Film Voices: Interviews from Post Script

1. Robert Altman

The following interview took place after a screening of Health (1980) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972) in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 28, 1981. The screenings and discussion were sponsored by the Maryland Film Guild and funded in part by the Maryland Committee for the Humanities. The interview was conducted and moderated by Professors Leo Braudy, then of Johns Hopkins University, now of the University of Southern California, and Robert P. Kolker of the University of Maryland. Members of the audience also participated in the exchange. 쵧 ROBERT ALTMAN: I have no opening remarks because I have nothing to say. ROBERT P. KOLKER: What happened at Fox that Health did not get out when it should have and the way it should have? RA: The film was made in 1979 and the Fox management changed about the time we finished editing. Then I was off to Malta to shoot Popeye [1980]. The new management came in and they agreed to wait until I came back to discuss the release plans, which was to be late summer of 1980. I wanted it to come out during the political conventions. They got a new head of sales, who I had the same problem with on the film I produced and Alan Rudolf directed for Columbia called Remember My Name [1978]. He chose not to release that because it was made under different management, and I ran into him again. They C H A P T E R O N E 쵧 Robert Altman LEO BRAUDY AND ROBERT P. KOLKER 17 18 FIGURE 1. Robert Altman and Kim Basinger on location for the film Prêt-à-Porter (1994). Courtesy: Jerry Ohlinger Archives. chose not to release it, so they bought a film for that time slot instead and released it, a film called Oh, Heavenly Dog! [1980]. I don’t know whether that was a comment or what. Health was given to Films Incorporated, so it will be seen. It’s being played in universities and revival houses and that sort of thing. It never got a full release nor will it. RK: Could you tell us how Lion’s Gate [RA’s production company] works and how you carry on your negotiations with distributors? RA: I work as an independent company. We will develop a project, take it to a major distributor, they will finance the film, I’ll guarantee the completion of the film, and they will release it. Usually we work in concert like that. LEO BRAUDY: I wanted to ask something more about Health and, also, since you were preparing Popeye at the same time, about the two of them together. In some ways it seems that Popeye has such a more benevolent view about what a community is like and what’s possible—personal statements and personal eccentricities —whereas Health seems much more satiric and has a pessimism about whether things work or not. RA: When I make a film it’s not my opinion of the way I think things should be. It doesn’t reflect what I would like to see. I’m criticized severely for being very cynical. I feel I’m very optimistic, but an artist is not a politician, not a philosopher. I’m not a philosopher. I try to show what I see, the way I see things. I’m really saying, “Come over here and look at what I see through my distorted view,” and it is distorted and it’s going to be a little different from yours, but that’s the whole point. For Popeye we went back to the 1930s, to the Segar comic strip, and tried to take the same philosophy that he put into those comic strips about that particular time. We created this oppressed community that was run by a dictator that they never saw and about people who were afraid. Then in comes this sort of I-am-what-I-am man and it’s just a different subject. LB: Many people saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller this morning and there was a kind of situation in which an I-am-what-I-am man comes into a town and gets lost. RA: Popeye and McCabe are very, very close. I mean there are not only a lot of unintentional resemblances, but there are a lot of intentional resemblances. LB: Could you tell us a little bit about them? RA: The town drunk in...