A Defender of Self-Faith

Robert Altman has the soul of a fighter. In one way or another, this elder statesman of America’s maverick directors has been fighting battles since flying 46 missions over Borneo and the Dutch East Indies in World War II. But he’s a subdued warrior, the kind who relies entirely on his wits and faith in his own abilities. When he defends his craft he reminds you of those peaceable sheriffs James Stewart used to play, the ones who never had to pull out their guns, because everyone knew they were the best and the fastest shot in town.

One month before he turns 73, Altman is in Manhattan in mid-January fighting a viral infection. It’s a stubborn bug that’s been hanging on for four weeks and has left him winded. His voice is a stalled carburetor, turning over several times till it connects with a clear sound. He coughs hoarsely and frequently but won’t let it defeat him. He’s got a movie to sell, and he seems to be as proud of the skirmishes he has won getting the picture finished as he is of the film itself.

Altman’s fatigued smile betrays a change in demeanor from the bristling filmmaker who in September threatened to take his name off the movie “The Gingerbread Man,” when the parent studio, PolyGram, took it away to be re-cut by its own editor. Test screenings of the film, an entertainingly florid film-noir cum Southern-gothic thriller based on a John Grisham story, were said to have found it wanting for tension. Altman balked, a sympathetic CEO from Island Pictures, the PolyGram subsidiary releasing the movie, resigned in support, and after the re-cut was made and rejected, the film was returned to its director.

“It was foolish,” says Altman, whose laconic manner, snowy beard and Big Daddy frame suggest Wilford Brimley doing “The Burl Ives Story.” “When we were doing those testings I kept saying, ‘You guys are seeing this without the music, etc., etc., and you should just wait.’ They didn’t. But they soon realized, they gave it back to me, and I didn’t show it to them until it was finished. I admire PolyGram for backing off.”

The end result is an apt reflection of the imbroglio that preceded its limited release in January. “The Gingerbread Man” is a tempestuous ride, wherein a Savannah shark lawyer (played by Kenneth Branagh) finds himself caught between an angry ex-wife and a mysterious gal from the other side of the tracks who is abused by her mentally disturbed, vagrant pop (played by Robert Duvall). Add a child-custody feud, a hostile police force and a hurricane called Geraldo that, like its television namesake, goes in for the grand effect.

Indeed, there is more precipitation in “The Gingerbread Man” than in any Altman film since 1971’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” which climaxed with a blizzard worthy of “Nanook of the North.” Are we to infer any apocalyptic symbols from the director, who also punctuated “Short Cuts” (1993) with an earthquake?

“I think you always have to think about the elements in the way they affect people’s behavior,” he explained. “Putting an additional physical pressure on people and events just heightens their situation. In ‘McCabe,’ I wanted to take out the normal western devices of the chase, the gunfight, at the end of it. So I set out to do a big windstorm, so the characters couldn’t hear each other because of the wind. Right before we started to shoot it, this enormous snowfall came and just covered the place for about eight days. You could walk from here to the door, and by the time you got there the tracks behind you were gone.

“That [“Gingerbread Man”] hurricane was really difficult and uncomfortable, but I really wanted it. I wanted to put this whole film in the context of that storm, like a cocoon. I didn’t want the characters to have time to think. I told the weather department down there what I wanted, and they created the whole thing. They mapped out a real scenario for that hurricane--the way that it works its way past Savannah then doubles back is completely accurate.”

If there is any metaphoric significance to Hurricane Geraldo, it is the extent to which it underscores the turbulent gulf between Branagh’s character and his women. In “The Gingerbread Man,” as in most Altman films, relationships between men and women are rarely sanguine.

“It’s the way it looks to me, generally. And I wanted to put him in a position of vulnerability. He’s the kind of lawyer I don’t like. He’s a killer in the courtroom, but the minute he gets outside his own element, he’s dog meat. His ex-wife is one of the millions of women alcoholics who get through their lives but are still, basically, alcoholics. And usually their relationships fall apart. They should be doing something to help those kinds of people deal with the alcohol-tobacco problem and pay less attention to--at least decriminalize--the people who are sick like Robert Downey Jr.,” who plays an alcoholic investigator in the film and was recently jailed for breaking parole on drug abuse charges.

“I mean, he has no more business being in jail than you or I. Why don’t they take anybody who is an alcoholic and put them in jail and lock them up? It’s really sad.”

While “The Gingerbread Man’s” slick thriller facade would seem to set it apart from the deliberately messy approach of such emblematic Altman films as “Nashville” (1975), “A Wedding” (1978) and “Ready to Wear” (1994), the director brought his usual improvisational approach to the script. “It was quite a feat for Mr. Branagh when you consider that he’s improvising in a language that’s not his own,” Altman says of his Irish star’s convincing Deep South twang. “He’s my hero.”

Branagh, along with his co-star Embeth Davidtz, is obliged to strip for the camera in the sort of casual nudity that has at times (as in the case of Julianne Moore in “Short Cuts”) angered viewers.

“The point of it is not to show something, but not to let the audience know that you are not showing something on purpose,” Altman explains in one of the more convoluted defenses of screen nudity. “The whole point of any nudity is certainly not to titillate, but to show the way these people would behave if the camera weren’t watching them.”

Altman accepted the project as an opportunity to work in a genre he had not yet explored. “Most of my films have been musicals,” he says, “but nobody knows that.” While he is famous for peripatetic scenarios that crisscross among the lives of several prominent characters, the Kansas City-born filmmaker prides himself on not repeating himself. “I can’t tell you how much money was shoved in front of me and other rewards and seductions to make another ‘MASH,’ another ‘Nashville.’ I said, ‘I did it.’ ”

Altman has been swimming against the tide of popular demand and striving for an often discomforting realism in his work since his earliest days writing and directing TV scripts for such shows in the late 1950s and early 1960s as “The Detectives,” “The Roaring ‘20s,” “Bonanza” and, his personal favorite, “Combat.”

“I tried to give them some other elements to separate them from all the other shows. Most of what I drew on for ‘Combat’ was a documentary on the battle of San Pietro that John Huston directed during the war, where you actually saw American and Italian soldiers just dropping dead, and suddenly you know what it looks like when they die. We tried to make it real.”

In the ‘80s Altman surprised many by turning to the artifice of theater for several TV films of Pinter plays and such stage-bred movies as “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” “Secret Honor,” “Streamers” and “Fool for Love.” His much-ballyhooed efforts to make a film of Tony Kushner’s epic two-play cycle “Angels in America” fizzled as a result of a problem that has haunted the director throughout his career: financing.

“I wanted to do Tony’s play the way he wanted to do it, and it was just too expensive. No one was willing to put up the money, because it was a limited audience. In spite of all the lip service, it isn’t going to play in Tucson or Columbus, Ohio. I don’t care. I’d make it in a second. I didn’t want to make it wrong, otherwise why do it? I told Tony, ‘You’re better never to have this play filmed. It’s won all the prizes. It’s left a terrific taste in people’s mouths. Why go out and demean it by making a lousy movie?’ I’m sure it will get done. Someday.”

The vapid preoccupations of the movie industry, which Altman satirized in his 1992 critical and commercial hit “The Player,” are a subject that gets his juices flowing. “I can’t get a picture done,” he says, commenting on the frustration of being an internationally acclaimed director who still has his movies taken away from him by studios.

“Nobody runs these studios or distribution companies with any sense of gut reaction. They’ve all got a formula, and they’ll send it out, and it’ll come back and say, well, the most we can expect of the return on this is so and so. And there is much proof that by following that line they fail. Warner Bros. has suddenly found themselves in this situation: They’ve got [John] Travolta, they’ve got Dustin Hoffman, and the picture [“Mad City”] fails. What did they do wrong? They don’t have a clue.”

Altman believes it’s harder now for a young director with independent vision to get a break than it was when he ditched the riches of television to mine new territory in movies. When the recent outgrowth of studio divisions for smaller films is mentioned, he smiles wearily and shakes his head. “Miramax is Disney. New Line and First Line are worse, they’re all Turner. There are people out there who try. But they have to do it on no money. And if you have no money, you don’t get distribution. Julie Christie won the Academy Award [for “Darling” in 1965], but you can’t get our picture, ‘Afterglow,’ [which Altman produced] into the malls. It’s like running shoes: Everybody wants the running shoe that everybody else has. They’re not for running anywhere.

“The imagination and creativity in selling these films falls way behind that of the people who make the films, and I’m talking about even the bad ones. I’ve never seen a film distributed that doesn’t follow the pattern of some other film that succeeded.”

In the present-day climate in which a movie’s entire economic path can be calculated from its preview results and first-weekend grosses, it is hard to fathom how Altman’s earliest trademark films would get green-lighted today. He will quickly remind you that “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is often considered to be among the top 25 films of all time and that it was also “an enormous failure; it made less money then ‘Beyond Therapy,’ ” his blink-and-you-missed-it adaptation of the Christopher Durang play.

When asked if he would make “Nashville” any differently today, considering the deepening nexus between politics and show business that it presaged 23 years ago, he replies, “I don’t think I would be as gutsy today. By that I don’t mean the subject matter but just the arrogance with which I attacked that, having the cast write all the songs, etc. There was no real model for that.

“Show them something they haven’t seen before, and they don’t know how to deal with it. Look at the history of Oscar Wilde. If you get something that is not down the main chute, at first it’s not accepted. So the first people to do it don’t profit from it. [Ironically], some of the criticism on ‘The Gingerbread Man’ has been that they didn’t expect such a main-line thing from me. And this is from people who don’t like what I do.”