Introductions: Lee Grant Introduces herself and Altman

INT: What are you doing now?
RA: I run a company, instigate my own films. We've got several projects in the process now. You never know which one is going to… These are like cooking pomme frites, whichever one pops to surface is one that's done and on you go. [INT: What's PAINT?] PAINT, is a film, Cain and Abel melodrama set today in NY in contemporary art world. Our normal plan, we'd be finishing about now, but we never could get the last bit of the financing in. Still going, now SALMA HAYEK got a big paying job so I said you got to go take it. Not available until the Spring. My experience tells me that when you push things off, they tend to dissipate.

INT: So to get your films on, you have to hustle?
RA: Oh yes, absolutely. One, we have to do them for real independent budget. I don’t think I've made a film nor do I think I would make a film that's going to go out on mass release. They're smaller films and they don't return, don't see them in 20 million dollars, major studios, major distributors are interested in that constant turnover. It's difficult for me to get a film made. Same with many film directors and producers that are in same category. [INT: That's a choice that you made?] It's a choice but I can't make the other choice. [INT: Why?] Because I'd be late for work. Most of the scripts they send me are studio scripts, I'd be embarrassed to be associated with them. Nothing I can do but radically change them which these people don't want. What I've learned is that I make gloves and they sell shoes. We're not really in the same business. They don't want what I've got because they can't market it in the right manner, and I don't want what they've got. Not bad blood, it's just that we're not in the same business, we don't do same thing.

INT: Some newsman asked you what retirement means, and you said death. Talk about that.
RA: Well, the main joy in my life, main impetus, is making these films and I just love the process and the doing of it so, when people say you can retire, I never had to do it except for my own desire. It's my makeup, it's become me. Death is the only ending I know about. Truth in the content of the films I make. People say, does this have a happy ending, and I say no, but we can make a happy stopping place. They're just stopping places, death, that's an ending.

INT: Talk to me about SHORT CUTS. My favorite film.
RA: SHORT CUTS, I was on a plane coming back or going someplace and I asked my office, give me something to read, I like to read short stories, kind of off beat things. They gave me anthology of RAYMOND CARVER's stories. These are fantastic. By time I got off plane, I just jumped into it. Decided to take several of the short stories which are so minimal and put them together in the way SHORTCUTS was. As we got into it and developed it, CARVER been dead a year or 2. I went to TESS GALLAGHER, his wife, and she said great. I said I don't want to do these stories literally. Title should say based on writing of CARVER. I wanted it to be a general ambience, non spectacular people. As we developed it it grew. I wrote the screenplay. FRANK BARHYDT wrote things with me, he and I put this maze together on a big board with different colored cards and dots so you could stand back and say there's too much color red here. We constructed that the way you would a painting. Way POLLOCK painted.

RA: There are things in that film that people would never notice that relate to CARVER stories. There's a scene that on the street, father and his son pushing a bicycle, walking across street, father has black eye. That we took from that story about father who goes over and beats other father up because of an argument over a baseball bat. Biggest criticism is I changed them, real CARVER fans... it's like when I did LONG GOOD BYE, RAYMOND CHANDLER fans said you changed CHANDLER and PHILIP MARLOWE can't be a serious work and not good work. If something's very dear to you and someone comes along and changes it, you don't like that. But, I wasn't trying to interpret either CARVER or CHANDLER, I was saying this is how it looks to me.

INT: That opening scene with the helicopter spraying the pesticide, where did that come from?
RA: I don't remember. There was a lot of that going on at that time. In the news. I moved it to LA, he wrote about smaller communities in Northwest. I moved it all to LA because to me LA had a mish mash of everything. All kinds of cultures. Your grandmother didn't live there. Anything that occurred to me that seemed compelling, I'd say do that.

INT: And JULIANNE MOORE standing there half naked?
RA: No that was my own concept. I don't know where that came from but I remember originally… That idea came to me and I went to her, there's this scene, but for you to play it requires that you do about a 5 minutes scene naked from the waist down and she said I don't think I can do that. I'll be naked but I can't stand there and do those lines. I said don't worry about it so I gave her another part. MADELEINE STOWE. She was so on this thing. She ended up playing the sister of MOORE. I couldn't get her to keep her clothes on because she had to prove to me and herself. I called JULIANNE MOORE who I had not worked with, had interviewed her for THE PLAYER, didn't cast her because too glamorous for the character but was impressed. She was always in my mind, I called her. She said I could do that. I have a bonus. I really am a redhead.

INT: What was the compulsion for you to do that scene, to have a woman half naked from the waist down, drying her skirt and arguing with her husband?
RA: Not just that, but she's confessing to sleeping with another man. To me it was the fodder of these people. The things we take so seriously and so unseriously. I can't explain this. It's an ambiance. It tells the audience that she's talking about a sexual assignation that she had with a friend of theirs, and she's standing there naked, it transcended what the argument was about, the argument was about you're not supposed to do that in front of other people, but she can walk around naked in her own house. This is the way their lives are and the fact that in the middle of this situation this marital argument comes up, it just seemed right to me. I really took the part away from MADELEINE.

INT: Did the image come to you from your life or from some image like a canvas?
RA: I don’t know. I remember when it occurred I had to envision the set or space where she was standing above him so that her crotch was on the same eye level as he was and it started with that. And we ended up shooting it that way. The set we used, step up from where he was, like he was on a stage almost. Those are the real stuff of all the detailing that goes into all of this kind of art. It's not important that particular thing happened. It's important that it occurred. Whatever the occurrence is the reason for doing the film in the first place. Audience saying I don't know what's happening but it's sure right, I believe it. This thing of having a Q & A, why did she do this, oh she did that because of this, all of that bullshit that we go through with critics and people who analyze films, none of it is true, it's in vapor.

RA: The thing that has affected my work more than probably anything was the opening chapter of WYNNESBURG OHIO, SHERWOOD HENDERSON book, old man is sitting there writing, can hardly get up, writes 5 words a day, writes the truth is elusive. I'm paraphrasing. Truth is something that floats freely and the minute you grasp it, minute you capture the truth and bring it into your bosom, it becomes an untruth and you become grotesque and his book was about people who were grotesque. They didn't let the truth exist. Everything that is in our human nature that is despicable, all the awful things we're capable of, come from trying to say ah this is the truth.