie. But it was all dog and pony con show. We were doing The Sting. But for a good reason. We wanted to make some money [laughs]. We wanted the picture to go, no matter what it was.
BOB BALABAN: The minute we started really getting close to shooting, it was as if somebody had given him a hundred tranquilizers. He was just enormously happy in a way that spread everywhere he went on the set. You could hear it in his headset. Everybody on the set was happy. Everybody who worked on the set was thrilled to see him—the makeup people, the hair people, anybody working on the set actively. He was just gloriously happy. But he was really a mess before we started.
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JULIAN FELLOWES: Bob realized it was kind of a minefield, this whole class thing. He knew that if you were doing some world, if you got all the details right, even people who didn’t know this world would accept its accuracy. It would smell right. He wanted it to be specific—not BBC servant acting, wandering around with a tray. Part of that was he asked me if I would be on the set for the whole shoot. With Bob this was unusual. He and I said my job was to stop him from making a mistake by accident. Of course, a director says that, but then they want everything they want to do not to be a mistake.
He wanted Mary to be in the dining room. There’s no reason for a lady’s maid to be in a dining room. We’d have these spats. What amazes me now was in the whole time we worked together he never once pulled rank. He never said or even implied, “I am a world-famous director with a million films behind me, and who are you?” We were just these two fat men fighting. That is a paradigm of the man. He was never afraid to fight for what he wanted, but by the same token he never felt he had to use unfair weapons. And I really love him for that.
The role of the writer in film is an odd one. You are the one part of the creative team that everyone wants to forget exists. The audience wants to think their favorite actor said and did all these wonderful things, and the director wants to think it all came from his mind. And the writer is the one member of the creative team that can be fired up to the last day. We’re like plastic surgeons. Hollywood couldn’t exist without them but nobody wants to know our names.
BOB BALABAN: Bob knew enough about what he didn’t know to make sure that Julian was on the set every second. Of course, by the end of it he wanted to kill Julian, which was no surprise to me. Julian would say to Bob, “See that maid in the distance? She’s coming down the stairs. She wouldn’t be carrying coffee. There would be no toast on her plate. This is eleven o’clock, she would have hard-boiled eggs. …”
JULIAN FELLOWES: The standard thing in Hollywood is to direct the camera with a movement on the scene. The dog goes down the walk and the camera follows the dog, and it leads to the body. With Bob, the dog goes one way and the camera goes the other. He creates this illusion in the mind of the spectator that they are directing the camera. It becomes an autonomous being that is moving around the room. Because you are the viewer, you take responsibility for the image. You are given the impression that you are exploring this film.
DAVID LEVY: Bob would give a listener the impression that he would show up on a set with a bunch of actors and they’d stir a pot and a movie would come out. Julian comes from the place where he’ll tell you that exactly one line of Gosford was unscripted, Maggie Smith’s line “Difficult color, green,” talking about Claudie Blakley’s frock. All I’ll say is those are both revisionist histories.
As someone who rode to the set every morning with Bob in the car, I fought hard for Julian’s script. But Bob would scribble in the morning and try and change things and Julian worked very, very hard to beat the deadline that morning of trying to take whatever changes there were and incorporate them officially and formally and get those to be the words the actors did say on the day. So I understand what he means when he says every line was scripted save one. But it doesn’t give the most accurate impression. But it’s more accurate than Bob’s assessment of we made it up as we went along.
BOB BALABAN: Certainly Gosford Park was not an improvised movie, but you got the feeling when you saw it that it was an improvised movie. There were enough sections that were improvised so that the actors really got in the skins of the people they were playing, even if they weren’t playing terribly well-developed characters.
DAVID LEVY: I can tell you one thing that was spontaneous. We were at lunch one day. Helen Mirren had come in for hair, makeup, and wardrobe tests. Eileen Atkins had already been working in the picture. Eileen was in costume because she was shooting that day. And Helen was there in some form of costume and hair and makeup, not fully developed at that point. I was sitting at one table, Bob was a table away from me, and the women were off to one side at yet another table. And I saw his eyes kind of get big and he called me over. He starts pointing at them. “They’re sisters. They’re sisters.”
He thought a large part of that picture’s success and appeal in terms of audience was because of that cathartic moment at the end that the sisters had. And you know, it’s something that I don’t think we’d have seen from the Bob of twenty years prior. Well, he might have thought it, but he wouldn’t have said it. I think it really comes as close to wrapping a package and tying it up with a bow as he would ever, ever do.
JULIAN FELLOWES: Those two actresses ad-libbed that. But for the most part of the film that was not so. This was very difficult for Bob in a way. I think he wanted to be an auteur director and it was hard for him to accept the importance of script. That was just difficult for him.
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Rick Lyman, story headlined “‘A Beautiful Mind’ Wins Four Golden Globes,” The New York Times, January 21, 2002: One of the evening’s bigger surprises, and the source of the longest ovation, was Robert Altman’s winning the best director award for “Gosford Park,” a murder mystery set on an English country estate. “Gosford Park” was widely seen as a solid return to form for one of the legendary American directors of the 1970’s.
BOB BALABAN: The Academy Award thing mattered, if only financially. If it did win Best Picture, that was going to be another twenty-five million. It had already done enormously well. So it was very pressured. It lasted a long time and it went on and there was a lot of dirty fighting during it, which happens in Academy Award things. Trying to dig up things you said and what you did. In Bob’s case it was easy to dig up things he had said.
JULIAN FELLOWES: I think it was unfair that I won the Oscar and Bob didn’t. I love Ron Howard and thought Beautiful Mind was a very good movie. But quite honestly I don’t think it was quite as iconic a movie as Gosford. I think it was a very difficult time. I don’t know about smear campaigns. I think that Bob misjudged the public mood about 9/11. For me, I was an Englishman. It seemed to me a terrible atrocity that had been visited on the United States and I felt very, very sorry for the people involved in it and sorry that it happened.
Bob was a very passionate political man. He had all sorts of feelings about American foreign policy. They were informed, literate opinions. He wasn’t a rattling drum. He didn’t understand that America wasn’t yet ready to hear his reasoned opinions.
We were in Paris together and doing one of those junket things. We were together on the platform, and—”Monsieur Altman, que pensezvous de 9/11?” And he came up with an impolitic answer. At the end of it, he turned to me and said, “Oh God, I think I can taste foot again.”
I said to him, “It’s just too soon. It’s like walking into a maternity ward and saying, ‘What’s the matter with its ears?’“
Robert Altman quoted by the Associated Press in stories published October 18, 2001: The movies set the pattern, and these people have copied the movies. Nobody would have thought to commit such an atrocity unless they’d seen it in a movie. … How dare we continue to show this kind of mass destruction in movies? I just believe we created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it.
Jack Valenti, quoted in The Daily News (New York), October 19, 2001: That’s a giant leap from movies to Osama Bin Laden.
BOB BALABAN: There was a lot of buildup and a lot of lead-in and there was this smear campaign going on. I’m not sure if Robert was aware of the smear campaign. He didn’t talk about it ever that I heard. But he probably knew.
It would have just been politic for him to shut up during the Academy campaign, but then, you wouldn’t be Robert Altman if you were politic. If anything, when he came up against authority, instead of pacifying, it made Bob want to strike out. It was like flashing a red cape at a bull.
JULIAN FELLOWES: That was the man. If someone said, “Bob, could you tone it down a bit?” Well, he wasn’t a big toner downer.
My own belief is that if 9/11 had not happened, the following March he would have won the Oscar.
BOB BALABAN: He was quite adorable the night of the awards. It was great how all the filmmakers and all the creative people weren’t in a competition. They were just happy to be with people they respected. It was really nice. But you focus so much on winning, winning, winning. And that’s so not what Bob would ever be about, you know? I’m not saying he would throw the race, but Bob would want there to be one giant thing where everybody won something. It didn’t appeal to his socialist nature too much, declaring winners. But he was fine during the award.
Soon after, Bob called us all and said, “We’re having a losers’ party. Come to my house.” And he was giddy. I think it was that we all had a reason to be together and to affirm our friendship. Because in a way, us all not winning together—well, Julian won, so in a way that made him persona non grata. But in a way it was a bond, having all gone through this amazing experience with this movie that people adored so much and then not winning anything. I think it almost made it more special. In a way. Because it didn’t even have the seal of approval from those silly people who don’t mean anything.
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The Company (2003)
Roger Ebert, review in the Chicago Sun-Times, December 24, 2003: Why did it take me so long to see what was right there in front of my face—that “The Company” is the closest that Robert Altman has come to making an autobiographical film? I’ve known him since 1970, have been on the sets of many of his films, had more than a drink with him in the old days and know that this movie reflects exactly the way he works—how he assembles cast, story and location and plunges in up to his elbows, stirring the pot. With Altman, a screenplay is not only a game plan but a diversionary tactic, to distract the actors (and characters) while Altman sees what they’ve got. “The Company” involves a year in the life of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, during which some careers are born, others die, romance glows uncertainly, a new project begins as a mess and improbably starts to work, and there is never enough money. … “The Company” is his film about the creative process itself, and we see that ballet, like the movies, is a collaborative art form in which muddle and magic conspire, and everything depends on that most fragile of instruments, the human body.
Neve Campbell and Malcolm McDowell in The Company.
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NEVE CAMPBELL (actress and producer): I’d been a dancer most of my childhood and teenage life and moved into acting because I had a lot of injuries. I always had an idea in mind that there had never been a dance film that portrayed the world of dance in a realistic light. I didn’t want to do the typical narrative film about one dancer who wants to make it and does.
I thought Barbara Turner, as a screenwriter, was very good at creating worlds—she does a lot of research. Over a period of about four years Barbara would go to Chicago to interview the dancers and basically ended up with hundreds of pages of conversations. We were throwing around names of directors—Barbara had worked with Bob in the past—and as soon as Bob’s name came up we knew that he would be perfect.
BARBARA TURNER (screenwriter/actress/producer): I sent him the script mainly because I knew he would be the only person who would understand it. Because it was really about the dancers; it’s really about them and it wasn’t linear and it was all over the place. It was a year in their lives, basically.
One of the things he said to me was, “Now, Barbara, I want you to know that this is your script and it’s wonderful, but it has to be my movie.”
No bells went off yet. “I understand that, Bob, blah, blah, blah,” I said.
So we get there and we start working. The script was long, and he said it has to be cut. Which I cut. He said, “What I want you to do is to take your ten favorite scenes, and make a list of them, because what’s important to you is important to me.”
And I did it. And he didn’t shoot one of them. So I realized, “That’s what he meant by it’s got to be his movie.”
It was painful but it was funny at the same time.
NEVE CAMPBELL: We knew even going in—not a lot of people are going to be interested in this. He would make it anyway. He was interested in it. That was enough for him, and maybe other people would become interested by seeing it.
Originally, Bob expressed some concern about the fact that he didn’t know anything about dance, and he needed to be shown why the film should be made. We started flying to New York and he just asked me a lot about dance—why this film could be important and what it was like to be a dancer. I think the more I talked about the dance world and what sacrifices dancers make, the more he identified with it. Bob was very similar to dancers in that he’s an amazing artist, he didn’t do many things for commercial value, and he never made as much money as he could have if he had sold out in any way. So I think he related.
BARBARA TURNER: To the dancers, he was already a god when he walked on the set. He treated them with such respect, just the way he treats actors. He’s amazing and respectful. They could just feel love pouring all over them.
ROBERT ALTMAN: I’d walk into the studio and there would be these beautiful girls with their legs spread apart, up in the air, and they’d think nothing of it. They’d call out, “Hi, Mr. A!” It made me feel young and old at the same time.
NEVE CAMPBELL: It’s true—for dancers it’s your tool, you almost forget how normal people behave with their bodies. I don’t think Bob minded at all [laughs].
MALCOLM MCDOWELL: He called me and said, “This young kid, Neve Campbell, she’s brought me a script about dance. Can you dance?”
“No.”
“Well, you don’t have to.”
He just loved these dancers. Fell in love with them and what they do—their dedication and their athleticism and artistry. And it was just wonderful to see him working with them.
And I remember my first day on the thing. We were rehearsing—the dancers were rehearsing in an outside theater. And I had to come on and, I don’t know, do something.
And Bob sees me. “Mal!” I went over. And he says, “You got the scene?”
And I said, “Yeah, absolutely, I got it.”
And he said, “Forget it.”
I knew this was coming. I knew it was coming. He said, “Call the company together and inspire them.”
Well, I figured that’s a week’s work. An hour later we had it in the can. I don’t know what I said. I have no idea.
NEVE CAMPBELL: I love that it’s a Robert Altman film. I like the fact that it doesn’t tell you how to feel. It lets you make up your own mind about things. It’s exactly what I envisioned and exactly what I wanted in the film. I said that to Bob. “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but you’ve done exactly what I wanted to happen.”
He said, “Well, I just listened.”
I don’t think there are many people who could have done that, who would have listened to another artist and known how to do it.
I would say Bob is the coolest person I met in my whole life. He wasn’t an old-school cowboy. Besides, I don’t know any eighty-year-old who could smoke as much pot as he could and still function.