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Robert Altman: Directors
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Altman movies were group portraits of inter-connected, eccentric characters. The director shot his films like impressionist documentaries. Using long lenses, he captured the actor’s natural behavior. No one on an Altman set could relax. Background players know that they could become the focus of a shot at any given moment.
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[T]he octogenarian Altman -- a longtime fan of 30-year-plus radio humorist Garrison Keillor -- devised with Keillor the idea for a filmization of his venerable Minnesota-based radio program, A Prairie Home Companion. Thrilled with Keillor's draft of the script, the director stepped behind the camera once again in 2005, and made full use of a once-in-a-lifetime cast that included Altman standby Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, and Keillor himself. It opened in early summer, 2006, to wide praise for its warm geniality and folksy charm.
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As a director, Altman favored stories showing the interrelationships between several characters; he stated that he was more interested in character motivation than in intricate plots. As such, he tended to sketch out only a basic plot for the film, referring to the screenplay as a "blueprint" for action, and allowed his actors to improvise dialogue. This is one of the reasons Altman was known as an "actor's director", a reputation that helped him work with large casts of well-known actors.
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Altman, one suspects, was chortling over these developments; but Bus Stop was cancelled after the first season, and never offered for syndication. ("The cancellation came, as all cancellations do, from low ratings," says Huggins. "If it had high ratings, the furor would have been irrelevant.") And, ironically, the director of the episode was never mentioned; Altman's name does not appear in committee transcripts or in media accounts. "They never talked about Altman," says Huggins. "It was as if the show didn't have a director. They only talked about ABC and Fox."
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Altman's next project, Dr. T & the Women (2000), a fanciful comedy about a Dallas gynecologist (Richard Gere) who becomes overwhelmed by the women in his life, marked Altman's second collaboration with screenwriter Anne Rapp after Cookie's Fortune. It ... earned mixed but generally positive reviews, many concluding that despite his previous missteps, the director had still not lost his distinctive touch.
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From All Movie Guide: During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times.
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