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Hello Culture

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Matthew Collings: From the movies, we get mannerisms and ways of behaving and gesturing and, if we have certain archetypal jobs, even ways of carrying ourselves and wearing uniforms. But because the movie form is of narratives and stories and themes, you could also say that we get our life themes from them. In the past, we might have got them from myths or from the Bible or from tales. But now that we get them from the movies, there's often concern that maybe the movies aren't good enough or they're not worthy of that role or that they should be telling us something a bit more important than they do. But to say that is to ignore the fact that the movies have an incredible range, that it's not a shallow culture, although one can see shallowness in it. It's not necessarily any shallower or deeper than any other culture.

Robert Altman: No, it's an unnecessary culture. I think we all get our behaviour from the stories. There's always been story tellers. And from the time of the printing press, of course, people's imaginations were stimulated and fed by literature.

MC: So they've still got to get their stories from outside of the movies.

RA: The stories are part of it. I mean, you sit and read Jane Eyre and you would imagine, and if there's an illustration in that book, that would set a fashion. So your own imagination worked and it was an individual imagination. And now we've become more specific. The only artists I know who are making film, they try to hide the obvious. In other words, it's not like 'Let's show the talking heads and have them say the words' and it becomes a radio programme, which most films are.

MC: Yeah.

RA: That's why everybody reads scripts, the people who pay for it, and they say, 'Well, let’s read this script.' Oh, yes, I like that line. What 20 years from now will be called a great film, I don't think we've even approached that.

MC: So you're talking about the whole medium communicating and articulating, doing something.

RA: And it's articulating on a point where the receiver is the one that is making the selections, rather than having them offered. I've had to look at two or three films, television pieces, in doing the casting of this piece. When we looked at these films, I found that I was not watching them, I was listening to them. And I realised that I could follow them as if they were radio programmes.

MC: So when you say that the movies are a slightly unnecessary medium, you mean it's because the film hasn't yet quite found itself as an autonomous medium?

RA: No.

MC: But it relies on lots of other things? And almost is those other things?

RA: Yeah, it's a combination of what you hear, what you see. A film is an arbitrary thing that fits, I guess, the amount of time most people can comfortably sit without going to the loo. Or how long can you sit there and be engrossed in anything. And it's a strange phenomena. Somebody should really do the numbers of how many people actually see films, what percentage of people. And with television, I don't think anybody sits down and literally watches. Very few people will not get up and walk out of a room and come back. Only occasionally, if you're really engrossed, you'll say, 'What happened?' You know, 'Did he kill her? What happened while I was gone?'

MC: You get used to a fragmented way of …

RA: Yeah, and the great thing about theatre and, consequently, film is the fact that you have to get people in a space and have them looking at a performance. You've got this massed audience and I think that changes everybody in the audience. It changes their receptors.

MC: Yeah.

RA: It's very hard to capture that audience. One member may come whose wife just died a week ago, and he says, 'I'm going to get my mind off of this.' Another person just won the lottery, another person just had a bad love affair and another one had a good love affair. And somebody brings somebody else along and says, 'Look at this, look at this. This is what I like. This is the kind of person I am.' So we have this weird assembly of people, and my job, or the film-maker's job, is to suddenly polarise all that attention and try to get them interested in and lost in this particular piece. Very hard to do.

MC: But there's a distinction between the movies as an art form and one that has something to do with the odd fetishised relationship to stars that causes this celebrity culture. That's all the movies are — movies are only about producing famous people and there's nothing more to it.

RA: Well, yeah, but I guess the greatest celebrity of the last 20, 30 years was Princess Diana.

MC: Certainly that was a weird phenomenon.

RA: Oh, yeah. It just became something everybody latched on to. If an actor becomes a star and the film he makes becomes too successful, he's finished as an actor. Because the perception of that person is now as it was received by this audience. He's got to be the same every time. Take Tom Cruise. If Tom Cruise goes out and — as he does occasionally — makes a really offbeat picture, it's never successful.

MC: Right, right.

RA: In those terms, he's become an icon. And he knows that.

MC: Yeah.

RA: These people — actors — know that. My friends who are actors, they say, 'You'd better hope this doesn't succeed …' Because if it does, your art has been eliminated because you're perceived by this audience and, of course, by the accountants who are selling all this.

MC: An oddity about Tom Cruise is that he's famous for being in a lot of pictures that are very successful. He's not necessarily famous for a particular way of acting. You, as someone who thinks about films a lot, might describe what type of actor he is, but not many people would easily be able to do that. They could say what type of actor Robert De Niro is or Marlon Brando or Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino or a lot of other people. But with him, they're more fascinated by the fact of Tom Cruise as an icon, who doesn't necessarily stand for any type of ability.

RA: He's recognisable. And anything that becomes recognisable, people latch on to.

MC: He's maybe even less distinct than Tom Hanks in that sense, because at least with Tom Hanks, you know he's the smiley guy who's always good. But you don't really know with Tom Cruise, although he was pretty good at being a vampire, wasn't he?

RA: But Cruise is a good actor.

MC: He's a superb actor.

RA: Yeah, he's a very good actor and …

MC: But it isn't really his goodness as an actor that makes him famous.

RA: Oh, not at all.

MC: People are simply fascinated by the fact of Tom Cruise. And they would be more fascinated by him stepping into the lobby than Tom Hanks.

RA: Well, there's something about personal eye contact. If you see somebody on the street, you go home and you tell your family: 'Hey, I saw Maggie Smith on the street today.' Or 'I saw Jude Law,' or whoever it is.

MC: Yes.

RA: I just finished this film with Richard Gere. I've never had a bodyguard in my life, and we went to Venice with this film, and everywhere we went, he would have eight, ten bodyguards around him. I thought, 'This is kind of overdoing it, isn't it?' And then suddenly, when we got in those crowds, they closed in.

MC: It's quite menacing.

RA: Yeah, and they feel they have some proprietary rights over these people.

MC: What the hell is it they want? They don't know what to do after saying hello. They're excited at somebody, but what are they doing?

RA: Say I was one of these people and went up to a star and said, 'Hey, can I have your autograph?' And then I said, 'Listen, do you want to have dinner with me tonight?' But what are they going to do at dinner? They're going to sit there and be very, very uncomfortable.

MC: Yeah, because they don’t know what they want.

RA: All they really want is to go to their mates and say …

MC: They saw you.

RA: 'Hey, I saw Robert De Niro, and look, I got his autograph and he looked at me.'

MC: If you were critical of Hollywood as a moral system, if you can imagine it like that, what would your criticism be?

RA: Well, I don't criticise that any more than I would any other business that works en masse. Hollywood, I have no connection to it really. They sell shoes and I make gloves. So I'm kind of riding on the wave of the attraction of films in all this. I've never had a film that's been a mass audience film. And I think that's been very good for me. I've pursued that. In the 35, 34, 36 films I've made, and God knows how much television, I have never been without a film of my own choosing and that I had control of and I've never had a film edited on me.

MC: But what do you see that's negative in your case …

RA: Nothing.

MC: About a mass film?

RA: Nothing. I don't do 'em because I'm afraid I'd be late for work.

MC: You couldn't be efficient enough for …?

RA: Well, I think I'd lose interest.

MC: Why?

RA: Because there's nothing compelling about it. If somebody says, 'I want a car chase in this film,' I'd have to think, 'Well, OK, somebody go have the cars chase each other.' What am I going to do about that?

MC: So the more mass it gets, the more anonymous it gets, and less original or less engaging for you?

RA: Well, the less personal it gets. In other words, it's like a painter. A painter does something that nobody else has done. People have done similar things and do similar things, but nobody has done that … thumbprint. And that's what is compelling to an artist. You look at that blank wall, and if the mural you get me to paint is 70 feet long, that's a pretty big picture. So I'm going to sit there and say, 'Well, what am I going to do with it?' And if it's 12 feet long, it's a different thing. But whatever's going on to that wall, I'm doing it. It's coming out of my conscious mind but supported by my subconscious mind. Or unconscious mind.

When I first started making films, I thought, 'Wow! My films are so different!' I did M*A*S*H and then I did Brewster McCloud, then did a thing called Images and The Long Goodbye, and I thought, 'Boy, nobody would ever know that it was the same author.' But now I look at 'em and my fingerprints are all over these films, whether I know it or not. And they are all just chapters of the same book. They must be, because they're of me.

MC: So you see them as products of your creativity?

RA: I don't see them that way, but you see them that way.

MC: Yes, quite. Yeah.

RA: I can't tell you the number of times I've finished a film and thought, 'Oh, my God, I wish I could put someone else's name on this film. At least I'd have a chance with the critics.' But you can't do that. It's just like building a sandcastle. You know, you finish it and the tide comes in and it's gone. And that's the best — the things that stay in the memory.

I'll meet people today and they'll say, 'Oh I liked your new film. I really liked it, but Nashville, that was the one.' I'll say, 'When did you see Nashville?' 'Oh I, I, I … I saw … I loved Nashville. That was … that was brilliant!' And I'll say, 'You know, that was 25 years ago. You must have been …' 'Well, I was 16 when I first saw it and … and ...'

Well, that was something that stayed in their mind. But it has no relevance to what they see today. And so I don’t think we should pay so much attention to all this. I don't think it makes any difference whether Martin Scorsese or Cocteau or Bergman or the worst hack there is — I don't think it makes any difference if they ever existed or not. I think it has no relevance whatsoever.

MC: Something that occurred to me then was a scene in The Great Gatsby, I think, where there's a party and he describes an actress arriving and he says it's like a big orchid. One gets the impression from the build-up of his description that this actress is some kind of goddess and everyone is contributing to the idea that she is a goddess and, of course, she has her own special goddess idea about herself. And you get the impression of someone who's almost psychotic in their detachment from reality. And that was a pretty long time ago. So do we think that the model of the self-absorbed star — Hollywood actor or actress — hasn't really changed over the years, that when you've got that amount of fame, that amount of adulation, that's one's success?

RA: I think, when you reach that point, you're finished. All you can do is become the icon of yourself. You just want to go somewhere else because you're not going to change that icon.

And let’s look at the problem that women have as opposed to men in this profession. By the time a woman's 32, she doesn't get any very good parts. I mean, she's washed up. And we still have Sean Connery at 70 playing the leading man. And Paul Newman was embarrassed about that 25 years ago. He'd come to me and say, 'I can't go out there and play a love scene. For christsake, I'm 52 years old!' It embarrassed him. He said, 'This doesn't make sense.' And yet today we're flooded with exactly that kind of information. De Niro, anybody who's a star, you know, these guys are all old. I mean, I can hardly get insurance to make a film, and what is an actor?

MC: So the problems that actors have of getting stuck in roles, of women not getting the good roles after a certain age, they haven't really changed?

RA: Not a lot.

MC: The Hollywood system, in that sense, doesn't move on?

RA: No, it's always been that way. The quality of the audience will determine the quality of the art.

MC: What do you mean by the 'quality of the audience'? One would think, from almost every point of view except a purely market point of view, that the audience couldn't possibly be of less quality than they are now because standards seem so low.

RA: That's what I mean.

MC: Everything's meaningless, you know.

RA: But for what we call art films or the films that we give awards to, the best thing about the film industry from the beginning has been the festivals. Because films from nowhere and films that otherwise would never be seen are seen, and they're seen by people who are at least knowledgeable and interested in them.

MC: Yeah.

RA: So they can say, 'Oh, here we are at Deauville or Cannes or whatever, and look at what we've discovered. We've got this wonderful film and there are no movie stars in it!' But that at least keeps the artists going. Otherwise the artists would disappear. I mean, why are they doing this?

MC: What has led to this point where there is this mass fetishisation on the figure of the star?

RA: What has caused it, do you mean?

MC: Yeah. Does it have to do with more freedom, more democracy, more money, more success, less success?

RA: No, I just think it's that thing of people trying find that kind of idol to latch on to. I remember a woman many, many years ago, who I was married to actually, and I thought, 'Boy, she's really smart.' I was making films then and it was very intense and I was an artist and I damn well was serious about good films and bad films. And then, after we got married, she said to me, 'Oh, I saw Burt Lancaster in …' — whatever the film was, some pirate film, I think — '… I saw that about 18 times.' And I said, 'Why?' And she said, 'Well, I was just crazy about Burt Lancaster.' Things were never the same with that woman and myself after that! I thought, 'Wow, this isn't the road that I thought I was on.'

MC: But it's true that it does affect us all …

RA: Oh, sure it does.

MC: It's the stupids who want the stars.

RA: No, no, no.

MC: But it affects us in a way that is so deeply unconscious that we don't really know what it is.

RA: No.

MC: You've just said it's because we want a star, and that’s true we do, but we don't know why exactly. We know why we might want a father figure or a mother figure or more money or, you know, things that we desire psychologically, but we don’t really know why we want to see someone in the street who we've seen at the movies.

RA: Well, we've also made the same kind of heroes out of people who amass a lot of money. I mean, we talk about Bill Gates and say, 'Wow, I saw Bill Gates. He's a star!' Just by virtue of the amount of money that these people have. I don't have answers for all this, but remember that, before a film comes out, they're advertising how much money it costs, how much we had to pay.

MC: Yeah, that's an important thing, isn't it?

RA: 'We paid Tom Cruise $40 million to play in this thing.' 'Julia Roberts gets $20 million a film now. Blah, blah, blah.' 'The film cost this.' They lie about it, they exaggerate how much it cost. Why?

MC: Instead of being proud of doing it for less.

RA: Yeah, they say, 'This cost $40 million or $240 million dollars. It has to be good, you know.' And people respond to that.

MC: Can we just return to The Player for a second?

RA: Sure.

MC: You've backed off a bit from saying that it was really a cruel film, or a really truly going-for-the-jugular type of film. Nevertheless, there is some mockery there or some sort of playfulness?

RA: Well, there is.

MC: What was the target then?

RA: Well, the target was the audience and myself and yourself. I mean, it was easy to get attention, as if we were doing something very naughty. Or something very inside. And there's nothing inside about The Player — it's a real fiction. It's much, much worse and more complicated and more evil than we showed in that film. The one thing that surprised was when I would show all those recognisable film actors t in those bit parts.

MC: Yeah.

RA: I know that Malcolm McDowell was one of the very first ones …

MC: Yeah, which is a very touchy one because …

RA: Yeah, but he's …

MC: He's on edge about not being acknowledged enough and …

RA: Yeah, yeah.

MC: But at the time he wasn't being ...

RA: Yes. Malcolm said, 'What am I supposed to do, just walk through there?' I said, 'No. Tell this guy you hate him or whatever.' Or, with Burt Reynolds, when he left, I said, 'Burt Reynolds is an asshole.'

MC: That's right.

RA: I said, 'Let's just turn this on each one of these things.' So then the audience thought, 'Oh, wow, we're seeing something really cruel.'

MC: Wicked.

RA: Yeah. The Player was fun to do, but I don't think it's a particularly serious, particularly compelling piece of work.

MC: People remember it for two things. One is what you just talked about, and the other was an amazing opening shot that went on and on and on. Was that part of what we want from films?

RA: Yeah, that was a conceit again. That was just a mirror. I put a mirror in front of me and in back of me, and I'm looking at myself in a mirror in a mirror. I was showing off.

MC: Yeah.

RA: And at the same time, I had the Fred Ward character walking through saying, 'Oh, they don't know how to make movies now. That Orson Welles, my God, that opening shot …'

MC: That must be …

RA: Three-and-a-half minutes long. And he's in a shot that is nine minutes long.

MC: It's a funny gag and very successful.

RA: So that was really to get the audience's attention and say, 'OK, I'm going to do this and it's real special.' Well, there's nothing special about it.

As a matter of fact, we figured it out afterwards. To make that shot took me one day of rehearsing and setting up. None of those lines were scripted specifically. Yet each time we did them, the actors tended to improvise in the same manner. Then we shot it in half a day. Had I taken that script and all those things that were said and shot them in a conventional manner, doing the master shot and looking in the window and then doing a close up of Tim and a close up of whoever it was, it would have taken me longer and cost more.

MC: Right.

RA: But I never would have. The danger and the reason you shoot these films in these segments is so you can edit them.

MC: So you've got the material.

RA: Yeah. After we got the first take done and we had rehearsed it a bit, I had as the anchor man Alan Rudolph, who's not an actor, he's a director. And I thought, 'My God, I should have put somebody with experience in there!'

MC: So we think it's a scathing look at Hollywood, but that's not the point. The point is to look at yourself, for us to look at ourselves?

RA: Yes.

MC: You as the director who's producing it, us as the audience and the actors who are playing in that little star system?

RA: Yeah. We were able to say a lot of things. The Peter Gallagher character says, 'What is this? We're not paying these writers all this money, are we? We don't need writers. We've got the newspaper. There's a story … We shouldn't be paying this money for writers.' And at the end of that, Tim says, 'You've got something there. All we have to do now is figure out how to get rid of the actors and we'll really have something.'

MC: Very good.

RA: And that's all that was about. Just turning the ground over a little bit.

MC: And satirically following up a few thoughts ...

RA: I don't know if it was satire or parody.

MC: Do you think that culture is spiritually bankrupt?

RA: Well, you've got to define culture a little more. I think, yes, we're being mass dumbed down. I think that the real example of that is not what kind of film gets all the accolades this year as opposed to 10 or 20 years ago, but look who the president of the United States is. I mean, it's like we've picked the kind of people that they pick up who have no acting experience and make movie stars out of.

This George Bush guy is intellectually bankrupt, and what he's saying is: 'We want those old values back.' By 'those old values', he means values that are controlled by other people — in other words, the church, the institutions that say, 'This is the way you should believe.' And he's become almost a preacher character. I mean, he's like Elmer Gantry. He has no qualifications or background for that. All he's ever been in his life was a guy trying to make some money in a very corrupt way. I think that shows the corruption that's taking place in the world more than anything. And this is a reflection of what's happened in films. I mean he's trying to act like Gary Cooper and it's such a joke.

I happened to be in London the whole time the election was going on. I was up all night until it was over. And so I saw it from a different standpoint.

MC: Yeah.

RA: And the people in America could not see it clearly because they're controlled by all their information coming through CNN, which is very right wing. I'm embarrassed by the fact that this guy is the president.

MC: But doesn't that issue relate to the movies?

RA: Of course, it does.

MC: Shouldn't we be getting a set of values from the movies that is more meaningful and more important so that we can see through a transparent figure who's in power in politics?

RA: Yeah, but we can't do it because we keep lowering the common denominator. It just keeps going lower and lower and lower. I can't put myself in the mind of a young person today. I can't erase my actual experience in life. So I don't know how it seems to them, but I know they're not getting the right information. And you would think that, with being able to store information and really record history, this should be put us into a position that we could profit from. But for some bizarre reason, it's working the other way.

MC: I wonder if this is the same in movies. Here, in this country, we've got a situation where art is incredibly popular, whereas it never used to be. But what has become popular is not exactly art or at least it's certainly different to what art was in the past. You've got a type of art emptied of values.

RA: Like Damien Hirst?

MC: Yeah, people like Damien Hirst. Within art now, he's a serious figure, but in terms of the art of the last century or so, he's not that serious because art now isn't that serious. Something has been removed, and what has arrived instead is a popularity and an accessibility. People are interested in it, but they're interested in something which is much flatter and emptier.

RA: Because it's easier to imitate. We can do all of these things. Somebody comes in and says, 'Look at this painting,' and you say, 'Oh, that's great.' Nobody will ever question that because they know that they can take a photograph and take it apart and you maybe don't need to be an artist to make that collage. The collage may end up being another Mona Lisa, but the guys who are around now with the same talent and eye as Rembrandt, we never hear from them.

MC: Well, I suppose my point is that there's a difference because art isn't supposed to be a popular medium, but the movies is a popular medium.

RA: Well, then, it's probably not art.

MC: But we see that sort of emptiness everywhere. We see it in art and also in the movies.

RA: I don’t think we see anything in the movies. I think they could all be erased and nobody would miss anything at all. Even going back to the 15th, 16th century, all the art involved religious figures, so they were following the popular beliefs of high things. It only later that we have the artists who painted the drunks and the whores in the street.

MC: Yeah.

RA: But Michelangelo and Caravaggio, all those artists didn't do that. So everybody caters to the culture of the time, of their time.

MC: The movies don't really have the function to give us higher values or tell us what they are. But since nothing else will, and the movies is a mass medium, one could feel sorry that there aren't some higher values there.

RA: Well, there are artists out there making films who really try. Most of them aren't able to because it costs so much money and it has to be somebody else's money. When somebody gives you money, you are beholden to them. I don't care how independent you say you are, you're still going to tell the guy who gave you the money, 'Well, anybody could play this part, so send your cousin over.'

MC: Yeah.

RA: We all do that, we all cater to that, and consequently we dilute the quality of our art. And when we dilute it too much — if they say, 'We've got to have a happy ending or we can't give you the money to make your picture' — you've got a choice to make.

My choice is: how can I make a happy ending, get the money and then double cross 'em. So my true internal mandate is to double cross these people. I'll say, 'Oh, this is going to be great! You're going to love this! I'm going to have a chase in here, this is going to be exciting, there's going to be a ghost or a vampire or whatever' — and I'm lying, lying to the people who are making it possible for me to do my movie. My justification for that lie to myself is: 'This is what they really want, but they don’t know how to say it.' But actually I'm manipulating this whole thing for my own ego. For my own self.

MC: Yeah.

RA: And I think everybody does exactly that. I think we're all basically double crossers and I think we have to be.