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.

Leigh Brackett: Watching the Detectives

The Big Sleep (Directed by Howard Hawks)

Screenwriter Leigh Brackett is known primarily for her scripts for Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1967), and Rio Lobo (1970). A successful science-fiction writer she also contributed the first draft of George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back (1980) widely regarded as the best of the Star Wars films. Starting out on ‘B’ movies her first major screenwriting assignment was for Howard Hawks’ 1946 version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Hawks had read Brackett’s pulp crime novel No Good From A Corpse and hired her to work with William Faulkner on the script for his adaptation of Chandler’s convoluted private-eye story. Brackett went on to work on several more projects for Hawks, as well as for other directors. In the 1973 version of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, Leigh Brackett updated the quintessential 1940s private-eye novel for director Robert Altman’s film. In the following extract from an interview with Steve Swires she discusses working on both Chandler adaptations and how the intervening years had changed the conception of Philip Marlowe as the detective-hero.

Your first screenplays were for ‘The Vampire’s Ghost’ [1945], a ‘ten-day wonder’ at Republic, and ‘Crime Doctor’s Manhunt’ [1946], part of the ‘Crime Doctor’ series at Columbia. You went from those ‘B’ movies to ‘The Big Sleep’, directed by Howard Hawks, in 1946. How did you manage so prestigious an advancement?

The ‘ten-day wonder’ was because my agent, Hugh King, had been with Myron Selznick, my agency at that time, and he had gone over to Republic as story editor and had sort of managed to shoehorn me in because they were doing this horror film. They decided to cash in on the Universal monster school, and I had been doing science fiction, and to them it all looked the same – ‘bug-eyed monsters.’ It made no difference. I did The Vampire’s Ghost there, and just out of the clear blue sky this other thing happened, purely on the strength of a hard-boiled mystery novel I had published. Howard Hawks read the book and liked it. He didn’t buy the book, for which I can’t blame him, but he liked the dialogue and I was put under contract to him.

The Big Sleep (Directed by Howard Hawks)

You worked on the screenplay of ‘The Big Sleep’ with William Faulkner. I wouldn’t say that you collaborated, but both of your names are in the credits as having written the script, along with Jules Furthman.

I went to the studio the first day absolutely appalled. I had been writing pulp stories for about three years, and here is William Faulkner, who was one of the great literary lights of the day, and how am I going to work with him? What have I got to offer, as it were? This was quickly resolved, because when I walked into the office, Faulkner came out of his office with the book The Big Sleep and he put it down and said: ‘I have worked out what we’re going to do. We will do alternate sections. I will do these chapters and you will do those chapters.’ And that was the way it was done. He went back into his office and I didn’t see him again, so the collaboration was quite simple. I never saw what he did and he never saw what I did. We just turned our stuff in to Hawks.

Jules Furthman came into it considerably later, because Hawks had a great habit of shooting off the cuff. He had a fairly long script to begin with and he had no final script. He went into production with a ‘temporary.’ He liked to get a scene going and let it run. He eventually wound up with far too much story left than he had time to do on film. Jules came in and I think he was on it for about three weeks, and he rewrote it, shortening the latter part of the script.

The Big Sleep (Directed by Howard Hawks)

If you try to watch the film as a standard mystery, fitting all of the clues together to logically develop a hypothesis as to who the murderer might be, you find yourself continually frustrated by the narrative development .

I think everybody got very confused. It’s a confusing book if you sit down and tear it apart. When you read it from page to page, it moves so beautifully that you don’t care, but if you start tearing it apart to see what makes it tick, it comes unglued. Owen Taylor, I believe, was the name of the chauffeur. I was down on the set one day and Bogart came up and said, ‘Who killed Owen Taylor?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ We got hold of Faulkner and he said he didn’t know, so they sent a wire to Chandler. He sent another wire back and said: ‘I don’t know.’ In the book it is never explained who killed Owen Taylor, so there we were.

In writing your portion of the screenplay, did you have any concept in mind of the role of the private eye as an archetypal hero?

I don’t think I dissected it that much. I was very much under the spell of Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and I have written a few stories myself in that same vein. Something struck me. I liked it and I felt it, but I don’t think I really analyzed it as I might do now, but I was a lot younger then. I just sort of accepted it.

The Big Sleep (Directed by Howard Hawks)

Are there contributions you made to the characterization of Philip Marlowe which are distinct from Hawks’?

I don’t know that I contributed too much to Marlowe, because I was taking directly from the book. This was the bible, and I wouldn’t dream of changing it. I think that the characterization of Marlowe as done by Bogart and directed by Hawks was entirely their own. On the other hand, I think Bogart was ideal and, as far as I was concerned, he was the greatest actor that ever happened. I adored him. Actually, it was a joy to watch him on the set because he was stage trained. On a Hawks film nobody gets their pages until five minutes before they’re going to shoot. Bogart would put on his horn-rims, go off in a corner, look at it, and then he’d come back on the set and they’d run through it a couple of times, and he’d have it right down, every bit of timing, and he’d go through about fourteen takes waiting for the other people to catch up to him.

I don’t like to say this, because it sounds presumptuous, but Hawks and I kind of tuned in on the same channel with regard to the characters, and I think this is probably one reason that I worked with him so long. He was able to get out of me what he wanted because I had somewhat the same attitude towards the characters as he did.

The Big Sleep (Directed by Howard Hawks)

There is a revisionist effort popular with such critics as Pauline Kael and Richard Corliss to consider the work of the screenwriter in contrast to the auteur theory, which postulates the director as the author of the film. When you look back on the movies that you wrote for Hawks, do you see them as Leigh Brackett films or Howard Hawks films or as collaborations?

It’s a collaboration. The whole thing is a team effort. A writer cannot possibly, when he’s writing a film, do exactly what he wants to do as when he’s writing a novel. If I sit down to write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter, and there’s nobody in between. But if I’m doing a screenplay, it has to be a compromise because there are so many things outside a writer’s province. Hawks was also a producer, and he had so many things to think about that had nothing to do with the creative effort – with the story – like cost and budget and technical details that you must learn to integrate. You cannot possibly just go and say: ‘Well, I want to do it thus and such and so, because presently they say: ‘Thanks very much and goodbye.’ It just has to be that way.

You came out of the tradition of the pulp magazines, where you were allowed a degree of creative control. How did you react to having less control over your work in Hollywood?

I sort of went off into corners and wept a few times at things that made me very unhappy. I think the hardest thing about adapting to working with other people was that. Because I was a fiction writer primarily, and I was used to writing in a little room with the door shut, just myself and the typewriter – all of a sudden I’m sitting in this room with film people and I’ve got to talk ideas. God I froze. Everything I was about to say sounded so dreadful. It took me quite a few years to adapt and also to learn my craft, because I don’t think there’s anything better than screenwriting to teach you the construction of a story.

The Big Sleep (Directed by Howard Hawks)

I was very poor on construction when I first began. If I could hit it right from the first word and go straight through, then it was great. If I didn’t, I ended up with half-finished stories in which I had written myself into a box canyon and couldn’t fight my way out. In film writing you get on overall conception of a story and then you go through these endless story conferences. Hawks used to walk in and he’d say: ‘I’ve been thinking . . .’ My heart would go right down into my boots. Here we go: Start at the top of page one and go right through it again. But you still have to keep that concept. It’s like building a wall. You’ve got the blocks, and you’ve got the wall all planned, and then somebody says: ‘I think we’ll take this stone out of here and we’ll put it over there. And we’ll make this one a red one and that one a green one.’ You’re still trying to keep the overall shape of the story, but you’re changing the details. It took me a long time, but I finally learned how to do it. It was exhausting.

One of the observations gleaned from an auteur-oriented examination of Hawk’s films is that certain sequences keep repeating themselves, being remade in different settings with different actors. For example, the scene in ‘The Big Sleep’ where the gangster is in the house with Bogart and Bacall while his henchmen are waiting outside. Bogart throws him out and Hawks cuts to a shot of the door being riddled with bullets. That scene is reshot in ‘El Dorado’ where John Wayne throws a cowboy out of a saloon and Hawks again cuts to a shot of the door being riddled with bullets from the henchmen waiting outside. Your wrote the screenplay for ‘El Dorado’. Did you do that deliberately, or was that Hawks?

That was Hawks. I have been at swords’ points with him many a time because I don’t like doing a thing over again, and he does. I remember one day he and John Wayne and I were sitting in the office, and he said we’ll do such and such a thing. I said: ‘But Howard, you did it in Rio Bravo. You don’t want to do this over again.’ He said: ‘Why not?’ And John Wayne, all six feet four of him, looked down and said: ‘If it was good once it’ll be just as good again.’ I know when I’m outgunned, so I did it. But I just don’t like repeating myself. However, I’m wrong about half the time…

The Long Goodbye (Directed by Robert Altman)

From what you’ve said, it sounds as though it was a very lively atmosphere around the sets of the Hawks films, with his spontaneously creative working habits. It must have prepared you, then, for Robert Altman, who I understand also likes not to inform the cast as to what they’ll be shooting the next day. In fact, many times he doesn’t bother to worry about it himself. How were you brought into the project of writing the screenplay for ‘The Long Goodbye’?

Elliott Kastner, who was the executive producer, used to be my agent at MCA a long time ago and we’re good friends. He remembered The Big Sleep and he wanted me to work on The Long Goodbye . He set the deal with United Artists, and they had a commitment for a film with Elliott Gould, so either you take Elliott Gould or you don’t make the film. Elliott Gould was not exactly my idea of Philip Marlowe, but anyway there we were. Also, as far as the story was concerned, time had gone by – it was twenty-odd years since the novel was written, and the private eye had become a cliché. It had become funny. You had to watch out what you were doing. If you had Humphrey Bogart at the same age that he was when he did The Big Sleep, he wouldn’t do it the same way. Also, we were faced with a technical problem of this enormous book, which was the longest one Chandler ever wrote. It’s tremendously involuted and convoluted. If you did it the way he wrote it, you would have a five-hour film.

I worked with another director who was on it before, Brian G. Hutton. He had a brilliant idea which just didn’t work, and we wrote ourselves into a blind alley on that. It was a technical problem of plotting – the heavy had planned this whole thing from the start. So what you had was a prearranged thing where everybody sort of got up out of several boxes and did and said exactly what they had to do and say in order to get you where you had to be. It was very contrived and didn’t work. Brian had to leave because he had another commitment, so when Altman came onto it I went over to London for a week. He was cutting Images [1972], which was a magnificent film – beautiful, powerful. We conferred about ten o’clock in the morning and yakked all day, and I went back to the hotel and typed all the notes and went back the next day. In a week we had it all worked out. He was a joy to work with. He had a very keen story mind.

The Long Goodbye (Directed by Robert Altman)

Mark Rydell played the character Marty Augustine in ‘The Long Goodbye’. He is an old friend of Altman’s, so I imagine they were able to work together more easily. Rydell claimed that he knew intuitively what Altman’ s conception of the movie was, which many critics, as well as many members of the audience, missed – the satirization of the genre of the private-eye film, by placing the conventions of the forties in direct conflict with the realities of the seventies. Were you aware of Altman’s intentions during your story conferences?

Actually, I was more aware of the construction of the thing, which is more my department. What he does with it after he gets the script is something else again. I don’t think I was quite as aware of the satire as I became later.

Jay Cocks of ‘Time’ magazine accused Altman of mocking ‘an achievement to which at his best he could only aspire,’ because he tried to demythologize Philip Marlowe. I imagine a lot of critics who are in their forties and fifties now grew up with the myth of Bogart as Marlowe, and hated to see the end of the film in which Marlowe murders Terry Lennox with no remorse. In fact, after he commits the murder, he dances down the road whistling ‘Hooray for Hollywood!’ You are responsible, to some degree, for helping to create and propagate that original myth with ‘The Big Sleep’. Then you turned around and helped to sabotage it in ‘The Long Goodbye’. Do you consider that a betrayal of your earlier values?

The Long Goodbye (Directed by Robert Altman)

No. Actually the ending, where Marlowe commits the murder, was in the script before Altman came onto it. The ending of the book was totally inconclusive. You had built up a villain. You feel that Marlowe has been wounded in his most sensitive heart, as it were – he’s trusted this man as his friend; the friend has betrayed him. What do you do? We said let’s just face up to it. He kills him.

In the time that we made The Big Sleep you couldn’t do that because of censorship, had you wanted to do it. We stuck very closely to Chandler’s own estimate of Marlowe as a loser, so we made him a real loser – he loses everything. Here is the totally honest man in a dishonest world, and it suddenly rears up and kicks him in the face, and he says: ‘The hell with you.’ Bang! I don’t know whether we were right to do it, but I don’t regret having done it. It felt right at the time. This was the way it turned out.

What do you think of the conceptions and characterizations of Marlowe as portrayed in the other film versions of Chandler’s novels?

I thought Murder My Sweet [1944] was a beautiful film. The others all had points of excellence and also points where they didn’t quite come across. The experimental business of ‘I am a camera’ in Lady in the Lake [1946] didn’t work too well.

It has been said that Philip Marlowe was sort of the son of Sam Spade. As Chandler said: ‘Down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean.’ In other words, here is the knight in shining armor with a shabby trench coat and snap-brim felt hat. I think he is a universal folk hero who does not change down through the ages except in the detail of his accoutrements. He’s not carrying a sword but a .32 automatic. The essential is that here is a man who is pure in heart, who is decent and honorable and cannot be bought – he is incorruptible. I think the concept was damn good, a very moral concept.

The Long Goodbye (Directed by Robert Altman)

What did you think of Gould’s performance, miscast as he was?

I thought he did a beautiful job. However, the thing about Elliott is that he isn’t tough. His face is gentle, his eyes are kind, and he doesn’t have that touch of cruelty that you associate with these characters.

With all of the disappointments that you’ve suffered – having your scripts revised without your approval to produce inferior versions of previous pictures – will you continue to write screenplays? Is there anything on the horizon that we can look forward to?

There’s nothing definite at the moment. I have an original Western screenplay out and around, and I’m hopeful. It’s a comedy. There are a number of things on the fire with television. As you know, the whole picture has changed out there very greatly in recent years. You grab what you can get. I wrote a script for The Rockford Files that was telecast last season.

But I greatly enjoy the work. It’s a challenge. It’s more technical than creative. What you have to be is a very good journeyman plumber and put the parts together. And then, if you can still inject a little bit of something worthwhile, you’ve done as much as can be expected.

– Extract from Leigh Brackett: Journeyman Plumber. Interview by Steve Swires in Backstory 2. Ed. Pat McGilligan.