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The
Times (London) January 21, 2002, Monday
It's
no walk in the park
Stephen
Dalton
Robert
Altman, king of counter-culture cinema, casts his eye on the British
class system with Gosford Park. Stephen Dalton met him Robert Altman
has a hacking cough. Although he recently spent a whole year in
drizzly Britain shooting his latest screen drama, Gosford Park,
the Kansas born directing legend has yet to reckon with the local
climate. When we meet on a drab winter's morning in London, this
76-year-old has a severe case of sniffles.
For
15 anxious minutes, our meeting with the Colonel Sanders of American
auteur cinema hangs in the balance. But loaded with zinc anti-flu
drops courtesy of your Times correspondent, Altman perks up, waves
away the remnants of his hotel breakfast and prepares to do the
one thing he does better than directing films -holding court.
He speaks like he makes his films -in vast, amorphous, open-ended
passages, most of them loosely concerned with Gosford Park, his
first British-made feature in 50 years as a Hollywood-bashing maverick.
From
a film-maker best known for sprawling, semi-improvised drama, Gosford
Park is oddly conventional in form. Set in 1932, this $ 13 million
production boldly takes on that most English of dramatic traditions
-the country-house murder mystery. And yet the conventions of the
genre are mostly mere hooks for some patented Altman techniques:
the huge ensemble cast, the overlapping dialogue, the multi-streamed
subplots and eavesdropped conversations.
In
a forthcoming BBC Omnibus on Altman, Richard E. Grant, who appears
in Gosford Park alongside a stellar cast that includes Maggie Smith,
Alan Bates and Helen Mirren, compares Altman's methods to "working
with the best kind of jazz musician".
Audaciously, Altman instructed these renowned stage veterans to
act in a "non-theatrical" manner. The resulting film, which is regarded
as a major Oscar contender this year, feels like a deliberately
diffuse antidote to all those perfectly poised Merchant-Ivory chamber
pieces. The film continues the way Altman's M*A*S*H (1970) redefined
the war movie, McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971) rewrote the western
rulebook and The Long Goodbye (1973) deconstructed the hard- boiled
detective yarn.
"I
wasn't taking the period movie apart so much as trying to put it
under a proper look," Altman explains. "Most of these films become
kind of precious, the camera is set up, everything is very orderly,
the lighting is excellent, and everybody speaks very precisely at
the same tempo. I didn't want to do that. The first thing we decided
to do was shoot with the cameras just moving arbitrarily and picking
up what happens."
Although
Altman and his co-writers, Bob Balaban and Julian Fellowes, took
Agatha Christie as their initial inspiration, the Cluedo-type suspense
narrative of Gosford Park becomes almost incidental to the novelistic
wealth of acutely observed snobbery and social ritual. "It's not
a whodunnit," Altman says. "It's a why-dunnit. And even so, why
not do it? That wasn't what the film was about. It was more about
the corners, the detail, the behaviour -the loose ends, you know?"
The
party line on Altman is that he had a magnificent 1970s, a terrible
1980s and a triumphant creative revival in the 1990s. The reality
is more complex, since every chapter of his career spawned underrated
gems and messy mistakes. But Gosford Park feels like a satisfying,
lavishly upholstered career landmark. Like The Player (1992) and
Short Cuts (1993), it looks set to revitalise Altman's wildly wavering
reputation yet again after a string of misfires.
Advance reactions to the film have been hugely positive on both
sides of the Atlantic. The only recurring criticism after advanced
screenings for British reviewers has been of Stephen Fry's jarring
performance as a bumbling police inspector, pitching the film from
naturalistic drama to cartoonish farce. However, Altman vehemently
defends Fry's comic turn, claiming that the sudden shift in tone
was deliberate.
"The Stephen Fry thing doesn't happen anywhere else but here," he
argues. "He is known too well on television as being that character.
People didn't want me to cast him for that reason, but that character
was what I wanted. Actually, I modelled him after Jacques Tati.
I gave him a pipe, the coat, the hands behind his back. Had I done
that realistically, there would have been probably six policemen
around that place. I didn't have time to do that, and it didn't
serve what I was doing. Unfortunately, Stephen's the one who gets
bruised when he reads all that stuff, and he shouldn't because he's
just terrific. He's probably smarter than anybody who criticises
him by a long shot."
Altman's
personal stake in Gosford Park seems to be an outsider's fascination
with the baroque intricacies of Britain's pre-war class system.
He anatomises the absurdities of upstairs-downstairs culture with
more affectionate bemusement than most British directors would dare.
"Well,
I don't have any affection for it," the director says frowning.
"We talked to people in their nineties who had been maids, butlers,
cooks and all that. It was their profession, their fathers and mothers
did it, and they were very proud. But I was shocked to find out
that servants in some households were not even called by their own
names."
Although
Gosford Park takes a largely dispassionate stance on class, Altman
has long been considered a left-of-centre voice since coming to
prominence during the halcyon days of the American New Wave with
such counter-culture classics as M*A*S*H. However, aside from tapping
into generalised social themes, his films have rarely made concrete
political statements.
"I
am a political person," Altman says, "but I don't have to put a
strong debate into a film. This present government in America I
just find disgusting, the idea that George Bush could run a baseball
team successfully -he can't even speak! I just find him an embarrassment.
I was over here when the election was on and I couldn't believe
it -and I'm 76 years old. Then when the Supreme Court came in and
turned out to be a totally political animal, the last shred of any
naivete that was left in me has gone. When I see an American flag
flying, it's a joke."
An
enraged Altman suddenly checks himself, aware that he is on sensitive
ground in our post-September 11 world. But, controversially, he
thinks that Hollywood may have inspired the World Trade Centre attacks.
"We gave them the ideas -it was a movie," he fumes. "We should be
ashamed of ourselves."
Altman
also disagrees with bombing Afghanistan, even though he flew B-24
bombers in the South Pacific during the Second World War. "I don't
think there was a moral choice then," he argues. "But this thing
we're involved in now - these people don't even have a country,
and maybe that's the problem."
Hacking
cough aside, Altman is clearly intent on working behind the camera
until the big director upstairs yells "Cut!". He already has a feature
about espionage legend Mata Hari scheduled for early next year and
hopes to get another film rolling this spring. Would he shoot in
Britain again? "Oh, I'm looking into that right this second," Altman
says with a grin. "It was the best experience of my life, with actors
and with crews -the whole process. If you asked would I live in
London the rest of my life, yeah, I'd be very happy to stay here.
There's nothing in America that I would miss at all."
*
Gosford Park is released in Britain on February 1
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