Kith and Tell

In the book, you present yourself as a fan who is overjoyed about working with top directors. But you also spend a lot of time figuring out how they operate and what they want. Do they ever give you "auteur fatigue"?

The advantage of auteurs, if that's what you like to call them, is that, whether they're good or bad, they at least have a very strong "visional" idea of what their movie's going to be. Problems come when you're doing a film with people who are just doing it because that's what they've been offered, and they're just getting through. Then the thing becomes rudderless. It's better to have somebody who, even if it drives you insane, has one particular idea so that everybody is going in one direction. Otherwise it's a free-for-all and then a sheer nightmare.

The stories you write about making the movies often seem to jibe with how the movies came out -- there's a difference between the confident casualness of "The Player" and the more frantic air surrounding Altman's later "Prêt-à-Porter."

Yet the actual experience of making both those Altman films was a fantastically good time. You were surrounded by every movie star you might wish to meet, people you might only have seen on a postage stamp; on every corner there was someone you knew by name and legend. "The Player" was on very sure ground, based on a novel by an insider (Michael Tolkin), made by a movie director who had been working in and out of Hollywood for 40 years, peopled by the great community of actors in Hollywood. And suddenly, in "Prêt-à-Porter," you've got the same setup trying to do to the fashion industry what it did to the workings of Hollywood. Maybe it was a kind of naiveti to say that those same principles could apply to an easy target with such an obvious parallel to movies as the fashion industry. But "Prêt-à-Porter" wasn't based on a novel to begin with; there wasn't a similar spine or structure within which Altman could work his variations on fame, celebrity, Hollywood, whatever. But you can say that only in hindsight.

You also worked for Coppola in "Bram Stoker's Dracula"; you depict him as being, in certain ways, as open as Altman, but to an entirely different effect.

Absolutely right. Coppola had a very large budget, and it was a project that he had not initiated. Winona Ryder had come to him with it. And the pressure on Coppola to produce a commercially successful film at that point was much more dominant than for Altman. That affects how you operate. "Dracula" was being done in a studio. Everything past the rehearsals was precisely detailed and worked out; rehearsals were videotaped beforehand. We then had a break of three weeks before we came in and shot the revised version of the movie. That is in complete contrast to Altman, who is more like, "Let's shoot the rehearsals, and make a movie out of that." Altman accommodates or relishes the fact that things go wrong. When I asked Andy Garcia about Coppola in preparation for working with him, he said, "Francis works in an atmosphere of contained chaos, controlled chaos." Even if he's asking for something collaborative or extreme, something we haven't tried before -- it's still within a kind of controlled environment, which is not the same thing as Altman does, where he does quite literally go tangentially off and say, "What have we got to lose, we may find something here."

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