ARCHIVE
It's Okay With Me: ROBERT ALTMAN
(Complete Interview)
SS: So it isn’t as much apathy from the audiences, it’s the fault of the filmmakers themselves?
RA: Well, no, the filmmakers are pushing themselves. It’s what they can get done, and now it’s all marketing. It went from the studio bosses ordering certain kinds of films to be made. Then the writers and filmmakers took over in the ’70s. The studio bosses disappeared. Then in the ’80s the agents started taking over. That was okay for a while. Then the marketing and advertising people took over, and now I don’t know who’s calling the shots. I don’t know any of the people who run the studios anymore. It’s pointless. What would I have to say to them anyway? We’re not in the same business. There’s no point in even getting in the same room together.
SS: Are you happy to reach an audience through whatever medium you can?
RA: When you go into opera and theater, you know you’re going into a limited stage, but it’s also a specialized stage. I don’t have to worry about the teenage boys anymore. But now we have a general level of intelligence in America that is considerably lower than it was 30 years ago. We’ve been dumbed down to a point where maybe some positive things will come around again, but I don’t even understand what they market as films these days. How do they do it? As I say, it’s probably me. I’m probably so out of touch with what’s going on.
SS: If there were a more thriving creative community in America, would film be the medium you would want to reach it through?
RA: Any kind of theater. Film is videotape now. There’s no need to use film anymore. You can use film to shoot your original material, and that film can be destroyed right after that, because it’s transferred to digital. At the end, when the digital is all dealt with, it’s put back to film. But that’s not the original film. The whole point of having to use film is because of the equipment that exists, and the egos of most of the artists, the cinematographers. If you took the top 10 cinematographers and I called them up, they’d say, “I’d love to work with you.” Then I’d say I wanted to shoot in high-def and they’d all say, “Oh, I don’t do that.” Well, why don’t they do that? It’s because they’ve made a big reputation by their manipulation of film. But film is just a medium. The picture that you see and the picture I see—how it gets from my mind to you, it’s of no consequence. It shouldn’t even be in the terms of discussion. I couldn’t have shot the Keillor picture, or The Company—the last two films I’ve made—on anything other than high-def. We shot Tanner on Tanner on regular video. We didn’t even get into high-def. The quality of the high-def can’t be beat. We were in this theater in St. Paul the whole time, and if you walked in there, you would not know that there was a motion picture going on, because you wouldn’t see any lights. You’d see a lot of cameras and cranes, but you wouldn’t see any lights.
SS: You’ve been burned more than anyone else by the effects of film deterioration—McCabe & Mrs. Miller being the obvious example. At the time you were making that film, it would’ve no doubt horrified you to think that, just a short time later, the original camera negative would be in such jeopardy.
RA: I was just on the edge of it. All of my films had been saved. There was a point when most of my films were not saved and couldn’t be, primarily because nobody knew who owned the negatives. It was only recently—because of Martin Scorsese and his film preservation efforts, along with a few things connected with some universities—where we went back and saved the films. They then go right onto video. But otherwise, if it hadn’t been for those efforts, you couldn’t see more than 10 of my films.
SS: As a format, DVD seems to be a particular lifesaver for you. Last year was a great year, in terms of previously unavailable films resurfacing. We saw Tanner ’88, Secret Honor, California Split and 3 Women.
RA: Oh, I know. And a lot of them weren’t out because of music clearances, or certain copyright problems. We had to make adjustments. The cost of the music track on California Split was so high that Columbia just couldn’t put it into video or DVD. That kept it out of circulation for years. Finally, Elliott Gould went in to find out why they weren’t releasing it. When they told him it was because of the music, he said, “Isn’t there something we can do about that?” So I made some cuts and took a couple of songs out. We got it into what they considered a reasonable budget. The picture wasn’t hurt by it. And that’s out now. It doesn’t make any difference, the quality of these things. It’s as good as anyone sees them. Most people see every film on a tiny screen. For me to go sit in a nice projection room and look at a screen where I get to move my head to see the full picture, that almost doesn’t exist anymore.
SS: Or it exists on a level where you almost don’t want to participate?
RA: Well, you just don’t have the opportunity that often. On Prairie Home Companion, we ran tests right off the bat. We took the tests down to a big art center in Minneapolis and ran the footage on an enormous screen. It’s breathtaking. But it’s hardly a big issue, because few people will see it under those circumstances. It’s a shame—although television is getting bigger and better, and screens are now a decent size. But you can’t just do a beautiful shot for the sake of making a beautiful shot. It no longer can really overwhelm.
SS: You certainly seized that opportunity when you had the chance. For example, on a film like The Long Goodbye, with its post-flashing of the negative, which led to stellar results.
RA: The flashing was a different kind of conceit. We were trying to not make Los Angeles look so pretty. We used a fog filter to destroy the image. Now the thing is to make everything as sharp as possible. But times change, tastes change. Eventually, people will see enough of that and want to start distressing the image. Already, the big problem is that it’s too sharp on too many plains. But I don’t think I would go back to film. Especially in the two years it took between The Company and this film, the technology has jumped 200 percent. Cameras don’t have to be the same size they used to be. They can just take a different card and put it in existing equipment and that upgrades it. When they get the equipment packaged down to the size of a Kodak box, the possibilities will really open.