Robert Altman: On Inspiration and Dreams

Three Women (Directed by Robert Altman)

Three Women directed by Robert Altman is set in a dry, sparsely populated California resort town, where a naive southern lost soul, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), worships and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). When Millie takes Pinky in as her flatmate, Pinky’s hero worship gradually evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have expected. 

Clearly borrowing its structure from Bergman’s masterly Persona, Altman’s film has typically fine performances from Spacek and Duvall. Often overlooked in Altman’s prestigious oeuvre, it’s now recognised as a a dreamlike triumph that veers from the witty to the frightening and to the surreal, resulting in one of the most remarkable and gripping films of the 1970s.

The following extract is from an interview with the director Robert Altman by Leo Braudy an Robert P. Kolke in front of an audience in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 28, 1981 in which he discusses his inspiration for Three Women, the ending of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and his thoughts on his Raymond Chandler adaptation The Long Goodbye.

AUDIENCE: What kind of preproduction plans do you make?

RA: When we start, when we think about a project and get it to the point where we say we are going to make a film out of this, the first decision I’ll make will be the cinematographer. I’ll set that person or at least do a lot of thinking about it and try to work out what my limitations are, or, in other words, what is out of my control. Then I decide what the visual and audio style of that film is going to be. For instance, in Nashville, or Health, or Brewster McCloud [1970] we were dealing with a real city and real places and we couldn’t control what people wore. We couldn’t say, “All right, nobody in St. Petersburg can wear a red shirt tomorrow.” We have no control, so I know I have to change the style of how that’s going to look, and I have to blend my film in with what is there. A lot of times that will determine the type of cameraman I want to use. In the case of Popeye, Three Women, and Images [1972], where we control, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, where we create the whole environment, then we can decide how we want this to look to the audience because we do the wardrobe and the construction. Then we start putting our crew together based on what we can’t control and how we are going to do it, and we cast it...

AUDIENCE: Was Three Women based on a dream and how did you cast it? I think it should have won awards.

RA: Thank you. It did, though. Shelley Duvall did win best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for it and the film itself came awful close that year except for three women who were on the jury: [director] Agnes Varda, who felt that the film was dangerous to women and should not be released, [actress] Marthe Keller, and [film critic] Pauline Kael, who loved the first two-thirds of the movie and hated the last third. I tried to point out to her that I don’t make movies in sections, but she just hated the film. But anyway, it did happen from a dream. I dreamed that I was making a film in the desert with Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall and that it was called Three Women and it was a character stealing, personality theft kind of thing. I woke up and made some notes on this yellow pad next to my bed and went back to sleep, and then I dreamed some more that I was sending my pro- duction manager out to look for desert locations and I woke up and made more notes on it and went back to sleep. Then I woke up and realized that I don’t keep a yellow pad next to my bed—the whole damn thing was a dream, but it was a dream about making a picture, not of what the picture was, but suggestions came from it. The next day was Sunday. I was depressed at the time. A film had been cancelled that we were going to do, or I chose to step out and cancel it myself. My wife was in the hospital and she was very ill at the time—we didn’t know how seriously. (She is fine now.) I called up the girl who does the casting for me and wardrobe and is probably the top creative associate I have, and I said I read a short story last night and let me tell you what it’s about, and I kind of faked through the thing. I said, do you think it could make a good movie and she said, “Yeah, can you get the rights?” And I said, “Yeah, I think so.” Within nine days of that time I went in to Alan Ladd Jr. That was the first film I did with him and I told him that story. I said I won’t write a script, but I’ll do an outline, and we had the deal for making the picture.

Three Women (Directed by Robert Altman)

LB: You were talking about actors before and the large creative input that they give to films. In Three Women and Images you were attracted to themes about people turning into other people, robbing personalities. I wonder if actors inspire you that way, the ease with which they go from role to role. Is there something fragile about the actor’s temperament?

RA: I don’t know where that comes from. It is very easy in retrospect for me to see that I make those kinds of pictures. That Cold Day in the Park [1969] was that kind of a picture, Images was that kind of picture, and so was Three Women. They are all very closely akin, what I would call an interior film—where I am dealing with the inside of the person’s head, and what they see or what you see or what I show you that they see may not necessarily be what’s happening. I have some fascination with that. Obviously, I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know because I keep dealing with that.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Directed by Robert Altman)

LB: When the camera at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller goes into Julie Christie’s eye, are we to take that as the film having been seen in some great part from her point of view?

RA: No. I don’t know what that was. I was trying to do the opposite of the normal ending because there is no way to end a film. I mean, life doesn’t stop. The only way I really know to end a film is with the main character’s death. That is the easiest way, so usually you do this big pull back, but I thought why not just go inside of somebody’s head. That little vase that she was using and looking at—we brought that into a studio or garage in order to shoot it, to get as close as we did with that—suddenly it seemed to me when we shot it that it looked like another planet. It’s just the idea that occurs. I’m sure you didn’t see it in Popeye, but if you see Popeye again, you will notice that when Popeye first comes in to the bordello looking for Wimpy and Sweet Pea, we go around that room and in one of those bottom bunks you will see the woman who I call Cinderella, the wash woman, the raggedy woman who is kind of around in the background, who also I think is probably Sweet Pea’s mother. She is lying in that bunk. The preacher is above her smoking an opium pipe and she is look- ing at this same vase, and that’s just fun for me. If it became obvious to an audience, it would be destructive.

The Long Goodbye (Directed by Robert Altman)

AUDIENCE: Was The Long Goodbye [1973] difficult to make?

RA: That was a successful film and should have been much more successful. That film was hurt originally because United Artists wanted to release it as a serious film. They had a poster of Elliot with a cat on his shoulder and a smoking gun and it looked like the ad for The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946]. People went in to see that kind of a film and they were disappointed, and they didn’t like it. We got them to pull the film, and we redid the campaign, opened it several months later in New York, and had that been the original opening, it would have been a very, very successful film. The real dyed-in-the-wool Raymond Chandler fans didn’t like it because, they said, it wasn’t true to the book or to Raymond Chandler, that wasn’t Philip Marlowe. But they weren’t thinking about Raymond Chandler, they were thinking about Humphrey Bogart. I would love to show that film to Raymond Chandler because I think that what I tried to do in The Long Goodbye was the same thing he did in the book. He used those crappy plots that he couldn’t follow himself—I never finished that book either, by the way—but he used them as a device to hang a bunch of thumbnail essays on, observations, and that’s the approach that we took on that picture.

RK: Visually it is your most elaborate film. There is not one shot in that film in which the camera is not moving.

RA: That was another experiment we tried. The camera is constantly moving, but not moving with something, not moving the way it should. You know how you would be in a crowd. You are trying to watch something and it moves and somebody is here and you are just always kind of at the wrong place at the wrong time. That was the kind of tension or attitude I was trying to get in that film. The idea came from a small sequence that we did in Images, where we did the same kind of thing in a short slice, so I felt safe with it, but it seemed to work so well in Images that we thought maybe we could do a whole film that way and The Long Goodbye was the film that followed Images.

– Leo Braudy and Robert P. Kolke. Interview with Robert Altman, In Gerald Duchovnay (ed): Film Voices.

David Lynch on Mulholland Drive.

Mulholland Dr. (Directed by David Lynch)

In terms of style, theme and structure, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. is less a story about dreams than it is about the corrupt, twisted fantasy of Tinseltown. Laid out as a convoluted network of interwoven plots, the film is told through the ruptured fantasies of Diane Selwyn (played by Naomi Watts in a superb breakout performance) who is experiencing a mental breakdown and has resorted to self-delusion in order to cope.

We are initially introduced to her as an aspiring young actress named Betty Elms, newly arrived in Los Angeles, who meets a beautiful amnesic woman, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), who takes refuge in Betty’s aunt’s apartment after a car accident. Assuming Rita must be a friend of her aunt, she allows her to stay. Before long, an intimate friendship starts to blossom, and the eternally optimistic Betty attempts to piece together Rita’s misplaced identity.

A captivating subplot, which is mysteriously and inextricably linked to both characters, then takes over the film, involving film director Adam (Justin Theroux), who is railroaded into casting a certain actress in his new production. Toying with notions of appearance, artificiality and deception, the film’s narrative becomes increasingly skewed and distorted as both women’s personalities begin to fracture and merge.

Part paranoid nightmare, part wish-fulfilling dream, Mulholland Dr. embraces the dark heart of film noir in its outstanding portrayal of Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms’ rapid slide into mania and suicidal despair. (Amy Simmons).

The following interview was originally published in the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews included in the book were conducted by Rodley between 1993 and 2005. For Criterion’s release of Mulholland Dr., they republished Rodley's chapter on the film as a selection of excerpts from Rodley’s conversation with Lynch about his masterpiece Hollywood love story.

So how did you first pitch the idea to ABC as a potential TV series?

I just had two pages that were read to them, and then more pitch stuff to give them a mood and more of a thing. And at that point, they were all saying, “Sounds great. Let’s do it.”

But what was on those two pages?

A couple of things: a woman trying to become a star in Hollywood, and at the same time finding herself becoming a detective and possibly going into a dangerous world.

As the idea developed in your mind, what was it about ‘Mulholland Dr.’ that made you fall in love with it?

If someone said to you, “What was it about that girl that really made you fall in love with her?” you couldn’t say just one thing. It’s so many things. It’s everything. Same with this. You get an idea. A moment before, it wasn’t there. And it comes SO FAST! And when you get the idea, it sometimes comes with an inspiration, an energy, that fires you up. Maybe the love is in the idea, and it just comes into you. I don’t know. But the idea is really small, and then it expands and shows itself to you so you see it completely. And then it goes to the memory bank so that you can examine it some more. It’s very complete. It’s like a seed. The tree is really there, but it’s not a tree yet. It wants to be a tree, but it’s just a seed.

Sometimes an idea presents itself to you and you’re just as surprised as anyone else. I remember when I was writing Mulholland Dr., the character of the Cowboy just came walking in one night. I just started talking about this cowboy. That’s what happens—something starts occurring, but it wasn’t there a moment ago.

Do you then get anxious about how this idea is going to fit in with everything else?

No, because you’re just in that world yourself. You’re just going. There is no movie yet. Until the process completes itself, you’re just going to carry on. Somewhere along the way, when it looks like it’s taking some sort of shape, the rest of the ideas all gather around to see if they can fit into that shape. Maybe you’ll find out that that thing isn’t going to work, so you save it in a box for later.

You’ve got to be the audience for most of this trip. You can’t second-guess them. If you did, you’d be removing yourself from yourself. Then you’d be out there in really dangerous territory, trying to build something for some abstract group that’s always changing. I think you’d fail. You’ve got to do it from the inside first and hope for the best.

Tell me about the character of Diane—or Betty—as there are two differently named characters, both played by Naomi Watts. What do we call her?

This particular girl—Diane—sees things she wants, but she just can’t get them. It’s all there—the party—but she’s not invited. And it gets to her. You could call it fate—if it doesn’t smile on you, there’s nothing you can do. You can have the greatest talent and the greatest ideas, but if that door doesn’t open, you’re fresh out of luck. It takes so many ingredients and the door opening to finally make it.

There are jokes about how in L.A. everyone is writing a script and everyone has got a résumé and a photo. So there’s a yearning to get the chance to express yourself—a sort of creativity in the air. Everyone is willing to go for broke and take a chance. It’s a modern town in that way. It’s like you want to go to Las Vegas and turn that one dollar into a million dollars. Sunset Boulevard says so much about that Hollywood dream thing to me.

Did you ever feel that way about this town yourself—that it was the place to make your career as a filmmaker?

No. I came in through a weird door, and I didn’t really know about it. I arrived here in August 1970, at night, and I woke up in the morning, and I’d never seen the light so bright. A feeling comes with this light—a feeling of creative freedom. So for me it was almost an immediate full-tilt love affair from then on. Hopefully, everybody finds a place where they feel good about being where they are—a place that does something to them. That’s L.A. to me.

I’m always intrigued by the exact time frame in a lot of your films. […] ‘Mulholland Dr.’ is defiantly contemporary, and yet it has a feeling that it’s happening in the past—the fifties or even the thirties and forties.

But that’s so much like our actual lives. Many times during the day, we plan for the future, and many times in the day we think of the past. We’re listening to retro radio and watching retro TV. There are all kinds of opportunities to relive the past, and there are new things coming up every second. There is some kind of present, but the present is the most elusive, because it’s going real fast.

There are still many places you could go in L.A. to catch the drift of the old golden age, but they’re getting fewer. It’s like the old oil well that used to be where the Beverly Center is now. That was one of the locations we used for Eraserhead, and it was one of my favorite places in the whole world. You’d go over this doughnut of earth and down inside this place, and you’d be in a completely different world. There were these oil tanks and this working oil well just standing there. It was just incredible. There was a pony ride from the twenties or the thirties. And there was this little key shop that was like four feet by four feet, with a roof. And then there was the Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand, which has moved to another place now. And there was Hull Bros. Lumber, which was a working sawmill, I think, with a hundred-foot-tall mound of sawdust next to it. There was also a nursery. It was all, like, from the thirties—mostly dirt, with this stuff scattered around. The buildings were ancient, and guys wore those green-colored visors and armbands. They were old-timers who knew about wood and Hollywood and everything.

Why are you attracted to all of that?

For me, it’s a thing that I felt as a kid in Our Gang comedies—The Little Rascals. It was feeling the thirties—a feeling of a place back in time, because it hadn’t changed. It was like a set. This place just existed there. And then it was gone. It became the Beverly Center. Now it’s just, like, a congestion of shops and parking and lights and signs. It’s just a huge change.

In its transition from TV pilot to feature film, did ‘Mulholland Dr.’ become more complicated?

No, it got much simpler. It became obvious what it was. It was like the day I was in the food room at the stable in AFI when we were shooting Eraserhead. We’d been shooting for almost a year by then, and I was drawing the Lady in the Radiator. I tried to picture the radiator in Henry’s room—which was twenty feet away—and I couldn’t. So I went running into Henry’s room, and I looked at the radiator, and I almost started weeping for joy. It was perfect. It was unique because it had a place built in it—for her. But she didn’t exist when that radiator had been handpicked. So the Lady in the Radiator married with what had gone before. I knew it already, of course. It was the same kind of thing with Mulholland Dr.

But there were many more elements to mesh and narrative threads to tie up in ‘Mulholland Dr.’

Sure, but when you’re working on something, you have strings that go out here and there, and they end. But one of those strings is going to continue, while others atrophy and fall away. You sometimes go in different directions to find your main path. And maybe one of those strings that were started comes back by surprise at the very end, in a different form, and you say, “That’s how that thing fits in.” All the threads in Mulholland Dr. are tied up.

The movie is full of obvious clues, but there are many other things that are important visual and audio indicators that are not obvious. So at times it does seem as if you’re delighting in teasing or mystifying the viewer.

No, you never do that to an audience. An idea comes, and you make it the way the idea says it wants to be, and you just stay true to that. Clues are beautiful because I believe we’re all detectives. We mull things over, and we figure things out. We’re always working this way. People’s minds hold things and form conclusions with indications. It’s like music. Music starts, a theme comes in, it goes away, and when it comes back, it’s so much greater because of what’s gone before.

But audiences have struggled with trying to work the movie out and, at a certain point, they just want you to tell them what it all means—to you.

Yeah, and I always say the same thing: I think they really know for themselves what it’s about. I think that intuition—the detective in us—puts things together in a way that makes sense for us. They say intuition gives you an inner knowing, but the weird thing about inner knowing is that it’s really hard to communicate that to someone else. As soon as you try, you realize that you don’t have the words, or the ability to say that inner knowing to your friend. But you still know it! It’s really frustrating. I think you can’t communicate it because the knowing is too beautifully abstract. And yet poets can catch an abstraction in words and give you a feeling that you can’t get any other way.

I think people know what Mulholland Dr. is to them, but they don’t trust it. They want to have someone else tell them. I love people analyzing it, but they don’t need me to help them out. That’s the beautiful thing, to figure things out as a detective. Telling them robs them of the joy of thinking it through and feeling it through and coming to a conclusion.

And it doesn’t matter if that conclusion isn’t the same as yours?

Right, because even if you get the whole thing, there would still be some abstract elements in it that you’d have to kind of feel-think. You’d have to say, “I kind of understand that, but I don’t know exactly what it is.” Sort of. The frames are always the same on the film—it’s always the same length, and the same soundtrack is always running along it. But the experience in the room changes depending on the audience. That’s another reason why people shouldn’t be told too much, because “knowing” putrefies that experience.

What is it about women crying that fascinates you?

I don’t know! What IS it? It’s a lot of things swimming together, I guess. I’ve done that kind of scene a few times. Maybe I’ll do it a bunch more. I don’t want to say exactly what it is, because it won’t be enough.

In ‘Mulholland Dr.’, both Diane and Rita sob uncontrollably while watching Rebekah Del Rio mime to her own performance of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” at Club Silencio. How did the latter come about?

That was an accident. My friend and former music agent at CAA, Brian Loucks, calls from time to time and says, “I want you to meet so-and-so, can we come over for a coffee?” One day he calls me and says, “I want you to meet Rebekah Del Rio.” So Rebekah comes over with Brian at ten o’clock in the morning, and because I’d said to John Neff, “I think she’s gonna sing,” he’d set up the microphone—a very beautiful microphone—in one of the booths in my recording studio. Rebekah just wanted to come over for a coffee and sing in front of us. She didn’t want to record anything, but she came in and four minutes later—I think before she’d had her coffee—she’s in the booth. And the one take that she sang, four minutes off the street, is the vocal that’s in the film. THE ACTUAL RECORDING!

The weird thing is that she chose to sing that particular Roy Orbison song. I was about to start shooting Blue Velvet, and “Crying” came on the radio. I said, “Jeez! I’ve got to get that song to see if it would work in the film.” In the end, it wasn’t quite right, but I started listening to other cuts, and “In Dreams” came up. It was destined to change things in the most beautiful ways after that. Rebekah knows Barbara Orbison, Roy’s second wife, and she’s the one who translated “Crying” into Spanish, but it’s just so strange that that was the song that was almost in Blue Velvet.

Rebekah’s got one of the most beautiful voices in the world, so I said, “Damn, this is unbelievable!” And I start thinking about it. We listened to it after she left, and I said, “She’s gonna be in the film.” I’d had this other idea that I’d written down one night, so that jumped in and provided the slot for Rebekah.

The lip sync that she did when we actually shot that scene much later was, like, the best I’ve ever seen. She’s the original singer, of course, but even so, there are singers who can’t do that—the lips and the tongue and the breaths don’t work. But this was perfect in every way.

There seems to be a lot of miming in ‘Mulholland Dr.’, to music—at the auditions for Adam Kesher’s movie—but also people “miming” entire lives. Is the character of Betty in some respects Diane’s “mime”?

[Long pause]

Someone who only becomes “real” when she plays someone else for that brilliant audition at Paramount Pictures?

[Pause continues]

Doing exactly the same scene we’ve already watched her rehearse rather badly with Rita? What was that all about?

It’s like doing something twice—the same piece of material two different ways. It’s always interesting. In Blue Velvet, the song “In Dreams” is played twice, and it’s got a completely different feeling each time, and a different meaning. Or maybe it’s the same meaning but you see it a different way. All the characters are dealing somewhat with a question of identity. Like everyone.

– David Lynch on Mulholland Dr. By Chris Rodley. Article here