CHRIS NEUMER: Based upon how well our last interview went, I said I have to go see The Company. So I was in New York 6 - 7 weeks ago and saw it up there. I was really impressed because one of the quotes you had said from my last interview was… we were talking about Dr. T. and you said, "I can't do this movie any better. I did it to the best of my ability and that's the best I can do." It struck me for some reason and when I saw this I thought I don't think anyone else could do any better.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Well I wouldn't do any better with The Company. This to me was maximum efficiency.
CHRIS NEUMER: This 'maximum efficiency' … I think your maximum efficiency on this picture was … You hit the bar and you just don't see that very often. I couldn't even think of a single shot where I thought, "Oh that was unnecessary." It was striking in that you don't see that many pictures like that where everything just flows seamlessly, especially the focus on ballet.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Well, the ballet is what the film is about and the rest of it was the dressing you know, just to make you think there was a real reason to make you go see the film. It does have a beginning, middle and an end… sort of. But basically it's all just a structure, a clothesline to hang the dance and then the lives of the characters.
CHRIS NEUMER: It seems in this respect, like I know you are very fond of telling people that other people make clothes, you make gloves. I thought this movie, The Company, is specialized gloves. Did you ever focus or think consciously about creating more interesting characters or putting some different elements into this given the subject matter or is it just as is?
ROBERT ALTMAN: No, I thought that that would have been really the wrong thing to do. I wanted the audience to focus on the phenomena of the lives that these dancers lead. It's 'A Day in the Life of'. There's nothing in this film that takes place that didn't happen.
CHRIS NEUMER: You mean to the actual Joffrey?
ROBERT ALTMAN: One dancer did this 2-3 years ago with the company. I don't remember her name. I didn't know her, but that was the end of her career. All of these things were just occurrences and I didn't want to over dramatize them. Like the thing at Grant Park. That had happened at another place, where was that now? Ravena?
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, Ravinia.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Ravinia, yeah. They tried to charge us… they gauged us so much because we were going to shoot out there. The guy who was the head of it was also on the board of the Joffrey, but they said, "Aw, that's a Hollywood company. They've got a lot of money." I said I wasn't going to do it and then the mayor gave us Grant Park. It was better, easier and the city was just terrific about it. That Ravinia place… well it was just ugly. But that had happened. It happened that a rainstorm came up during production and there was the question of whether we were going to stop it or not stop it, but we didn't have lightning hit or anybody slip and get hurt. It was just something that occurred and these were some of the kinds of things that occur in this kind of life. Why should I take that kind of life, the life in a dance company like this, why should I try to make it more dramatic or less dramatic? Why should I fuck it up?
CHRIS NEUMER: Not that I agree with this, but playing devil's advocate, it seems that certain people might say to make it more marketable or to get funding.
ROBERT ALTMAN: That's absolutely what they would say and in their minds they are right. But then it would look like every other lousy picture that comes along and I'm not interested … I really don't care. I'm so happy with this film. The people who I care about who have seen it… I see people who are just knocked out about it. Now that doesn't mean it's going to be a big Master and Commander. That isn't going to happen, but the people who see it really like it. I just think we've accomplished something. I think that everybody was served well by it and to add more stories to it … There's only six stories anyway; you know them all. Even the little love story that we did do in it between Franco and Neve, we did it as a ballet. We took all the words out of it, we just made it a dance.
CHRIS NEUMER: There's that scene at the bar where they were working and I think it was New Year's Eve and I marveled that here you are just mouthing the words.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Because I couldn't hear it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, well I didn't put 2 and 2 together that it was a ballet, but I noticed that there was sort of shifting between the film and the ballet like when you open, you have the cell phone announcements and then you close and you have the curtain call. Even when Franco is in Neve's apartment and they are watching the ballet on the TV, it's still the same thing. Was that a conscious effort of yours to intertwine the two?
ROBERT ALTMAN: Yeah, I was trying … I just didn't want to do this obligatory story so I did it the way as if it was a pas de deux, as if it were a dance. That's the way they would do it if they were to translate that into a ballet. I used the same songs, same music, different versions of it, but it was all Funny Valentine and that was the story.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now how did you … Was this a story that was brought to you or did you think that you wanted--
ROBERT ALTMAN: No, no. Neve Campbell first wanted to make a dance film because she is a dancer. She hired Barbara Turner who is a writer. Barbara Turner had written Pollack, several films, Georgia, terrific stuff. She had worked for me as an actress in Chicago 30 years ago in a film shot here for television. She called me. Neve wanted to do the dance film, but she didn't want it to be The Turning Point. She hired Barbara. She just picked her out of a lot of writers. She and Barbara spent 2 years with this company, the Joffrey. They picked the Joffrey and they were in and out with the company. They traveled with them. Then Barbara called me to try to get me to do it. I said, " I don't know anything about the dance. This is not the right thing for me." Now I read her script after a lot of prodding and I said, "I don't even know what this is. I don't follow it, I don't get it."
CHRIS NEUMER: Was it the ballet references or was it--
ROBERT ALTMAN: It was just the way the script didn't seem to have the normal dramatic fillers. It was just about these two and not being able to visualize it because I don't know dance, I didn't get it. Then finally I decided I would do it because I didn't know how to do it.
CHRIS NEUMER: That's a great reason.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Why should I keep doing things that I've done before? I was afraid I'd be late for work. So that's really the way it started and then of course we just updated it as we went along. What Barbara had written about was the dancers that were there a year ago. When I got there to shoot it, those dancers weren't there, some of them. When Barbara was on the set every moment, every day we shot, she was writing like mad. I said, "Let's do this kind of thing." We would leave that in. We knitted it together.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did the contradictory nature that surrounds ballet, it's a very graceful and light art, and yet you have to be amazingly up and really physical …
ROBERT ALTMAN: It's like a basketball team in sports. It's injury prone. They have to do The Nutcracker every year and they don't like to do that. They have to do certain obligatory programs because people take their kids to see that and there's certain classic things that have to be done. They don't take any less work out of the dancers. The reason they selected the Joffrey was it is such an eclectic company. They do the classics and they do the most modern … They will try anything. They had to learn all of these dances because this is not out of their … What you saw is not necessarily out of their repertoire. They had done many of those Arpino numbers before, but the same dancers hadn't done them. So we had a full rehearsing schedule going on all the time that we were preparing and working. The dancers were learning those dances.
CHRIS NEUMER: I know this is your first experience with high depth and I know that you did, oh what was it. Was it Darby?
ROBERT ALTMAN: Darby-vision.
CHRIS NEUMER: How much was that something that was very integral to your work?
ROBERT ALTMAN: It was because of my experience with the Darby-vision or the knowledge that it existed that I decided to do this film, shoot it in high def. And I'm going to shoot the next film in high depth.
CHRIS NEUMER: What was your prior experience with high def?
ROBERT ALTMAN: I hadn't had any.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, I mean how did you know about Darby-vision.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Well I did Gosford Park and when we took that to DVD, this Darby-vision had just arrived. One of my sons was involved with it and it was on the DVD of Gosford Park. What it does it takes … The big complaint about high depth is its flatness, that it doesn't seem to have the depth that film does. I don't know that that's true, but this way I was able to shoot the whole thing in high depth and in the last minute put the Darby vision on. Then it goes to anamorphic film. This film that you saw plays on the biggest screens in the world and nobody would know that we shot in high depth.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, I didn't.
ROBERT ALTMAN: There's no way because it's just like saying, "Did you shoot this with an Aeroflex or a Panovision?" It's just a mechanical tool.
CHRIS NEUMER: At certain times I think one of the things with high depth is the 24 frames per second is that it actually looks the same way and the characters more the same way as they would on film. Maybe it's a subconscious thing, but if you are seeing 30 frames per second or something.
ROBERT ALTMAN: That's different. That's a different speed. That's unnatural. This is all at 24.
CHRIS NEUMER: And high def also gives you the ability to watch things and get a pretty good idea of how they are going to turn out.
ROBERT ALTMAN: You know exactly. What you see on your monitor, on your main monitor that the DP looks at are your dailies. What's there is what it is so you don't have to process the film. You don't have to project the film. You don't have to run it again.
CHRIS NEUMER: It seems like for someone like yourself who is prone to improvisation and things like that it would be an enormous benefit to them.
ROBERT ALTMAN: It is. We were able to shoot in that scene where the company has the Christmas roast. We shot 4 cameras for 26 minutes. We ran through that whole thing. You can do that. Also I was able to shoot … because of the dancers I had to shoot 4 and 5 cameras. The dancers can't do it again.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you would only do a dance once?
ROBERT ALTMAN: Once. Maybe we would do a section of it twice. In most cases because they can't do it. I mean they need a couple of days rest.
CHRIS NEUMER: More like basketball.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Yeah, exactly.
CHRIS NEUMER: How many cameras would you shoot the dance sequences with?
ROBERT ALTMAN: I shot 'em with five. Five was the most I used. Two was the least I used mainly in the scenes between Neve and Franco. Three we used almost all of the time, but we didn't have to stop the cameras either. Usually you shoot 6000 feet of film a day. If you shoot 10 it's getting expensive. We shot the equivalent of 20 to 30 thousand feet every day.
CHRIS NEUMER: Just because it's all going to tape.
ROBERT ALTMAN: And it didn't have to. That was an expense. Also it relieved a lot of tension. You're not worried about, "Oh am I wasting this?"
CHRIS NEUMER: Even if you did a bad take, you can go right over it.
ROBERT ALTMAN: You don't do that, but it's just so cheap. You don't have to do that. It's just less expensive. Now friends of mine are shooting where they shoot on film, they transfer the film to high depth and they throw that film away, the negative. Then they go through the whole experience like I have and at the end, they put it back on film. That film done at the end has nothing to do with the film they shot in. This way, what's the point of it?
CHRIS NEUMER: You are really cutting down several middlemen by doing that. One other thing that was very interesting about this was that the whole look of it, the production design was very colorful and bold. I felt especially at the end with the blue snake which was … I was watching it and my history of ballet prior to this is minimal and …
ROBERT ALTMAN: Me too.
CHRIS NEUMER: I wasn't quite sure if that was supposed to be sort of a tongue-in-cheek.
ROBERT ALTMAN: That was a children's ballet. It was a ballet for children. It was done in Canada at one time. All of that stuff the costumes, the set, everything we shipped down from Toronto. Neve had seen it when she was 10 years old and she said, "Oh, I love this thing." I said, "Let's look at pieces of it." There was some film on it and I said, "Let's use it."
CHRIS NEUMER: Going back to my production design question … On a lot of your other projects like Dr. T or Gosford Park or something like that in the last several years, it seemed like it would be pretty much up to you to create the feel of the movie. You had to decide should we do this, should we focus here, should we play up a dark and stormy night or should we just show Dallas as it is. In this one it seemed almost as though the production design would be thrust upon you based upon what's already--
ROBERT ALTMAN: What the design is.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah. Did you find that in any way freed up other time or did you want to tinker with that at all?
ROBERT ALTMAN: No, no. Whenever I come into a room, I take what's here… that's the dining room, that's it. You know you feel like real estate agents. Whatever is there is there. I don't try to create … we create with light and we create kind of moods whether it's spooky or whether it's cheerful or rainy. I end up putting rain or weather in every one of my films.
CHRIS NEUMER: Because it's there.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Yeah and because it makes people feel different. You feel different on a rainy day than you do on a sunny day and the audience is no different than that. They feel the same way. It's like music, like a music score. We're able to help the audience in the way where we want their feelings to explore.
CHRIS NEUMER: Which is nice that it's a nudge as opposed to pointing exactly what they have to feel.
ROBERT ALTMAN: That gets down to individual choices.
CHRIS NEUMER: That's a good point. Back to the curse of being beautiful. You had gone back to working with the editor… what was her name, Geraldine?
ROBERT ALTMAN: Gerry Peroni.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yes and just because I've seen some of the dance things that have been available … like the only experience I've had is with Michael Flatley. It seems that the directors are very interested in letting you know that they are there by cameras zooming in on cranes and fades and wipes and that. Did you ever give her instructions on how to work with the editing like how to be as unobtrusive as possible or was it just again as usual?
ROBERT ALTMAN: No. I find out editors read the film. They are not there when you shoot it. They are not there when you write it and think about it. The only evidence they have to go by is the film they see. They kind of read that film so I wouldn't have any particular attitude or reason why I put the cameras as it did. I wanted to get the audience backstage; you see dance from a 2-dimensional standpoint. If you are looking one direction and they are dancing toward you, you don't see around behind them and that's not what the audience is supposed to see. But by being able to be back behind them and use different angles to see what's going on backstage, combining the dynamics of that with what's on the film, was just a caprice. It was an attitude. I think, "Oh, this is the way we shoot it."
CHRIS NEUMER: And having worked with her how many other times in the past…
ROBERT ALTMAN: Gerry? Oh, yeah. She's done many, many films for me. She didn't do Gosford Park and she's not able to do this next film because we got out of synch. She takes a job and the job runs over. I start too soon. I don't know how to explain those things because they just happen. Gerry comes into a room and she looks at all this film and she has to put it together.
CHRIS NEUMER: Similar mind sets.
ROBERT ALTMAN: Yeah, she's been with me… and she does this. She's a very talented person. She has a great eye and she makes selections. Rarely do I go over her head. She'll do something saying, "I didn't think that would be very interesting." That's what I want.
