The Altman of the ‘90s : The director’s newest film, ‘Vincent and Theo,’ may return him to his stature of the late ‘70s

Like his movies, director Robert Altman often seems to operate on multiple tracks. He can be expansive and guarded, intellectual and jokey, warm and acrid, free-wheeling and wary, all at the same time. Right now, high in the hills above Malibu beach, in his combination house-editing room-preproduction office, he is all of those things.

“I used to love living on the ocean,” Altman, now 65, says, looking down at the Pacific. “I love sleeping with the sound of the waves, so I’ve always thought, ‘Why do people come all the way to the beach and then live up in the hills?’ Now, we’ve been here six months and I’m addicted to it. It’s quiet; deer come up at 6 o’clock. Quail. A hawk. Ants get into the house--and lizards, snails, turtles. It’s nice up here.”

Altman’s amiability lasts all afternoon, through a long interview. It’s a crystal-clear, windless day. Below, the ocean looks just as Ross Macdonald once described it: “like a piece of fallen sky.” A dinner of steaming soup and Cornish hens is on the table; friends and co-workers are gathered around, including his son and art director, Stephen, and long-time producer Scott Bushnell. But beneath his calm is an edge of exasperation: surprising, given what appears to be a moment of genuine triumph.

On the eve of its U.S. opening, his latest movie, “Vincent and Theo,” has prompted exuberant praise from critics here and abroad. In many ways, it looks like the movie that may return him, decisively, to critical and public favor 10 years after he abandoned mainstream studio movies for the less contentious arenas of television, filmed plays and live theater.

“Vincent and Theo” is a beautifully shot and acted biographical drama about the relationship between the Van Gogh brothers, the artist Vincent and his loyal patron Theo. Elegantly written by Julian Mitchell (“Another Country”), it’s atypical Altman: a period film with a small speaking cast of British and continental actors. But it’s already being hailed as one of his masterpieces.

“At first, I refused to do it,” Altman says. “It was too ‘Masterpiece Theatre.’ But finally Scottie said, ‘Well, if you don’t like that kind of film, why not make the kind you do like?”

He has. Critics are often partial to Altman’s social iconoclasm and innovative style, but “Vincent and Theo” offers something extra: cultural appeal and one of those performances--Tim Roth’s startlingly obsessive, punkish Van Gogh--which can become legendary.

Altman says he is happy with “Vincent,” but he’s already entangled emotionally in his next project--a script called “L.A. Short Cuts.” Writing it, casting it, preparing it and, most importantly, hunting the finances, has consumed much of his last six months here.

“Short Cuts” is an adaptation of nine short stories by the late minimalist poet and writer Raymond Carver. Though originally set in the Pacific Northwest, Altman and screenwriter Frank Barhydt have woven these spare, haunting tales into a multiplotted, multileveled “Nashville”-style collage, an Altmanesque portrait of modern Los Angeles anomie and isolation. In the script--which keeps veering, in mood and intention, between humor, romance, and horror--an odd collection of cops, cello players, pool cleaners, make-up artists, chauffeurs, jazz singers, doctors, phone-sex specialists, TV commentators, fishermen, waitresses, judges and incontinent dogs keep crisscrossing each other’s paths, mostly in Glendale and Inglewood, each unaware of the dramas unwinding on parallel tracks. “Any one of Carver’s stories could make a full film,” Altman says. “But, by being able to bounce around, let you peek under this rock and that rock, you form an impression--spherical rather than linear.”

Twenty-seven actors, many of them “bankable” stars, have agreed to appear in the movie for fractions of their usual salaries. Altman says he has potential backing for most of the $12-million budget, if one of the major studios will agree to distribute it. None of them has.

“I’m on dead center,” Altman says, “I can’t do any work on any other project--because I’m really sitting on the edge at this moment. I’m frustrated; I’ve never been so frustrated. It’s ready to go. It’s cast. There’s no earthly reason we shouldn’t be shooting today.

“Because of the assurances we’ve gotten, the risk actually comes down from $12 million to maybe $4 million. Well, maybe that’s too much, but they take it on other judgments. And those judgments are basically on bad pictures: pictures they themselves don’t like.”

Altman, of course, in his heyday, developed a reputation for living it up during his productions. Stories about the making of “Popeye” on the island of Malta are legendary, and, in the late ‘70s, Los Angeles magazine once defined the word “looped” as “what Robert Altman does in his trailer.” Does that reputation hold him back?

“No, it doesn’t,” he says, gloomily. “And that’s apocryphal, anyway. We finish shooting, we look at dailies, we have a party. My reputation, as far as being on schedule and on budget, is as good as anybody’s that’s ever been. I’ve never skyrocketed (over budget). No, I think it’s just that they want to pre-market the movie. All the majors have passed. They’ve all flirted with it, but ultimately they said: “Oh, maybe it’s going to be depressing. ‘ “

Should he write a happy ending where everyone meets on the Sunset Strip and dances around, smiling, in a big circle?

“You know: I think that’s what they want,” he mutters. “One studio person told me there didn’t seem to be enough hope in the film. I said: ‘Listen: hardly any of the women in “L. A. Short Cuts” know each other. I’ll just name all the female characters “Hope.” ’ They thought I was being a smart aleck.”

“Actually,” he muses, “we saw the kind of thing they are looking for: one of those top-secret, classified documents from the big agencies. Something they’re wildly enthusiastic about: a director’s committed, two big stars are interested and they’re looking for a writer. This is it, the whole project: ‘Virile man, who has tractor, faces invasion of tanks in a small town.”

Who’s invading?

“The tanks ,” Altman says. “They didn’t say who was in them...”

Back in the 1970s, Robert Altman had less trouble floating ideas through the studios, and onto movie screens around the world. After a decade in network TV (“Bonanza,” “Combat,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”) and a decade before that in Kansas City industrial shorts and B-movies (“The Delinquents”), Altman made the 1970 Korean War comedy, “MASH,” a Cannes Festival Grand Prize winner and international box-office smash that 20 other directors had turned down--and instantly became the pet of critics and hip audiences. One after the other, they came tumbling out: “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Long Goodbye,” “California Split,” “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville,” “Three Women,” “A Wedding.” It was a run of studio movies that, for its range of subjects, richness of characters, invention and audacity of texture and technique, was unrivaled.

His trademark style delighted aficionadoes: the daring experiments in multi-tracked dialogue, the revolutionary work with ensemble casts, the seemingly free-floating camera style. But some audiences were bewildered; some executives hostile. Altman’s maverick stance, left-of-center politics, and occasionally whimsical sensibility made him seem, to some hardball Hollywood players, like a man bluffing his way through a high-stakes poker game, with nothing but art in his hand.

The quasi-apocryphal legend of the gonzo director, working in mass, cheerful anarchy, began to coalesce. So did the off-camera legend of an acidulous temperament that gradually shucked off old co-workers and friends, leaving only Scottie Bushnell as keeper of the flame. Patrick McGilligan chronicles the latter viewpoint in his half-admiring, half-iconoclastic biography, “Jumping Off the Cliff” (due out soon in paperback), a book that Altman dislikes.

“There doesn’t seem to be any point to that book,” he says, “except to show that I’m a jerk. Well, maybe I am a jerk, but I don’t want my grandchildren reading about it.”

After “Popeye,” which Altman still refuses to acknowledge was the failure critics labeled it, he changed his style. The master of the ensemble movie, he was often reduced to casts of five, or two, or even--in the case of his extraordinary Richard Nixon monologue film, “Secret Honor”--just one. The blithe deconstructionist of screenplays, he stuck almost religiously to texts by David Rabe and Harold Pinter. The mixed celebrator/debunker of male camaraderie, he began to focus more on women and gay themes. He went from wide-screen to regular aspect ratio, foggy colors to sharp contours. The Altman of the ‘80s was often a very different director from the Altman of the ‘70s: arguably less inventive, but far more exacting; less of a virtuoso, more of a polished craftsman.

Yet, far from collapsing, he managed to renew and extend himself. “Vincent and Theo” shows how much he’s survived and grown. And, in his presidential campaign mock-documentary, “Tanner ‘88,” the old ensemble-movie flair zoomed in once again: the hip, caustic dialogue, the dead pan comedy and ultra-real performances, the unpredictably voyeuristic camera-work. Along with “Secret Honor” and “Vincent and Theo,” “Tanner” is one of Altman’s three great works of the last 10 years--and as good as any of his best films of the ‘70s.

Because of all this, it’s hard not to see Altman’s own frustration infiltrating “Vincent and Theo’s” drama of the clashing worlds of art and business. He repeatedly refers to his movies as “paintings,” and “Vincent” is notable for the incredible violence that the painters wreak on their own works. This is art, Altman seems to say: messy, fertile, naked, alive, explosive and even a bit self-destructive. You cannot tame, harness or predict it. You shouldn’t even try.

So, how does he feel about any psychic identification with Van Gogh?

“I can’t, for a second, compare myself to Van Gogh,” he says. “Or my situation to his. If everything from this day through the rest of my life was just straight downhill, I would still have to look back and say: ‘Listen, I had it pretty good. I had a lot of recognition, success, gratification.’

“And Vincent: This poor guy never had anything. Nobody even said: ‘That’s good.’ He wasn’t even encouraged. You’ve got to have somebody that looks back at you and says, ‘That’s wonderful!’ I mean, just one person. . . . He painted about 4,000 paintings and drawings altogether in nine years--but the last two years, he must have done about half of them: three, four paintings a day. And he was writing those great letters--and drinking a lot. He was a mess. But that energy: that energy!

‘Tim Roth gave Vincent an aggressive, obnoxious side. . . . He got it to such a point that I would come on the set (and) we would be shooting a scene with him and Theo (Paul Rhys) and Tim would say, ‘I don’t want to say anything.’ So we’d cut all his lines, and Paul would say, ‘Well, I’ll smoke.’ And so I’d say: ‘He’s gonna smoke; Tim’s not gonna talk. What the (expletive) are we going to put in this picture?’ So I’d suggest other things, they would improvise and I would shoot it.”

Altman says he went for an attitude in “Vincent and Theo” that would demonstrate how those people actually related to painting--as an everyday, frustrating, highly physical activity. “We wanted to rain on it, kick it, tear it up, even have them throw it at each other.” he says. “These things weren’t considered great works of art, though I know in their mind, the audience thinks: ‘Oh, geez, he tore that up! It’s probably worth $100,000!’

“I know a lot of artists. Nobody sits around and talks about the ‘great art’ of their painting. They work. They talk about mechanical things. They talk about sex and gambling and having fun. And paying the rent. They don’t get into those things about the color and the soul and all that. They don’t talk that way to each other. That’s what I was trying to get across: that he and his brother didn’t sit and talk about the quality of his paintings. They talked about selling (them).”

In one hair-raising scene, Van Gogh has a temperamental explosion while painting in a field of sunflowers and violently destroys his work. Altman calls that scene “the key aria” of the film--but it wasn’t in the script and didn’t occur to Altman until he saw the sunflower field on his way to work.

“I drove 20 minutes every day to our headquarters and I’d pass these enormous fields of sunflowers,” he says. “I’d look at them; they’d turn their little heads. I kept thinking: ‘God, these look like people! They look like an audience. Why aren’t we shooting this?’ ”

Still, he didn’t decide to use the sunflower fields until, arriving at the set one day, he discovered a delay. On impulse, he sent someone to get permission to shoot in the fields, then got his crew and actor ready. He planned only to show Van Gogh at work in the field, but because it was windy and difficult to paint, Altman improvised, on the spot, the idea of a temper tantrum.

“I said to Tim, ‘Why don’t you tear it up? Cut about 12 of those sunflowers up and stick them under your arm for practice.’ And we made it. It’s as good a scene as there is in the picture.”

Altman speaks of Tim Roth with near reverence for his talent.

“There’s nobody I admire more than actors. I don’t understand them. I don’t have the slightest idea how they can do it. . . . So, when I see an actor performing, like Tim or Warren (Beatty)--and I’ve been involved in some great performances--I’m just in awe of that. I think that that’s probably why I have some value in the job that I do, because what I’m doing is seeing something new, and then I’m implementing it to pass it on to someone else. In other words, if I’m not excited about it, I don’t show it to you.”

For all his disclaimers, Altman at least shares with Van Gogh an artist’s temperament.

“When I see a bad film, I think, ‘I would shoot myself; I couldn’t even walk out of the front door of the editing room. I couldn’t let that escape. ‘ And I’ve had scenes that don’t work, scenes that are just terrible. But I don’t ever let anybody see them. Again, the material’s filtering through me.”

Altman smiles, with a hint of self-mockery, and adds: “It’s always my painting.”