The series so far:

• Introduction

• And Now for Something Completely Different (1971)

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

• The Making of Life of Brian

• Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)

We now come to the only film in this series that I’ve never seen before. While Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982) isn’t generally considered part of the Python cinematic canon, it is a theatrically released feature film starring Monty Python, so the completionist in me feels compelled to cover it.

Despite — or, more accurately because of — the controversy, Life of Brian (1979) was the number one film at the American box office in late September and early October 1979. It grossed $20 million at the American box office alone on a budget of about $4 million. However, an expensive marketing campaign and creative Hollywood accounting meant that the Pythons made no profit on the film.

“The disillusion with Hollywood and all things to do with Warners and Brian,” Michael Palin writes in a February 1980 diary entry, “leads us into thinking how nice it would be to do a small-budget film just for the fun of it.” They decided to combine footage of their upcoming Hollywood Bowl performances with material from two 1972 West German television specials into what Palin calls “a quick, cheap movie.”

In the documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut), the Pythons — and honorary Pythons Carol Cleveland and Neil Innes — recall the four September 1980 Hollywood Bowl shows as triumphs. They performed for their largest ever live audiences, who dressed up as favorite characters and puffed out clouds of marijuana smoke.

While the intention was a quick, cheap movie, editing footage of these shows into a feature — primarily the work of longtime Python collaborator Julian Doyle — was a fairly protracted process, with multiple cuts that did not meet the Pythons’ approval. Filmed on videotape and initially intended to be a cable television special, early versions of Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl seemed to miss a certain cinematic quality.

“All of us feel the sense of occasion is lacking,” Michael Palin writes in a November 1980 diary entry. “It is, after all, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl and at the moment it’s just Python Live Against Black Drapes.” He goes on to mention that multiple Pythons were against releasing it as a feature film. 10 months later, in September 1981, he describes the four Pythons’ reaction to a new cut: “all agree it isn’t right. Main criticisms – links, atmosphere, shapelessness.” Finally, he approves of a January 1982 cut that he calls “greatly improved.”

The film eventually came out in June of that year. It disappointed at the American box office, grossing just $327,000 in its limited release. As Palin notes in his diary, it faced tough competition; June 1982’s highest grossing releases included blockbusters like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Rocky III, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Poltergeist. Another factor has to be the reality — then and now — that documentaries rarely get the same attention or ticket sales as fiction films.

Finally, it was also probably overshadowed by other Python-related projects in the early 90s. A year earlier, George Harrison’s HandMade films released Time Bandits (1981), which was directed by Gilliam, cowritten by Gilliam and Palin, featured Palin and Cleese in supporting roles. Gilliam’s first non-Python feature Jabberwocky (1977, which starred Palin, received a theatrical rerelease in summer 1982 that put it in direct competition with Hollywood Bowl. The 1981 Amnesty International benefit show The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball — directed by Cleese, featuring Cleese, Chapman and Innes — was commemorated with two albums (one for music, one for comedy) and its own 1982 theatrical documentary.

So Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl faded out of the spotlight and remains overshadowed by the other four Python movies. Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut), for instance, uses footage from the film but only in the context of the Hollywood Bowl shows themselves; no talking head mentions the existence of a theatrically released feature documentary.

But what about the film itself?

The obvious critique of Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl is that it looks and feels less like a film and more like an HBO comedy special. Shot competently on video by tv director Terry Hughes, it lacks the cinematic quality that elevated Life of Brian, Holy Grail and even And Now for Something Completely Different.

Those movies generated comedy by playing with the medium itself: by spoofing genre cliches, by breaking the fourth wall, by subverting audience expectations about basic aspects of the cinematic experience like openings credits, intermissions and endings.

Live at the Hollywood Bowl does none of this. Its most cinematically interesting moment comes at the very beginning, in a montage of Python fans (some in homemade costumes) finding their seats, drinking cocktails, waving tiny British flags and holding up signs. It’s a nice documentary glimpse at the OG American Monty Python fandom, a time capsule.

Other than that, Hollywood Bowl is just live Python sketches and songs interspersed with decade-old tv footage and the occasional Terry Gilliam animated segment. Which of course means that it’s still weirder and funnier than most comedy films.

One interesting aspect is the frequency of American references, many of them apparently ad-libbed: jokes about Ronald Reagan, nuclear missiles, the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale and celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli. While playing an over-the-top Australian stereotype, Eric Idle quips that he sticks to Foster’s because American beer is like making love in a canoe: fucking close to water.

In the introduction to this series, I emphasized that filmmaking was just one facet of Monty Python; this film really demonstrates their skill as live performers, which isn’t something you can say of most auteurs post-Chaplin and Keaton. The five British Pythons began on the stage and Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl represents a return to their roots. It also represents an illustration of each Python’s individual personality. Blogger and podcaster (and Substacker!) once aptly described how each member combined to into larger-scale creative chemistry:

Flying Circus is built on the tension between the traditional, rigorously logical sketches of Graham Chapman and John Cleese and the shaggy, absurdist sensibility of Terry Jones and Michael Palin. These two partnerships had tensions of their own: Cleese maintains that he did most of the heavy-lifting, with Chapman serving as a sounding-board who contributed occasional off-the-wall ideas…

The two other members wrote alone. Eric Idle specialized in wordplay (“The Man Who Speaks in Anagrams”) and comic monologues; is said to have been skillful at shaping the shows; was largely responsible for the group’s musical output; and had the most flair for showbiz. Terry Gilliam’s cut-out animations gave Python a visual identity that has no parallel in any other comedy troupe.

Thus Cleese stars in the “Albatross” sketch that rigorously, logically explores the interaction between an albatross vendor (Cleese) and a customer who wants ice cream. (“What flavor is it?” “It’s an albatross, isn’t it? It’s not any bloody flavor! It’s bloody albatross flavor, bleedin’ seabird bleedin’ flavor.”) Chapman stars in some of the film’s most off-the-wall moments, including a bravura bit of physical comedy in which he plays a professional wrestler in a match against himself. Palin and Jones (in drag) star in an absurd sketch about a dead bishop that abruptly transitions into “The Lumberjack Song,” which they cowrote. Idle leads a crowd singalong of “Bruces’ Philosophers Song,” about the drinking habits of famous philosophers, and Gilliam plays supporting roles and provides a few original animated links between segments.

I’ve compared Monty Python to a rock band throughout this series. If And Now For Something Completely Different was a Monty Python’s Flying Circus greatest hits compilation, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl is their live album. And, like quite a few classic rock live albums, it was released as something of stopgap while the group was busy working on their next original project.

Less than a year after its release, the last — and possibly most Pythonesque — Monty Python movie came out and won the Grand Prix at Cannes. I invite you to join me next time for the conclusion to this series, my look at Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), which will hopefully serve as the Substack equivalent of a wafer-thin mint after this Monty Python feast.

is a creature and prosthetics performer whose credits include Nightmare Alley (2021) and Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023). As someone whose work involves physically transforming into other human and nonhuman characters, she is a perfect guest for a special Halloween edition of Conversations with Filmmakers. (She’s also a Substacker; you can read her writing here.)

In this interview, we discuss her experience playing Zizi the Pinhead in Nightmare Alley, her origin story as a performer, and her dream role.

You describe yourself as a creature and prosthetic performer.

Yes. There’s a distinction there because, a lot of the time, the characters you play aren’t necessarily monstrous. Or even non-human. For instance, when I was cast in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, that was a full prosthetic transformation. But I wasn’t playing a creature. I was playing someone with a medical condition called microcephaly. Also, I was playing a man.

So I like to say prosthetics performer, because sometimes there are roles where I’m required to transform from head to toe. This one was head to waist, so everything from the waist up was covered, save for my eyes. I wore fake teeth.

How did you approach playing your character in Nightmare Alley?

Luckily, there was this actual person it was loosely based on. You might know a version of him. The performer’s name was Schlitzie; he was a famous carnival performer and was also in an exploitation film called Freaks (1932).

The makeup artist Mike Hill told me to go and watch Freaks and copy all those mannerisms, since you are Schlitzie. That was my audition, actually. I had to do a scene, a little moment that Schlitzie has in Freaks. Basically, I had to move like him, and know his mannerisms, his postures. Luckily, I had plenty of material to work with.

During COVID, there were delays and rewrites, and most of my scenes were removed, save for one that got moved to the end. I was originally going to be featured more prominently, especially in the first half. We loved that character. Mike especially is fond of Schlitzie. He did so much digging and provided me so many notes and other materials. It was important to him because that was his makeup at the end of the day. It was an honor to be a collaborator, to be the person that puts the makeup on, to be the person that gives life and a heart to this personification.

You’ve also played very nonhuman characters. How do approach playing a character that’s very different than a human being?

I think it comes down to what am I playing? For instance, if I’m cast as a zombie, one of my first easy questions to give casting and the makeup department is are we talking World War Z or The Walking Dead? I’m a zombie, but what kind? There have been so many iterations of zombies. Am I really, really fast and freshly dead? Or have I been dead for years? And I’m just lumbering?

I just need to know what I’m playing. I’ll ask the writers and director, and then look at the makeup, or any concept art or maquettes if I’m privy to those. Then I ask about anatomy. Would you say it’s lower body dominant or upper body dominant? Because that’s going to affect my posture. Then I have to fill in the blanks with history. I’ll ask. How old are they? Am I playing a child or an adult? When I say this line, or do this gesture, should I be familiar and affectionate, or aggressive?

It sounds like you have a true empathy for the creatures you play.

You know, that’s what gives me an advantage compared to some other people who do this. I have been made to feel like a monster in my life. That gives me a sense of empathy because I know what it’s like to feel different. I know what it’s like to walk in an atmosphere that’s not native to you.

I take that experience and turn it into a creative skill. I actually spoke with someone recently and they said that, for some of us who do this kind of work, it’s very therapeutic. There’s this catharsis when you get permission to celebrate the fact that you’re different. You’re allowed to find that humanity in your character, regardless of whether or not you’re human. Playing these monsters is a form of shadow work, because you have to embrace that darkness or that aspect of yourself that was born from survival.

I think of the late stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, who insisted on calling his characters creatures instead of monsters.

I’m a fan of Harryhausen, because he would go method, like he did with Mighty Joe Young when he ate nothing but bananas and salads to try to get into the mindset of the creature he was animating. And I agree, I don’t like to use the word ‘monsters.’ Sometimes I do, but at the core I don’t see them as embodiments of evil. I could do a whole lecture on this … these creatures were constructs man made to understand the unknown. Our way of explaining things, but they came from our nightmares, our collective unconscious. So at the end of the day I don’t see them as purely destructive or nefarious.

Speaking of Harryhausen, I actually saw the new Odyssey movie and thought of him because there was a brilliant moment in the cyclops scene. The cyclops Polyphemus eats one of the members of Odysseus’s crew and there’s this moment I love, because it shows so much humanity, where he makes this disgusted face and spits part of it out. This isn’t your typical monster biting off a head. It shows that this character has an appetite, has maybe his own favorite flavors.

That’s what Harryhausen would do with his monsters. They feel natural, because they’re scratching their backs or cocking their heads. They’re exploring their environment. I think that’s what’s lost at times with modern CGI. That’s an age-old discussion, but at the end of the day what I do is find those moments of humanity.

How did you become a prosthetics and creature performer?

That came after I pursued acting. I was just at a low point where I wasn’t feeling any joy. I wasn’t having fun anymore acting and I couldn’t articulate what I was searching for, just that I didn’t want to be human.

So I was 16 years old and I was asked to play Samara, the girl from The Ring, at my old elementary school’s haunted house. They knew me because I had long hair almost down to my waist and I’m petite. I’m 4 foot 9 and I think I peaked when I was a freshman in high school. So they asked me, and I thought, what have I got to lose?

It was fun and I realized, wait a minute, I like that I’m very physical and I get to be something that’s not human. There’s something powerful about that. I wasn’t a contortionist then, but I had done yoga for many years, so I was already very bendy, I can do the Exorcist back crawl. So I put a bit of Regan into Amara and crawled out of the fake well and creeped people out.

That kind of opened the door. I went to a convention in Burbank called Monsterpalooza and met a gentlemen there named Frank Woodward, who was promoting a documentary he’d done called Men in Suits, about the art of suit performance, specifically creature performance. They interviewed people like Doug Jones, who is the modern-day Lon Chaney. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are shorter than me, some are extremely tall. There’s a handful of women who do this, but it’s primarily male-oriented.

I really dove deep and made my own curriculum, because there was no school for creature work. There are, nowadays. Workshops across L.A. But they’re few and far between and, for the most part, I had no contracts. I would cold call makeup shops.

And how do you make a good pitch? How do you get over your social awkwardness? How do you like speaking to myself? How do I, an introvert, masquerade as an extrovert and sound confident that I can do this? Because I had an acting background. I did theater, and I even took an acting for film class, but I had no credits to my name.

It was years of pro bono work of me shooting all sorts of weird projects that the people who even made them are just gone. Like, they’ve fallen off the face of the earth, things that were supposed to just be YouTube shorts, like short films. I did a pilot where I didn’t make any money, but I was filming with SAG actors. So that’s how I even got qualified to join the union I was working with.

I happened to be at the right place at the right time, and Mike Hill saw me and he thought, “Hmm, I’m looking for someone to play the pinhead who’s also a good actor and can handle makeup. How about her?” And he took a big chance, but I still had to audition.

And it was down between me and a Canadian local, because they wanted to say, “we don’t want to fly out someone from California to do this in Toronto.” It was down to this: who’s willing to shave their head? … they weren’t. I was. So my hair, again, was very, very long, and I said, I’ll do it, because hair grows back. Opportunities like this are once in a lifetime, at least for actors, and at least for working with someone like Guillermo del Toro.

In a previous interview, you identified the xenomorph from Alien as your dream role.

Because it’s a unique creature with a biology, a life cycle. You go from the egg to the facehugger to the chestburster to the adult xenomorph, and then, like, insects, they have a queen.

they’re an insect colony, they have a hive mind, and I have read some expanded material where they inherit memories, so there’s this whole hatred for Ellen Ripley, not on a moral level, it’s just that human’s blood, or that scent, or whatever, we remember you. We remember that you are an enemy of our kind.

It is elegant but terrifying. It’s androgynous. It’s a little sexual but also sinister. It can literally get under your skin if we’re talking the chestbursters. It’s elegant but horrifying, and I love that combination in a monster. I love looking at how they move and navigate. it’s something very juicy I’d want to sink my teeth into, and now I have a very bold side of me that says challenge accepted because we’ve had very tall performers embody them. No one at four feet nine inches tall has ever done that.

Why can’t we have a four foot nine xenomorph?

Exactly. And think about forced perspective or different camera angles fitting them in an interesting spot that is really hard to shove a nearly 7-foot-tall man into. Maybe you’re showing me as a xenomorph before it grew to its full height, not that I always have to be playing infantile or juvenile characters. There are so many ideas.

The series so far:

• Introduction

• And Now for Something Completely Different (1971)

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

• The Making of Life of Brian

While writing about film on Substack, I often run into a question of balance: of analyzing the film itself vs. looking at the broader cultural context. Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979) is particularly tricky because it was undoubtedly a cultural event which became a culture war battlefield in multiple countries, pitting religious moral guardians against free speech advocates.

As I mentioned in the last post, Life of Brian was banned in Ireland, Norway, South Africa, Chile, Malaysia and Singapore. “And it was suppressed throughout the United Kingdom,” Kliph Nesteroff writes in Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars. “Screenings were forbidden in Birkenhead, Brynmawr, Cornwall, East Devon, Haverfordwest, Harrogate, Pontypridd, Swansea, and Whitehaven.”

In the United States, Catholic, Jewish, evangelical and interfaith groups condemned the film. In South Carolina, a Presbyterian minister pressured Senator Strom Thurmond to get the film banned in that state. Thurmond in turned put pressure on the General Cinema theater chain to suspend screenings, which they did. In an October 23 New York Times article, Wendell Rawls Jr. describes an anti-Life of Brian protest at the film’s opening night and a much larger pro-free speech protest against cancelling screening.

It’s important to mention that second protest because the Pythons received a wave of support alongside all the criticism. If controversy around Life of Brian anticipates the last several decades of debate about political correctness and acceptable comedic targets, it also anticipates the large audience for provocative, boundary-pushing humor. In late September and early October, American moviegoers made Life of Brian the #1 movie at the box office; made for about $4 million, it grossed more than $20 million in the United States alone. In the UK, Life of Brian was the year’s fifth highest grossing movie despite various local bans.

As Terry Gilliam notes in the cumbersomely titled documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut), many — perhaps most — of the film’s harshest critics had never seen it. But the endlessly repeated talking point about it being a blasphemous mockery of the life and passion of Jesus Christ shaped the public discourse, aided by related concerns about its parody of first century Judaism.

The late Gene Siskel — a devout Jew who took his faith and identity very seriously —gave probably the best possible riposte to many of these critiques in Siskel and Ebert’s 1979 review of Life of Brian. “I feel bad having to defend it,” he tells Ebert.

I wonder about religious leaders who say things like this. Do they think that people who have deep, personal religious faith will have that faith shaken by a 90-minute movie? How shallow, how patronizing, how insulting to people of faith. This is a funny picture.

The best remembered moment of the Life of Brian controversy is the November 1979 BBC2 Friday Night, Saturday Morning tag team debate between Pythons John Cleese and Michael Palin and the duo of conservative commentator Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop of Southwark Mervyn Stockwood.

Part of it is that this debate looks and feels like a Monty Python sketch. The situation sounds like a comedian’s setup: an Anglican bishop, a conservative Christian, two Pythons and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lyricist Tim Rice walk into a tv studio…

And the debate occurs on an impossibly tacky tropical-themed set with bamboo furniture, potted palm trees and a sunset seascape with distant islands painted onto the back wall. Rice apparently gives up on moderating the discussion early in the show to instead just let the two tag teams argue.

The Pythonesque twist is that the comedians come across as normal people making reasonable arguments about free speech, independent thought and their artistic intentions, whereas Stockwood and Muggeridge come across as Pythonesque characters who speak in over-the-top posh headmaster voices and play to the crowd with quips and attempted zingers. Stockwood, Michael Palin writes in his diary, “posed and preened and pontificated.”1

In that debate, Malcolm Muggeridge predicts the Life of Brian would soon be forgotten. He was wrong, and in hindsight the Pythons clearly won the war. In the 21^st century, Life of Brian regularly shows up on greatest comedies and even greatest films of all-time listd. In 2023, Empire magazine ranked the 100 greatest British films of all time. Life of Brian finished second only to Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

And both Christians and religious scholars have increasingly embraced it, as illustrated by the second quote I used to open this post. Richard Burridge, the author of that quote, falls into both of those categories and contributed to Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a collection of essays from Biblical scholars about the connections between the film and its historical setting. John Cleese has described the Jesus and Brian project, which began as a 2014 King’s College London academic conference, as “the most interesting thing to come out of Monty Python.” Instead of being condemned, Life of Brian has now been seriously studied as a work deeply engaged with the life of Jesus, the Jewish identity of Jesus, and the historical and political context of first century Judaea.

That seems like a perfect place to end this preamble and move on to the film itself.

Like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian opens by creating and then subverting expectations. We see a starry night sky, hear a heavenly choir, and then follow the three magi as they ride camels across the desert, arrive at a town and enter a manger. We’re in a world of classic Nativity iconography. Then, however, they encounter the newborn Brian’s shrill, blunt mother Mandy (Terry Jones) and — after an unpleasant conversation — realize that they’ve come to the wrong manger. They take back their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh and proceed to the correct manger, where haloed Mary and Joseph stand over the Christ Child in a scene right out of a Christmas card. That is the film in miniature.

Crucially, it establishes that Brian is not Jesus Christ, which lays a foundation for much of the rest of the film’s comedy. Jesus was not the only Jewish messiah claimant or apocalyptic prophet in first century Judaea; multiple contemporary Jewish leaders either claimed that title or were called a messianic figure by their followers. In the words of religious scholar Nathan C. Johnson, “the popular messianic uprisings in Roman-period Palestine demonstrate the potency of apocalyptic dreams in action… even if the ends of these movements resulted in catastrophe for these would-be kings and their followers.”

What makes Life of Brian both funny and ultimately not blasphemous is our understanding that Brian is not Jesus but a failed messianic figure, someone who never wanted that role in the first place and whose life certainly ends catastrophically. It’s funny that he is in fact particularly inept as both a prophet and an anti-Roman revolutionary but is nonetheless followed by a throng of desperate, credulous people. As Burridge suggests in a quote I used to open this piece, the comedy comes from the contrast between the idiocy and cruelty in the foreground and our knowledge that some version of Jesus Christ is rising above it somewhere offscreen.

I haven’t really talked about Terry Gilliam’s animated Python sequences in this series so far. Let me do that now. The Life of Brian opening credits — set to a pastiche of Shirley Bassey’s Bond themes — represent some of Gilliam’s best work as an animator, a fantasia of Roman art and architecture complete with crumbling temples and flying Constantine heads. As another playful take on familiar iconography, it provides a perfect bridge from the pre-credits sequence into a film that constantly presents archetypal situations — gladiators in the coliseum, traders at a near eastern bazaar, a desert hermit, the crucifixion — and twists them in surprising directions.

The bigger budget then becomes immediately apparent as we seen a column of extras (some leading camels) marching across the desert in a scene with David Lean grandeur. They’re headed to the Sermon on the Mount, where Kenneth Colley plays Jesus Christ completely straight, delivering the Beatitudes straight out of the Gospel of Matthew. But we quickly cut away to the farthest reaches of the crowd, including adult Brian (Graham Chapman) and his mother, who mishear and misinterpret Jesus’s teachings. Eventually Mandy decides that the sermon is too boring and leads her son away to the much more exciting activity of watching blasphemers getting stoned to death.

I named this publication after a Hieronymus Bosch painting; Life of Brian makes me think of another Bosch painting, Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns) at London’s National Gallery. Jesus Christ exits The Life of Brian after the Sermon on the Mount and it’s as if we’re left with cinematic equivalents of the four somewhat sinister, somewhat grotesque tormentors seen below:

Bilge Ebiri aptly describes this aspect of Life of Brian in his Criterion Collection essay. The film, he writes, has a

casual approach to the unspeakable horrors of its world. The offhandedness speaks to the film’s real disgust, evident in several moments throughout: the bodies of slaves and gladiators lying in pieces on a coliseum floor; the slapstick spectacle of a stoning, in which merely uttering the word Jehovah produces an immediate hail of rocks, no matter the speaker; the almost industrial efficiency of crucifixion, with a patient bureaucrat (Palin) politely confirming the fate of each of the condemned before sending all of them off to march through the streets of Jerusalem.

This is a world where street vendors sell both stones to be used to ritualistically stone others to death and fake beards for women who want to participate incognito. Where an ‘ex-leper’ complains about being miraculously cured by Jesus Christ because it ruined his business as a beggar and a Judaean condemned to death demands a segregated crucifixion with no Samaritans allowed.2

Another painter comes to mind when I think about Life of Brian: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who in his early career painted busy, satirical, occasionally scatological genre scenes of towns crowded with fools, gluttons, drunkards and charlatans. My strongest impression from this viewing of The Life of Brian was of hustle and bustle, of a crowd of people engaged in frantic, generally self-interested activity: throwing stones, haggling in the bazaar, insulting each other, plotting rebellions, denigrating rival rebel factions over minor ideological differences, sneaking around, and, above all, chasing after Brian down corridors, up staircases, through crowded bazaars and across the desert.

Before Life of Brian, Graham Chapman’s most iconic roles were the Colonel in Monty Python’s Flying Circus and King Arthur in Holy Grail, two pompous authority figures exasperated by the silliness around them. Brian is a very different character, a bewildered, beleaguered everyman stretched thin and on the run. Bilge Ebiri is again insightful:

So many of the episodes in Brian’s life play like boyhood terrors. He finds out his father wasn’t his father after all. He finds himself unwittingly taking the place of a wannabe prophet and struggling to come up with coherent things to say, as the small crowd starts expressing its doubt and disapproval. Then, when he leaves a sentence unfinished, that same crowd becomes convinced that he’s actually holding back secret wisdom and that he is a prophet, chasing him through the streets and obsessively hanging on his every word. Every step of the way, Brian finds himself incapable of dealing with the rules of the world around him.

Yes, Life of Brian is, to a great extent, a series of sketches in the Python tradition: a gladiator winning by running away until his opponent keels over from a cardiac arrest; John Cleese’s centurion giving Brian an impromptu Latin grammar lesson at swordpoint; Pontius Pilate attempting to defend the dignity of his friend Biggus Dickus.

But Chapman effectively links the film together with his performance. He creates probably the most sympathetic, compelling and even tragic character in the Python canon.

This tragicomedy ends in an absurdly uplifting way. The Gospels offer, in addition to everything else, a series of cosmic jokes: that the first will be last and the last will be first, that the scruffy, itinerant rabbi riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is a greater, truer king than the emperor in Rome, that death itself is just a flesh wound. A film that ends with condemned prisoners singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from their crucifixes is in some sense profoundly congruent with that message.

The series so far:

• Introduction

• And Now for Something Completely Different (1971)

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

In 2026, when the surviving Pythons are elderly men, Monty Python can seem safe, familiar, established in the canons of Boomer nostalgia and nerd fandom.

But Monty Python was once truly dangerous, truly transgressive.

I won’t bury the lede here. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) was banned in multiple countries including Ireland, Norway, South Africa, Chile, Malaysia and Singapore. It was picketed by priests, nuns, rabbis and evangelicals. In the U.K., various local councils banned it. In the United States, a faction led by Senator Strom Thurmond tried to ban it in South Carolina, starting a counterwave of pro-free speech protests. A spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York condemned it as “an act of blasphemy;” an American Jewish organization labeled it “a crime against religion.”

That’s already a lot to talk about, and covering

• the lives of the Pythons c.1975-1977,

• the development and production of Life of Brian,

• the film itself,

• the culture war it catalyzed and

• its lasting legacy

is simply too much for one reasonably sized post. So I’m splitting it into two, with this post covering everything up to the film’s theatrical release.

While promoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), the Pythons were frequently asked about their next movie. As a joke, Eric Idle began telling reporters that it would be called Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory. That joke grew into something more as the other Pythons began seriously considering the possibilities of a New Testament spoof.

“We decided that our next film would be ‘Monty Python and the Life of Christ,’” Michael Palin writes in a March 1975 diary entry.1 But that idea soon ran into a roadblock. As John Cleese has explained on multiple occasions, he sees Pythonesque comedy as essentially satirical, as essentially concerned with mocking human hypocrisy, stupidity, inflexibility, pomposity and conformity. As the Pythons read the Gospels, they realized that none of this applied to Jesus Christ.

However, first century Judaea — colonized by the Roman Empire and gripped by what Michael Palin terms “Messiah fever — seemed like fertile comedic territory to be tilled when they reunited. The Pythons decided to put the project on the back burner and pursue (mostly) individual solo projects.

• Graham Chapman fell into the orbit of fellow heavy drinkers Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson, two of the notorious Hollywood Vampires. He cowrote and starred in the now-forgotten dark comedy The Odd Job (1978), which was originally intended to feature Moon; Moon’s eventually fatal addiction prevented him from participating in the project. Chapman also cowrote a BBC pilot, Out of the Trees, with future The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams.

• John Cleese created and starred in the BAFTA-winning comedy series Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), which was actually ranked above Monty Python’s Flying Circus — and as the greatest British television show of all time — on a 2000 BFI top 100 list. It was inspired by a hotel the Pythons had stayed at while shooting Monty Python’s Flying Circus on location in Torquay, Devon. Cleese would later describe that hotel’s owner as “the rudest man I’d ever come across in my life;” his own character Basil Fawlty treats guests with “fawning, condescension or outright contempt” depending their perceived social status.

• Eric Idle created a new BBC2 sketch comedy show, Rutland Weekend Television (1975-1976.) He expanded its most famous sketch, the Beatles parody The Rutles, into the mockumentary All You Need Is Cash (1978), which featured various celebrity cameos including George Harrison. The Rutles themselves were played by Idle, frequent Python collaborator Neil Innes, John Halsey, and former Beach Boys drummer Ricky Fataar.

• Terry Gilliam made his solo directorial debut with Jabberwocky (1977), a film starring Michael Palin and very much in the vein of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Instead of the grail quest, it spoofs the classic hero’s journey: the plucky young man leaving home, slaying the monster and marrying the princess. It’s an uneven film, but fascinating as a fuller realization of the same muddy, disheveled pseudo-medieval atmosphere.

• Terry Jones and Michael Palin collaborated on another BBC2 comedy, Ripping Yarns (1976-1979), which spoofed early 20^th century British boy’s own adventure stories. Jones also pursued his serious scholarly interest in medieval history and literature by writing what became the nonfiction book Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (1980).

• Michael Palin starred in the previously mentioned Jabberwocky and Ripping Yarns. He also appeared in a 1975 BBC adaptation of Jerome K. Jerome’s classic comedy novel Three Men in a Boat alongside the late Tim Curry. He also continued to write the daily diary that I frequently draw from in this series.

The Pythons (sans Idle) reunited in April 1976 to perform in the first of a series of Amnesty International benefits that would later be known as The Secret Policeman’s Ball. The project was spearheaded by Cleese and would go on to inspire Bono, Sting, Bob Geldof and other musicians to get involved in charity fundraising.

Three days after the last Amnesty show, the full lineup flew to New York for a month’s long residence at Manhattan’s City Center. On the 28^th, they met to discuss the film. Cleese proposed a new title, The Gospel According to Saint Brian, and a general plotline about a forgotten thirteenth apostle who was always late to key events in the life of Jesus. They continued to work on and off on the script — in between their other projects — throughout 1976 and 1977.

In his diary, Palin records two key developments in November 1976. On the 18^th, he describes a writing meeting, noting that

The sketches or fragments, which work least well at the moment are those which deal directly with the events or characters described in the Gospels… The way the material is developing it looks as though the peripheral world is the most rewarding, with Jesus unseen and largely unheard, though occasionally in the background.

On the 24^th, the Chapman-Cleese writing team pitched what would become one of the film’s most famous scenes, Romani ite domum or Romans Go Home, in which Cleese’s centurion corrects Brian’s Latin grammar and forces him to rewrite seditious graffiti all over the walls of Pontius Pilate’s palace to ensure that he learns proper Latin noun cases. (Cleese was inspired by an early job teaching Latin at a prep school.) Later that day, the Pythons rented a theater to watch clips from the Hollywood Biblical epics Ben-Hur (1959), King of Kings (1961), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

Both of these would shape Life of Brian. Contrary to public perception, Brian isn’t really a Christ analogue. Jesus Christ exists in the world of Life of Brian, which bookends its opening credits with the Nativity and the Sermon on the Mount. Brian only becomes an unintentional messianic figure about 55 minutes into the 93-minute runtime; before that, the plot is driven by the Judaean People’s Front and their mostly ineffective attempts at rebelling against the Roman occupation. As Palin notes, this film foregrounds the peripheral characters in the Gospel narratives: the beggars, the zealots, the Roman soldiers, the common people of Jerusalem.

Furthermore, it’s often specifically a parody of how midcentury Hollywood depicted that world. In Siskel & Ebert’s review, Gene Siskel describes Life of Brian as a parody “of Biblical movies, of the pictures that purport to tell the story of important religious figures, but always with a Hollywood cast of thousands.” That’s right on the money. As seen above, the Life of Brian poster is a clear homage to those movie posters, with their titles carved out of rock to suggest the cinematic equivalent of an ancient monument. The famous “I’m Brian” scene at the end of the film is a clear parody of an iconic scene in Spartacus (1960), And the only major character from the Gospels in Life of Brian is Michael Palin’s posh, lisping Pontius Pilate, a character in conversation with a Hollywood tradition of decadent Roman villains with upper-class English accents.

While Cleese wanted to play the title role, the other Pythons decided to go with Graham Chapman, partially because of Chapman’s performance in Holy Grail and partially because they knew how funny Cleese could be in various supporting roles. Chapman had a rough 1977 as his alcoholism precipitated a rapid downward spiral. He decided to get sober for two reasons, as his partner David Sherlock recalls in the documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut). First, because his doctor had warned him about his binge drinking’s potentially fatal consequences. And second, because as the actor playing the title role he felt a responsibility to the film’s cast and crew, and wanted to avoid a repeat of the debilitating withdrawals he had experienced while shooting Holy Grail.

So Graham Chapman drank alcohol for the last time in his life on Christmas 1977, checked into a hospital, and detoxed; he would remain sober until his death. Sobriety, Sherlock notes in the documentary, gave him a new energy, a new enthusiasm for life that he brought to Brian.

In January, the Pythons flew to Barbados to finalize the script, which they did in between visits from rock stars, including Keith Moon in the last year of his life. Terry Jones would direct, with Terry Gilliam creating animated segments, playing various minor roles and serving as the film’s art director. The film would be shot in Tunisia, where the Pythons could reuse still standing sets from the 1977 Franco Zeffirelli miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.

Securing funding was the next roadblock. On January 30^th, EMI offered to fully fund the project. A month later, they pulled that funding because chairman/chief executive Lord Delfont found the script offensive. The Pythons considered various alternative options, including a much cheaper film shot in Britain using stylizes sets and Welsh locations and recutting television material as a b-movie to play alongside All You Need Is Cash.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Holy Grail happened in large part because rock stars funded it. So did The Life of Brian. After EMI pulled out and American studios expressed zero interest, George Harrison stepped in at the last minute to fund the project because he was a Monty Python fan and just wanted to see the movie. As Eric Idle is very fond of saying, he essentially bought the most expensive movie ticket in history.

That decision began a second career for Harrison as one of the most important power players in 80s British cinema. Life of Brian was the very first release from his newly formed HandMade Films, which would go on to produce and/or distribute films like Time Bandits (1981), Mona Lisa (1986) and Withnail & I (1987).

Having secured funding, the Pythons and their collaborators traveled to Monastir, Tunisia to begin principal photography. Palin’s descriptions of the journey itself seem like the first seeds of his second career as a world traveler/documentary host/travel writer:

A long taxi drive from Tunis to Monastir as night fell. Impressions of aridity, emptiness, scrubland stretching away on either side of the road. A camel train tottering, or rather swaying, in that peculiarly restful camel motion, along a dried up river bed.

The team included cinematographer Peter Biziou, who would later shoot Time Bandits and The Truman Show (1998), as well as regular Python collaborator Carol Cleveland, Sue Jones-Davies (playing Judith) and Kenneth Colley (playing Jesus Christ.)

Graham Chapman, who graduated from medical school, served as the production doctor as well as playing Brian. “Graham is rapidly becoming a saint,” Palin writes in a September 19^th diary entry. Observing Chapman’s new lease on life since becoming sober, Palin calls him “a model of co-operation and efficiency… his avuncular presence is calm and reassuring.”

This set the tone for the rest of the cast and crew. In Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut), Terry Jones describes the filming of Life of Brian as a breeze; John Cleese calls it one of the happiest times of his life. Palin’s diary entries describe the platonic ideal of a working holiday, with hard but creative work punctuated by swimming (in both the hotel pool and the Mediterranean), eating, drinking, reading, playing tennis, sightseeing and walking on the beach.

Backed by George Harrison’s brand-new HandMade films, the Pythons had a much larger canvas to work on. “John Young, dressed in loin cloth, is being dragged to the stoning yard beneath the outer walls of the Ribat by a wonderfully dressed, swirling crowd,” Palin writes on September 16^th. “It’s an impressive, exciting, authentic Biblical crowd – and more than anything today gave me a sharp boost of confidence. This film could really be impressive.”

Tunisian locations included:

• the Ribat (old fort) of Monastir, which Palin describes as “built of very light, almost golden, local sandstone, with innumerable dark passageways and steep stone stairs”;

• The old city walls of Sousse;

• The desert around Matmata; and

• The ancient Roman baths and amphitheater at Carthage.

I’d like to end with those locations. In the previous post, I argued that the anachronistic silliness of Holy Grail works because it unfolds against a backdrop that feels authentically medieval. Life of Brian does this on a bigger scale.

Are we in Jerusalem? No, but these are historic — and in some cases, authentically ancient Roman — locations, weathered by centuries in the desert, that immediately create the right Biblical atmosphere to set off Pythonesque comedy.

The series so far:

• Introduction

• And Now for Something Completely Different (1971)

1973, Michael Palin writes in his last diary entry for that year, “saw the break-up of the Python group.”1 After three seasons of television, one feature film, two studio albums and one live album between 1969 and 1972, the Pythons had an even busier schedule in 1973:

• The writing and publication of The Brand New Monty Python Bok;

• The recording of their third studio album, The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief;

• Extensive live touring across the United Kingdom and Canada; and

• Their first appearances on U.S. television (The Midnight Special and The Tonight Show) in a second attempt to break into the American market.

“But all these projects,” Palin continues, “were, to a certain extent, Python cashing in on a comfortably receptive market, rather than breaking new ground.” The Pythons themselves were going in different directions, pursuing different solo projects. Palin and the late Terry Jones, for instance, cowrote a satirical take on children’s literature, Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls, which would be published in 1974.

More dramatically, John Cleese announced that he would not return for a fourth season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; he would instead create his own show, Fawlty Towers, which began airing in 1975. Inter-Python tensions were further exacerbated by Graham Chapman’s alcoholism, which had begun to seriously affect his onstage performances.

At the end of 1973, just one force held Monty Python together enough to prevent an official breakup: the promise of writing, directing and starring in their own original feature film. As the six Pythons worked on their script in autumn and winter of that year, however, it seemed that the project would die in development hell, as no one in the British film industry stepped up to fund it.

But, as Michael Palin records in his diary, Monty Python got the best possible Christmas present that December. Their management had connections with Pink Floyd’s management, who in turn helped convince rock stars and record executives to invest in the film. Almost 50 years later, Eric Idle would summarize the film’s financing in a Tweet:

Even better, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and other investors didn’t even ask to see a script; they saw the Pythons as peers and wanted them to enjoy complete creative freedom.

In February 1974, Monty Python assembled in London for a month of live shows at the Drury Lane Theatre; they recorded their second live album Live at Drury Lane on the final night of that run. In April they headed north to cold, misty Scotland to begin production on their second feature film.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail began with a Jones and Palin idea for a Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch about low-budget knights using coconuts to imitate the sound of horse hooves. Influenced by Terry Jones (who studied Chaucer at Cambridge and would later be posthumously described as “the world’s funniest medieval historian”), Monty Python decided that the Arthurian grail quest would be the perfect subject for their first original film.

It was. Sometimes fans divide the Python films into two categories: the loosely connected series of sketches (And Now for Something Completely Different and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life) and the narratives (Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian.) The truth is, they’re all loosely connected series of sketches.

Monty Python were just not interested in a traditionally structured screenplay; they never quite left their sketch comedy roots. Their characters do not go through arcs of change and growth. At the same time, they did want to create something bigger and more cinematic than And Now for Something Completely Different, which was essentially a feature-length episode of their show. The medieval chivalric romance with its knights errant on episodic adventures is the perfect way to combine Pythonesque sketch comedy with a loose narrative.

In his classic essay on Casablanca (1942), the late Umberto Eco ponders why some books and movies develop cult followings. “In order to transform a work into a cult object,” he writes,

one must be able to unhinge it, to break it up or take it apart so that one then may remember only parts of it, regardless of their original relationship to the whole. With a book, one can unhinge it manually, so to speak, dismembering it into a series of excerpts. A movie, on the contrary, must be already wobbly and disjointed in itself.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is undeniably one of the great cult movies, exemplifies this aspect of the cult movie. Monty Python fans are notorious for their eagerness to quote favorite moments, favorite lines from this film. You know them, I know them:

• “Bring out your dead.”

• “It’s just a flesh wound.”

• “ I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”

• “Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

• “Get on with it!”

And so forth. A scene like King Arthur’s gory, one-sided battle with the Black Knight has its own life as an autonomous proto-internet meme outside the context of this film. This is probably my best argument for this film’s importance, for its classic status. Few films (of any genre) have this many iconic, instantly recognizable moments, and that is enabled by its wobbly, disjointed quality, by how its quest narrative unfolds in discrete episodes involving various enemies and obstacles.

Instead of just listing these moments, however, I’d like to approach Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a film. As an artistic whole, as a gestalt formed by all these individual moments. The best way to do this is to start with the production history.

Last year I covered the 50^th anniversary of Jaws (1975), a film whose challenging production has become a central part of its cultural legacy. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which came out about two months before Jaws, is in the same boat (pun intended). The Pythons and their collaborators have told and retold now-familiar anecdotes in interviews, books and documentaries:

• Graham Chapman dizzy and shaking from delirium tremens on the first day of production.

• Cast and crew members rushing back to the local hotel after a cold, muddy day of shooting to take advantage of a limited amount of hot water for showers and baths.

• The sheer muddiness of the project, which led to Michael Palin being served a ‘Mud Sorbet à la Palin’ at dinner after the last day of shooting.

• The National Trust denying Monty Python’s request to shoot at historic Scottish castles due to concerns about “the dignity of the fabric of the buildings.”

• The crew getting around this restriction by using the privately owned Doune Castle as almost every castle in the film, shooting it from different angles each time.

• The cast and crew going all-in on the project after seeing just how funny the early dailies were.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail was codirected by Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam; various talking heads in Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyers Cut) consistently mention the difficulty of working with two rookie directors with very different creative visions. As production manager and longtime Python associate Julian Doyle puts it, Jones was an efficient, “shoot from the hip” director whereas Gilliam took pains to set up the perfect shot. In an on-set interview, John Cleese — who’s fully dressed in chainmail2 — complains about Gilliam’s focus on “arty visual effects” like atmospheric billowing smoke rather than on the jokes.

Gilliam the cartoonist and animator was not the only crew member with an eye for visual composition. The cinematographer was a third Terry, Terry Bedford, who would go on to shoot Jabberwocky (1977), Gilliam’s solo directorial debut and something of a spiritual sequel to this film. Assistant cameraman Roger Pratt would become a successful, Oscar-nominated cinematographer, shooting Terry Gilliam’s other cinematic grail quest The Fisher King (1991) as well as Brazil (1985), Batman (1989) and Troy (2004).

I hadn’t seen this film in a while and what struck me on this rewatch was what Gilliam, Bedford and Pratt accomplished, visually. As cheap and amateurish as it is, Monty Python and the Holy Grail has some moments of striking, evocative, picturesque beauty. This begins with the very first shot.

From time to time, I’ve toyed with the idea of a Substack post about great opening shots. If I ever wrote it, I would definitely include Monty Python and the Holy Grail, because its perfect opening shot offers a microcosm of the entire film.

As seen above, we open on a mist-shrouded heath. To the right is a corpse strapped to what appears to be an elaborate torture device.3 We hear wind and distant birdsong. It’s an evocative, ominous image, a heavy metal image, the kind of image that could open a Robert Eggers folk horror movie.

We then hear approaching hoofbeats. The camera zooms and reframes to show two figures emerging from the mist: King Arthur (Chapman), who’s pretending to ride a horse, and his loyal retainer Patsy (Gilliam), who is imitating hoofbeats by rhythmically banging two coconuts together. In the space of about thirty seconds, the film builds up a thick atmosphere and deflates it in the most absurd way.

This is the pattern throughout the film. (One is tempted to describe it as the back-and-forth between the two directors, from Gilliam the visual stylist to Jones the sketch comedian.) It actually begins during the wacky credits sequence, which starts normally and devolves into a bizarre series of jokes about pseudo-Swedish subtitles, dentistry, llamas and Richard Nixon. The film proper does this constantly:

• Instead of bowing down to Arthur, an anarcho-syndicalist peasant (Palin) offers a leftwing critique of social stratification and systemic oppression.

• Patsy (Gilliam) points out that the distant castle of Camelot on the horizon is only a model.

• Eric Idle’s Sir Robin encounters a three-headed giant and then slips away while the heads argue among themselves.

• The Cave of Caerbannog is “is guarded by a creature so foul, so cruel, that no man yet has fought with it and lived,” which turns out to be a white rabbit, which then turns out to actually be a ferocious monster.

• In an animated segment, the knights then encounter the fearsome Black Beast, an enemy they don’t have to face because its animator (also Gilliam) suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack.

Zooming out further, this is a grail quest whose heroes never quite get to the holy grail; Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a hero’s journey that does not result in the maturation/self-actualization that Joseph Campbell saw as fundamental to that mode of storytelling. The film teases the viewer by getting King Arthur 99% of the way there and then ending in a deliberately unsatisfying, anticlimactic way.

What makes these jokes — and the film as a whole — work is the contrast between anachronistic silliness against a background that feels authentically medieval, authentic not necessarily to history but to the imaginary medieval world of knightly romances and popular imagination.

Graham Chapman’s performance is a critical element. I feel like everyone who’s ever written about Monty Python has noted the amusing irony that Chapman, an openly gay man, excelled at playing the comedic straight man. Let me join that club now. Even while cold, muddy and dealing with alcohol withdrawal, he gives King Arthur a regal gravitas that perfectly sets off the silliness around him.

The choice of music also plays a key role. While Neil Inness (who plays Robin’s Minstrel and various other roles onscreen) offered to compose an original score, the rest of the team decided to go with two original Innes songs (“Knights of the Round Table” a.k.a. “Camelot” and the diegetic “Brave Sir Robin”) alongside a soundtrack of library music. Orchestral compositions like Jack Trombey’s “Homeward Bound” and Stanley Black’s “The Promised Land” sound like they could have soundtracked a non-ironic fantasy epic.

Locations are also important. Doune Castle, which plays most of the film’s castles, is an authentic 14^th century stronghold. The film’s climax takes place at Castle Stalker (“Castle Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh”), a 14^th-15^th century tower house built on an almost impossibly picturesque island in Loch Linnhe against the backdrop of the Morvern mountains. Shooting around these key Scottish locations, the three Terrys and Pratt captured moments of springtime British pastoral beauty: bluebells on forest floors, dappled light through forest canopies, the robin’s egg blue of a midday sky.

Gilliam has cited the historical films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, especially The Canterbury Tales (1972), as a major influence on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He sought to create an onscreen space with “its own time and place and filth.” He certainly did that as a director, and in some ways the film’s low budget and amateurishness contributes to that period atmosphere.

For instance, Michael Palin’s diary entry for May 13^th, 1974 begins as follows:

The day of the Mud-Eater. Clad in rags, crawling through filthy mud repeatedly and doggedly, in a scene which makes the flagellation scene from The Seventh Seal look like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Extras all supposed to have plague – boils and pustules everywhere. People really do look wretched and, after two hours wallowing in the mud, because the plague village is such a convincing set, reality becomes fantasy and fantasy becomes reality.

Reality becomes fantasy, fantasy becomes reality, cold, muddy extras give convincing performances as medieval villagers, medieval castles convincingly play medieval castles, men running around forests and castles while dressed in chainmail become Arthurian knights and the reference to an Ingmar Bergman film about the black plague becomes not pretense but an apt comparison.

During the editing process, executive producer Michael White told the Pythons that they needed to correct the film’s tone. In Palin’s words, “it was, in his opinion, far too bloodthirsty, far too unpleasant in its atmosphere; almost every scene, he complained, showed death, disease, dirt or destruction.” The death, disease, dirt and destruction make the silliness funny.

Monty Python’s hard work in 1973 paid off during the postproduction of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In August 1974, Dallas PBS affiliate KERA became the first American television station to pick up Monty Python’s Flying Circus. KERA began broadcasting the show in October; Texans immediately took to Monty Python and the show’s success soon spread to other media markets. Michael Palin wrote the following diary entry on February 4^th, 1975:

Good news from New York – Python is on top of the PBS Channel 13 ratings there, beating even Upstairs Downstairs, which has just won an Emmy and all. Sales to other stations increase – far away places with strange-sounding names – to Pensacola, Florida, to Utica, Illinois, Syracuse, New York, Athens, Georgia and so on.

Sixteen days later, he noted a new partnership with Clive Davis’s Arista Records, who would give The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief and Monty Python Live at Drury Lane major label American releases complete with publicity campaigns.

In other words, Monty Python and the Holy Grail hit America at the perfect moment, at a time when Python had a growing American cult following and my own father had a choice of not one but two high school Monty Python fan clubs. So the Pythons flew to New York and were received like invading Beatles: blockbuster crowds at their premiere, a Richard Avedon photoshoot for Vogue, a meeting with Clive Davis, partying with Martin Scorsese.

American audiences were ready for the Pythonesque. The previous year, Mel Brooks and co. had a pair of critical and commercial hits with Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974), two films on a similar wavelength. About two months after Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Universal released Love and Death (1975), a Pythonesque Woody Allen parody of 18^th century Russian literature. Ironic, absurd genre deconstruction was in.

Made for about 280,000 pounds, Monty Python and the Holy Grail grossed more than eight times that internationally. It made Monty Python a global cultural icon and developed a cult following that has never faded away.

How do you end a post about a film notorious for its copout ending?

Do you compare its Merrie English (or Scottish) countryside setting to the green world of Shakespearean comedy?

Do you connect it to other 20^th century reinterpretations of the grail quest, like Eliot’s The Waste Land, and note that its combination of Arthurian legend, meta-cinema and anachronistic references make it a uniquely funny take on Eliot’s mythical method?

Do you ask about the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow?

I’d like to take a fourth option and think about the first time I ever watched this movie. I was about 11 or 12 and our parents had apparently decided that my brother and I were old enough to watch Monty Python. Going into it blind, we were surprised when were supposed to be and cracked up at every bizarre, unexpected twist. It was one of my great viewing experiences and, if I could see any film again for the first time, I might pick this one. To see Arthur facing off against the black knight or the knights arriving at the Cave of Caerbannog with no idea of what happens next.

The series so far:

• Introduction

In the previous post, I called Monty Python a cinematic rock band; And Now for Something Completely Different (1971) is their greatest hits album.1

In Spotify-dominated 2026, the greatest hits album is an anachronism. But if you’re a millennial or older, you probably have at least some experience with this format, which served two main purposes. First, they were a product for the casual fan who just wants to hear the radio hits. Second, they serve as an introduction to that artist for newer (perhaps younger) listeners, one that will hopefully intrigue and serve as a gateway into the rest of the discography.

And Now for Something Completely Different was made primarily to serve this second purpose in non-British markets. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was not on American television in the early 70s; it was too weird for the networks and the PAL-NTSC conversion process was too expensive and time-consuming for independent stations.2 But Monty Python’s American publicist and manager Nancy Lewis thought that the Pythons could conquer America like The Beatles before them, and that the big screen was the best way to do that. While not on American television, Monty Python had found a small American cult following with their first comedy album, which came out in late 1970 and planted the first seeds of their American fandom.

I began this series with a discussion of what makes Monty Python unique in film history. Another important aspect of this uniqueness is that film history offers very, very few examples of a creative team translating their hit show into a series of successful films.

There are many examples of tv shows rebooted as movies — with different casts and creative teams — decades after they ended, to varying degrees of success. There are also examples of casts reuniting for a movie years after their show ended, like the original series of Star Trek and Downton Abbey. But when it comes to directly jumping from the small screen to the big screen and making multiple successful movies, it’s the Pythons, the Muppets, Star Trek: The Next Generation, massive Monty Python fan Sacha Baron Cohen and maybe a handful of others.

I think of a movie I saw at my local theater about 20 years ago (which makes me feel old), The Simpsons Movie (2007). Despite being a fairly well-received blockbuster hit based on one of the most successful television shows in history, The Simpsons have yet to return to theaters and this movie seems to have almost entire disappeared from the public consciousness; I’ve had conversations about The Simpsons without this movie coming up. For whatever reason, the Simpsons team did not make cinema an integral part of the Simpsons legacy. But the Pythons did.

They were helped by someone else looking to break into the movies, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Playboy executive Victor Lowndes had become a Python fan while managing the Playboy Club in London and pushed for And Now for Something Completely Different as the first Playboy Productions film; it and Roman Polanski-helmed Macbeth (1971) would be the independent production company’s first and most notable films.

Serving as executive producer, Lowndes hired producer Patricia Casey and director Ian MacNaughton, a television veteran who directed almost every episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Instead of writing original material, the Pythons would refilm the funniest sketches from the show’s first two seasons (or first two series, for my British readers) on 35mm film.

It was a low-budget production on a tight schedule. (In his diary, Michael Palin notes that principal photography began on October 26^th, 1970 and ended December 9^th.) Filming took place in various London-area locations, most notably Black Park, which is right next to Pinewood Studios and has played many different locations on film, from Transylvania in Hammer Horror movies to the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter.

Part of the film was shot at an abandoned dairy in Whetstone, a location that Palin finds fitting in a November 9^th diary entry. “The dairy premises are so far excellent for our sketches,” he writes, because they have “the same rather dreary atmosphere of failure” as some of the more pathetic Python characters. Three days later, he describes a similarly dreary location for the famous Dead Parrot sketch:

Shooting at a pet shop in the Caledonian Road. It’s a grey, wet, messy day and this particular part of the Caledonian Road is a grey, wet, messy part of the world. In the pet shop there is scarcely room to move, but the angel fish and the guppies and the parrots and the kittens and the guinea pigs seem to be unconcerned by the barrage of light – and the continuous discordant voices. The shop is still open as we rehearse.

This wet, gray, dreary ordinariness gives And Now for Something Completely Different a flavor unique in the Monty Python cinematic universe. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) are, in their own strange ways, period pieces that transport you to a Pythonesque version of another time and place. Even Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), this film’s closest cousin in the Python canon, takes the viewer on a journey through birth, life, death and the afterlife, with a musical detour through outer space.

This film, on the other hand, is set in unglamorous parts of London and its suburbs and has its own very Seventies look and feel. McNaughton is a workmanlike director – this is his feature film credit – but even he adds an occasional handheld camera sequence that evokes a specific time and place. I’ve seen films capture Dickensian London, and swinging 60s London, and glamorous romantic London, but And Now for Something Completely Different effectively captures another side of the city, that of the dreary, overcast gray suburb.

In 1971, Monty Python’s Flying Cirus was on the air in the UK, Canada and the Netherlands. Their first comedy album had not charted outside the UK but had found a small niche audience in other countries. For everyone else (such as the 99.999% of Americans who hadn’t listened to an obscure imported comedy album), the opening of And Now for Something Completely represents a first encounter with Monty Python. What kind of impression does it make?

The film begins with a pre-credits sequence presented as an instructional film (“H.M. Government Public Service Film no.42, ‘How Not to Be Seen’”) narrated by John Cleese, who asks various characters to emerge from their hiding places behind trees or shrubs in a forest landscape. They do and get shot or blown up in an increasingly violent, sadistic game of hide and seek.

This opening scene sets a tone for the rest of the film, in two ways. First, And Now for Something Completely Different begins with people getting shot and blown up and ends with the Upper Class Twit of the Year competition, whose final challenge is shooting yourself in the head; the film’s last shot shows the winner and runners-up’s coffins in first, second and third place on the medal podium. In between, we get an animated man cutting his own head off, a fatally funny joke, a spate of office workers jumping out of high windows and a long string of euphemisms for death in the Dead Parrot sketch.

Yes, Monty Python is very silly. A running gag throughout this film is Graham Chapman’s uptight colonel threatening to stop the film for getting too silly. But there’s an edge to that silliness, an eagerness to mock authority figures, to push the boundaries when it comes to acceptable subject matter: jokes about animal cruelty, adultery, the domino theory of American foreign policy, the British military, homosexuality,3 gender norms, and, of course, death.

Second, “How Not to Be Seen” is presented as a film within a film, which introduces the metafictional aspect of the film’s humor. If you had to identify just one reason why Monty Python’s Flying Circus was such as a groundbreaking show, it would be that it was a satire of television itself, offering spoofs of commercials, public service announcements, and the whole spectrum of BBBC programming, from news to talk shows to costume dramas. In one show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus recapitulates the same surreal juxtaposition of images you get from channel surfing, or from staying tuned to the same channel and going directly from a news report about a catastrophic disaster to a commercial for laundry detergent, or vice versa.

And Now for Something Completely Different expresses some of this same spirit. After “How Not to Be Seen,” we get the opening credits animated by Terry Gilliam and then a cut to “The End.” Terry Jones then appears onscreen as the theater manager, who apologizes to the audience for how unexpectedly short the film was. After some confusion, he plays a silent film pastiche — complete with sepia filter and intertitles — that leads into the rest of the film. Later on, we get various films-within-the-film and, after a Terry Gilliam cartoon, Gilliam himself breaking the fourth wall to describe “a scene of such spectacular proportions that it could never in your life be seen in a low-budget film like this.”

It never quite becomes a full-on Pythonesque parody of movies and moviegoing, but it is a first indication of the subversive, self-referential comedy of later Python movies.

“It wasn’t a happy experience,” Eric Idle recalls in Monty Python: Almost the Truth, “because we weren’t in charge of it.” Describing a March 1971 sneak preview of the film in his diary, Michael Palin writes that

I found it dragged heavily and parts of it were downright dull. But my judgement is probably colored by seeing most of it before — several times. I still feel sad that we didn’t write more original material.

To me, And Now for Something Completely Different is clearly the least of the four canonical Monty Python films. Because it’s just a rehash of what they had already done on television, because it’s really just an extra-long episode of that television show. But then again, a long episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is funnier than most comedy movies. And I think it does work as a cinematic greatest hits compilation. If you’re curious about Monty Python’s Flying Circus but don’t have the time or inclination to watch four seasons of television, this film gives you many of their most iconic sketches in less than 90 minutes.

And Now For Something Completely Different was an important step in the history of Monty Python: the moment that inspired them to write and direct their own feature film. In a September 1972 diary entry, Palin describes a meeting in which the six Pythons learned that they each only made about a thousand pounds in box office royalties for all the hard work they’d put into making the film. “This had an amazing effect on the Python group,” Palin writes.

Suddenly everyone wanted to work. Within half an hour we had agreed on a third LP for the Christmas market, another book for next year, and a film script as soon as possible. No talk of holidays this time.

And now for something completely different. In June, I wrapped up a long series on the films of Robert Altman, a project that grew into something much more rewarding and interesting than I had first anticipated.

Today, I embark on a new project that I hope will be equally worthwhile, if quite a bit shorter: a retrospective look at the films that the late Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, the late Terry Jones and Michael Palin made as Monty Python.

While I chose the Pythons as a change of pace, their work does in fact have some interesting affinities with Robert Altman’s. First, they were artistic contemporaries. Monty Python’s Flying Cirus first aired on the BBC in October 1969. About three months later, M*A*S*H (1970) came out in theaters. Both the British tv show and the American film immediately resonated with audiences, especially younger, countercultural audiences, by offering a weirder, funnier, more provocative alternative to mainstream entertainment.

The Pythons and Altman were united in their eagerness to break the creative rules, to tell stories in new ways, to deconstruct genres, to subvert authority figures and cultural icons. And, of course, both created a style so distinctive that their names became adjectives. Just as Altmanesque is simply the best way to describe a certain kind of film, Pythonesque has come to describe a certain flavor of comedy.

What is Pythonesque? Answering that question seems like best way to begin this project. The word’s etymology is clear enough. It comes from the name of the mostly British comedy team Monty Python, which in turn comes from their 1969-1974 BBC show Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Where did that title come from? The very first entry collected in Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years (for July 8^th, 1969) begins with “Today Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot came into being, with about five minutes of film shot around Ham House.” (It’s very fortunate for me that one of the Pythons was a devoted diarist who created a perfect primary source for a project like this.)

In a footnote, Palin explains that Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot was just one of many working titles, which also included Ow! It’s Colin Plint, The Toad Elevating Moment and Owl Stretching Time. Another possible title was Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus: a dada stunt of naming their project after a random person in the phone book, who would presumably be completely baffled upon learning that she now had her own BBC show.1

BBC suggested calling their show a circus; the addition of flying turned it into an anachronistic reference to early aviation. Monty Python, as Terry Gilliam explains in the documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut), sounded like the name of a slimy, shabby wannabe talent manager, which struck the group as somehow fitting.

In other words, Monty Python’s Flying Circus — like the rejected working titles — is an odd, illogical title for a tv show, a title that simultaneously grabs your attention and gives you no idea of what to expect. That, in a nutshell, is Pythonesque. In the next post, I’ll cover Monty Python’s first film, And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), which takes its title from one of the show’s catchphrases. A Pythonesque work is one in which something completely different, bizarre, hilarious and unexpected can happen at any moment.

About a century before the Pythons, Lewis Carroll sent Alice down a rabbit hole into wonderland, where she encounters strange characters, gets into pointless, repetitive conversations, and faces a Queen of Hearts with a passion for beheading. Watching Monty Python is like going down that rabbit hole. If anyone in 20^th century British culture truly picked up that torch and ran with it, it’s Chapman, Cleese et al. And they did so in a distinctly late 60s, psychedelic way, one on the same wavelength as Magical Mystery Tour, The Who Sell Out, Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Woodstock.

In 2026, more than a half-century separates us from Monty Python’s early years. In that time, they’ve had a pervasive cultural impact on multiple media, from standup to film to internet memes2 to basically every English-language comedy show over the past 50 years. As Mike Myers once put it, the Pythonesque has become a basic element on the periodic table of comedy. In this series, I hope to explain why that is, and in doing so recapture some sense of how weird and groundbreaking the young Pythons were.

I began this post by comparing the Pythons’ work to the films of Robert Altman. While there are some interesting similarities, there are also at least two massive differences, differences that really speak to what made Monty Python unique.

First, while Robert Altman had extensive experience directing television and live theater, his primary legacy is as a filmmaker. When we talk about his body of work, we’re — for the most part — talking about the feature films he made between the late 1960s and his death in 2006. The Pythons, on the other hand, were not exclusively or even primarily filmmakers. After beginning on television, they became a multimedia cultural phenomenon. I can’t think of another group with a BAFTA-winning tv show, a US box office #1 film, an international hit single, a bestselling book and a run of sold out O2 Arena shows on their resume. To use a piece of 21^st century jargon, their creativity was platform agnostic.

Second, Altman was one man, while Monty Python were six men. If he was alive today, Robert Altman would be the first person to tell you that filmmaking is essentially a collaborative artform, that a lot of his work involved getting out of the way and letting cast and crew members do their thing. Nonetheless, Altman was one of the great auteurs of American cinema, a director with an individual creative vision and an idiosyncratic, influential approach to the filmmaking process.

One of the reasons why I chose Monty Python is because they don’t fit easily into this auteurist paradigm. Auteurism, one might say, is a basic element on the periodic table of film discourse, one that has long since filtered out from academia to the mainstream; millions of people who have never taken a college film course or spoken the word auteur went to see The Odyssey (2026) because it was a Christopher Nolan film and then went home (or online) to discuss how it compares to Nolan’s previous films, and whether his particular style and thematic interests are a good match for Homer’s epic.

Who is the auteur of a film like Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)? The director and cowriter, Terry Jones? That doesn’t feel right. He’s part of the team, not an individual creator standing alone and calling the shots. The film’s title is Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which strikes the right note of collective authorship.

Auteurism is not entirely married to the concept of, as Frank Capra once put it, “one man, one film.” I think even the most auteurist of critics would agree that the partnerships of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger or Joel and Ethan Coen each represent a singular auteur vision. However, an auteur composed of six different individuals would seem to stretch this paradigm past its breaking point.

The Pythons are often called the Beatles of comedy, and that is really my main thesis. That they represent something unusual and perhaps unique in cinematic history: a run of successful, groundbreaking, unique films made through a rock band model of auteurship.

Indeed, my above discussion of how Monty Python’s Flying Circus got the name Monty Python’s Flying Circle probably sounded quite like the often-retold stories of how famous bands got their names. (Similarly, I’ll probably refer to the various Python’s other work as their solo careers.)

If I ever did a Substack series on The Beatles’ albums, I would talk about a teenage Liverpool skiffle band called The Quarrymen who evolved into a rock and roll band called The Silver Beetles and then The Silver Beatles in homage to Buddy Holly and the Crickets.3 If I ever did a Pink Floyd deep dive, my introduction would tell the story of how early version of the band went through various names, including The Screaming Abdabs and The Tea Set, until Syd Barrett combined the names of American bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council into something his bandmates found appropriately strange and psychedelic.

In all three cases, naming is an important part of the story because it represents the forging of a new collective artistic identity. I’d like to end — which is to say begin — with that moment.

With Chapman, Cleese, Idle, Jones and Palin, five young British men with similar life experiences:

• Growing up in an austere, rationed midcentury UK;

• finding joy and inspiration in BBC radio’s The Goon Show starring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan;

• being sent off to boarding school and demonstrating academic gifts;

• attending Cambridge (Cleese, Chapman and Idle) and Oxford (Jones and Palin); and

• performing comedy at university and deciding to pursue it as a career.

Terry Gilliam, the only American Python, grew up in rural Minnesota, fell in love with Mad magazine, became e a cartoonist, worked for Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman and then moved to England. When I saw Gilliam speak about a decade ago, he mentioned being initially intimidated by the other five Pythons, who were Oxbridge graduates and came off to him as impossibly confident and erudite. (They were also already experienced in writing and performing sketch comedy, something he had never done before.) But he soon got over his initial apprehension, perhaps because of something else he said at that talk.

He credited a lot of his creativity to the experience of growing up on a farm without most of today’s entertainment options, which meant that he had to find ways to entertain himself. In the documentary, the other Pythons tell similar stories of childhoods in a drab, gray postwar Britain (one without many of today’s technological distractions): being bored, telling jokes first and foremost to amuse themselves.

Yes, Monty Python would go on to become a global brand, but it began with six young men’s shared love of just playing the same game, whether in animation or live action. “Python was never aimed at a specific audience,” the late Terry Jones once wrote. “We just did what made the six of us laugh.”

After working together (in various configurations) on shows like The Frost Report, At Last the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set (costarring the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band), the six came together and decided to create their own show. Their pitch to the BBC, as all the living Pythons recalled in Monty Python: Almost the Truth, should have been a disaster. They didn’t even have a title for the show, much less any idea of what would be like.

But a sympathetic BBC executive decided to greenlight 13 episodes, 13 episodes whose distinctly Pythonesque blend of lowbrow humor, highbrow humor, non sequiturs, surreal animation, metacommentary on television as medium, political satire and crossdressing would change comedy forever.

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

Years ago, as an art history undergrad (and cinephile), I got the amazing opportunity to work as an intern on the feature documentary Kusama: Infinity (2018), which had the working title of Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots. What began as an undergrad internship developed into an education unto itself: about the challenges of independent documentary production, editing and marketing; about the many hats independent filmmakers wear; about storytelling; and about the life and work of one of art history’s true origins. I’m thankful to director Heather Lenz and producer Karen Johnson for that opportunity, and for that education.

Before starting the project, I went to my university library and checked out Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. If I wasn’t already sold on the film, reading Kusama’s story in her own words lit that fire. During my time working on Kusama: Infinity, I saw my share of different cuts, different ways of telling that story, and they all worked to some extent because that core story is just so compelling.

From a young age, Kusama experienced the vivid visual hallucinations that inspired her art: dots, flowers, infinitely expanding abstract patterns. Art was therapy for her. Her conservative Japanese family, however, did not support Kusama’s artistic aspirations, which were completely interrupted by World War II. At age 13, she was taken out of school and sent to work in a parachute factory where she sewed for up to 12 hours a day in a dark room. Later in life, Kusama would recall the regular blaring sound of air raid sirens and the ever-present fear of allied bombing raids as traumatic memories. But she continued to create what she would later call “art-medicine.”

After the war, she moved to Kyoto to study art and began painting polka-dots. “One day,” she would later recall,

I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers.

Infinity would become the central motif of her art.

At age 26, Kusama wrote a letter to her artistic idol, Georgia O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe’s response encouraged her to move to New York and pursue a career as a professional artist; the two would remain regular pen pals.

In New York, her art exploded off the canvas into sculpture, art installations, fashion, filmmaking, psychedelic lightshows and countercultural happenings. As a Japanese woman, she became a driving force in the white male New York art world because she was just that good. She would later describe herself and Andy Warhol as rival gang leaders; the Kusama gang held its share of artistic and cultural turf because her aesthetic resonated with the sixties counterculture.

Simply put, Kusama helped pioneer so much of what we now think of as contemporary art: soft sculpture, installations, performance art, feminist provocation, satirical meta-commentary on the art market. And all in about a decade.

In the early seventies, she returned to Japan after an extended mental health crisis. For the last fifty years of her life, Kusama lived in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, commuting to her studio and commuting each night.

Then the world fell in love with Kusama’s art in the 21st century. In her eighties, she became probably the hippest artist on the international scene: museum retrospectives, public art commissions in multiple countries, collaborations with Louis Vitton and Veuve Clicquot, and countless selfies taken at Infinity Room installations in museums and galleries around the world.

That, in broad strokes, is the story of Yayoi Kusama. She was one of the great contemporary artists, with no need for an adjective like ‘Japanese’ or ‘female.’

Today, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, people of all ages and backgrounds will stand in line to have their 30 seconds in one of Kusama’s Infinity Rooms. Because they really do offer something unique in the art world, something sublime. I think of the $250-$350 million blockbuster movies I’ve seen that somehow fail to achieve even visual spectacle; Kusama could do something much more spectacular, much more memorable with a few lights and mirrors.

About a decade ago, I had the great joy of seeing a comprehensive retrospective of her work at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum. The sheer range of it, in different media, was what struck me; her entire body of work is an expansion out into infinity.

In 2020-2021, a Mexican comedy-horror short film called Together Till the End hit the festival circuit. It screened around the world and earned nominations for various awards at Filmquest, Macabro: Mexico City International Horror Film Festival, the Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival and other festivals. Energized by this success, writer-director decided to expand Together Till the End into a feature film, which is currently streaming on Tubi and Bloodstream.

I recently caught up with Medina to discuss his feature debut. A UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting graduate, he is passionate about both horror and independent filmmaking. With Together Till the End, as he writes in his director’s statement, “I took on the task of telling a story that sounded impossible: two characters in a single location for an hour and a half.”

That might sound impossible, but it also sounds like the world we all lived in when that initial short film came out. While Together Till the End is very much a zombie movie, it’s a zombie movie that often feels more like a claustrophobic psychological thriller or even a deadpan indie dramedy about people stuck together during a global pandemic. The microcosm of fraying relationships against the macrocosm of the zombie apocalypse. It has quiet moments and cringe comedy moments, and ends with an emotional gut punch — more romantic and tragic than horrific — that I really wasn’t ready for.

What was the initial spark of inspiration for Together Till the End?

I wanted to do something that was absolutely independent. The original short film became the spark, and we realized we had the resources to make something small, contained, but universal. And, as a filmmaker, I didn’t want to wait for anyone else to tell this particular story.

How did you communicate that initial idea — that initial enthusiasm — to your collaborators?

The whole idea of making a completely independent film in Mexico sounded like a great idea from the start. We started with the resources we had, the crew we had built over the years, and the idea took off. Having the original actors from the short was the icing on the cake, and we created everything around their identity.

It was scary, of course, because it was a long shot. But having people believe in your idea and actually support it makes it easier to jump.

Together Till the End is your feature-length directorial debut. What did you learn from this experience?

A lot. I could make a series about this.

Thankfully I had directed the short and had commercial directing experience, but this was a whole other animal. I think working with a minimal budget and only six shooting days forced us to come to set absolutely prepared. We rehearsed, blocked every scene, planned every sequence, and the days seemed easier because of it.

For a shoot like this, my idea was: if I have to improvise or come up with something on the spot, at least I know what I can work with.

Before becoming a director, I was a first AD, and that really helped me understand how a set works, how to stretch a day, change something when things aren’t clicking, and let actors find their flow. I think that’s exactly what happened.

I also learned to trust my collaborators. As a first-time feature director, you naturally want to control everything, but filmmaking gets better the moment you realize everyone around you is trying to make the movie better.

Also, when people are working on an indie film, don’t make their lives miserable. Prioritize their mental health, don’t overwork them, talk to them every day, ask them how they’re doing. They’ll feel much more connected to the project.

Understand that, as a director, no one cares about the project more than you do, so you need to inject the people around you with the enthusiasm needed to pull off a film in six days.

How did you approach expanding your short film into a feature?

I immediately understood that it couldn’t be a horror comedy like the short. And since I’m a fan of horror, I wanted to make something contained where we don’t see the terror outside but live the fear within.

I didn’t want to write them as heroes, but as regular people forced to choose what to do to survive. And I knew I had to add an agent of chaos, like Giovanni’s character, who brings the chaos from outside into the four walls they’re cooped up in.

The script became more of a character study of two people facing impossible circumstances in the middle of an otherwise ordinary life, which makes it feel more relatable; they weren’t ready, and their relationship certainly wasn’t. So it became more about what they’re willing to do for each other when the apocalypse comes knocking on their door.

But honestly, it was mostly the actors’ work. They made everything feel organic and natural. They made the script what it became…

The zombie movie is one of the classic horror subgenres. How did you approach making your own film in that space?

I have many scripts and projects involving zombies because it’s my favorite monster. Nothing represents the current state of the world like them—to me, at least. So I wanted to make them a representation of the outside world shoving itself into our daily lives.

Zombies here are a threat that brings out the worst in us. Their origin is a virus, so it’s transmissible, making it even harder for the characters to face them and survive. And that’s where the conflict comes from.

What were the challenges and rewards of shooting an entire feature film in a single location?

We not only shot in a single location but also masked and worked through a COVID spike in Mexico, so it was twice as hard. We all felt sick at times, had to get people tested, and then get them back to work. But I think that became part of the challenge.

And since we knew it would be the same location the whole time, Javier Najar, our DP, and I really worked on making the cinematography feel unique. We tried to find ways to make the audience feel contained without the visuals becoming repetitive.

Together Till the End doesn’t look and feel like your typical horror film; it has a cool color palette, with off-whites and various shades of blue. How did you go about creating this visual style?

I worked really closely with Javier, my DP, and Ernesto García, our production designer, to make the space feel real.

We got the apartment almost for free because no one had lived there, and that actually worked in our favor. I had originally written that the couple had been living together for a while, but working with an empty canvas gave us the opportunity to change that part of the script and make it even more symbolic.

That’s how we started doing screen tests, working on colors, and choosing their wardrobe. We wanted to create a visual style that felt universal while peppering it with Mexican themes and details that would jump out to people paying attention. Hopefully, it paid off.

Mexican cinema has a rich history of horror filmmaking, from thirties gothic horror films like El fantasma del convento (1934) to Guillermo del Toro to the present day. Did this tradition inform Together Till the End?

Before falling in love with Jason Vorhees, Lovecraft, and all types of monsters, I discovered horror through Mexican filmmakers like Carlos Enrique Taboada, one of the pioneers of Mexican horror.

Then I dug into Bustillo, Ramón Peón, and Fernando Méndez, to name a few. There was even an anthology series called La hora marcada, where Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Emmanuel “El Chivo” Lubezki got some of their first opportunities. That show was hugely influential in my discovery of horror as a genre.

There’s a big horror tradition in Mexico, particularly one focused on death, that sometimes doesn’t make it out of the country. I was lucky enough to put the film in the right hands, and now it’s found an audience. I never would have thought that was possible, and I hope I can become a small part of that tradition.

Can you tell me about your upcoming projects?

I have several projects in development, one of them with my manager in LA and a couple of others here in Mexico, all horror-oriented, since it’s the genre I truly love the most.

Hopefully you’ll hear about them soon, because I can’t wait to get back on set directing horror again.

You can find Salvador Medina on Instagram.

Monica Taddei and Luca Zappala both have extensive experience in film and television postproduction. As a designer and modelmaker, Taddei has accumulated a diverse list of credits, from BBC children’s television to John Carter (2012), World War Z (2013) and Hercules (2014). Zappala has worked for more than two decades as a visual effects artist, contributing to films like Inception (2010), Hugo (2011), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011), Ex Machina (2015) and T2 Trainspotting (2017). He is also a Lecturer in Film Production, Visual Effects and Colour at University College London.

Fracta (2026) represents something new for the duo, who are personal and professional partners: a move above the line, their debuts as a writer-director (Taddei) and a writer-producer (Zappala.) I caught up with the duo last month to discuss this eerie, haunting short film, which was nominated for Best Short Film and Best Director at the Barcelona Indie Filmmakers Fest.

The 2023 Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) strike catalyzed Fracta. As Taddei told me, the sudden availability of so many talented, experienced film professionals provided a “small window of opportunity” that might never happen again. Capitalizing on this opportunity, they wrote a script for a claustrophobic chamber piece.

Since they met as animation and visual effects students two decades ago, the duo have both been fascinated by representing solitude on film; both made student films about that topic. Drawing on their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, they wrote a film that, as Taddei told me, is

about isolation and what it entails. We did not want to talk about intentional solitude; instead, we wanted to focus on solitude created by adverse circumstances. The idea is that your living quarters become a map of your daily life, movements, and endeavors, and that you are just floating through life, gliding on the surface. In all of this, COVID is not overtly and obviously invoked, but it is implied.

Other memories also informed Fracta. Taddei, the daughter of two antiques dealers, told me that growing up “among vintage and antique objects” inspired her to become both a professional 3d modeler and a collector. Antiques, she told me, can be “carriers, vehicles of stories, books waiting to be read, especially if they are anthropomorphic or zoomorphic.”

While the film’s human cast consists of a single name, its art direction includes an eclectic group of vintage toys, sourced from Taddei’s own collection, whose unblinking eyes add an eerie presence. The most unnerving moment in Fracta is punctuated by cuts to closeups of these toys — a small tin duck, a pie-eyed Kewpie with long eyelashes — that seem like watchful and perhaps even suspicious observers.

Another piece, a green vintage vase with two pixies, served as a visual touchstone for the whole project. In Taddei’s words,

we established two color schemes for the living room and corridor, with a mustard variation for the nighttime corridor to alter the theme. Since development, the vision was dramatic contrast with the soft shadow Renaissance quality of shows such as Fargo and Patriot, especially the mustard yellows with pockets of saturated color.

After writing the script, Taddei and Zappala assembled a creative team including cinematographer Rami Bartholdi, colorist Daniel De Villiers and actress Hannah Hornsby. Hornsby, who has experience in both theater and puppeteering, brought a physical presence that shaped the final film, which is almost entirely wordless. “She immediately understood the mood and theme,” the filmmakers told me. “We pretty much adapted the role around her and her presence.”

After the shoot, Taddei and Zappala drew on their postproduction background to shape the film’s look and feel. “Nearly every shot is a visual effects shot,” Taddei told me; they used extensive color correction to give the film a consistent cold teal and white color palette and digitally removed the set’s doorknobs and light switches to subliminally enhance the claustrophobic atmosphere. (This seamless work would win an award for Best Special Effects at the Montelupo Fiorentino International Independent Film Festival.)

Finally, Taiwanese musician Nicole Lee agreed to compose an original score as her final thesis work at the Film Scoring Academy of Europe; it was recorded by the European Recording Orchestra of Sofia. “What started out scribbled on the back of our son’s homework,” Taddei told me, “ended up with an orchestra recording original music in Bulgaria.”

An international group of people came together to make this claustrophobic film about isolation. As Taddei writes in her director’s statement,

It’s strange how a narrative about being broken and lost, fragmented, lonely, has been cobbled together carefully, knowingly, crafted and glued piece by piece by people scattered across different countries and from three continents.

Fracta won’t be Taddei and Zappala’s last film as writers, producers and directors'; they are currently developing several projects, including multiple short films and their first feature. (You can find them on Instagram at Paper Town Films, and Fracta itself on Film Freeway.)

When I think of my all-time favorite films, one common thread is the use of atmospheric, picturesque, compelling locations. The midcentury San Francisco of Vertigo (1958), the fluorescent and glass Taipei of Yi Yi (2000).

I’ve recent finished a lengthy retrospective of Robert Altman’s films; his filmography abounds in memorable locations, from the Desert Hot Springs health spa in 3 Women (1977) to the Hollywood backlot in The Player (1992), the hazy, sunbaked Los Angeles County suburbs in Short Cuts (1993) and the stately manor grounds in Gosford Park (2001).

Locations are of course a logistical challenge as a well as a key artistic element. For this month’s conversation with filmmakers, I invited three contemporary directors to discuss both sides of the location shooting process. and Sis Gürdal () are right here on Substack, while H. Nelson Tracey can be found on his website and on Instagram.

What is your general approach to filming locations?

I’m deeply inspired by locations. They often become the starting point for a story. My first narrative short film came from visiting a friend’s house on the coast of Turkey. It was built around a central courtyard, which is common in traditional Turkish architecture, and it made me think about how little privacy exists in a family home where every room opens onto a shared communal space. That observation became the emotional foundation of the film, which followed a teenage girl feeling pressure from the women in her family, only to then impose that same pressure on her more liberal cousin visiting from abroad.

I think of locations as part of the emotional fabric of a story. They make the world feel tangible to me. They hold mood, tension, atmosphere. Often, they reveal something essential before a character even speaks.

Sis Gürdal

You can never quite find the perfect location. Ultimately whatever the writer has written likely doesn’t exist one-to-one unless they wrote specifically for a particular place. Now I’ve never shot in a major city hub, so thankfully in more suburban/rural areas, location owners are usually more agreeable as long as you don’t inconvenience them too badly. One or two days is usually easy enough to find an agreeable owner to shoot somewhere.

But a mostly one-location shoot means you have to find a location that isn’t actively being used. That’s much tougher depending on what’s written. We also look to combine locations as much as possible if it’s a small room, the less I have to move a film crew across town the better, that means more time to actually shoot the project.

Once I have a location that I’m seriously interested in I’ll bring my production designer and cinematographer along to do a walk through to see if they see something I’m overlooking. We may need to adjust the shotlist for the new layout, or perhaps the wall color isn’t working. We try and find a compromise as to which place ticks the most boxes at the end. Additionally I’m always careful about sound, is there an airport nearby? A busy road? Or a fire station? These issues could be a death knell to a small production.

Jared Sprouse

I figured out early on in my writing and in making short films, that one of my signatures was location-centric storytelling. On a short film level, all my early projects were driven by setting, most notably a bowling alley and a sex shop where I shot my first two short films. From these locations, characters and scenarios spawned: who occupies these spaces?

Leaping to my debut feature, this was equally the case. From its inception, my feature Breakup Season was rooted in La Grande, Oregon, a location whose granular details informed plot points and character traits. I spent ample time there informing the story further based on speaking to locals and making sure it rang true. I think my documentary work is also informed by this love of geography and locations, as documentaries more naturally emphasize this. And my first music video is all set aboard an airplane, which ties into the story every step of the way.

H. Nelson Tracey

What do you look for in a location?

I think of location almost as a character, it can shape the way I shoot just as much as the people in the frame. I’m drawn to spaces that have a real presence to them. Colour and light are obvious considerations, but beyond that, it’s about whether the actors feel naturally embedded in the environment, rather than simply placed into it.

A lot of this is instinctive rather than entirely practical, which is interesting to reflect on, because I don’t often consciously break down what I’m responding to. You only really begin to articulate it when working closely with a location scout, and you realize it’s not just about aesthetics, it’s about atmosphere, authenticity, and whether the space can quietly carry part of the story.

Sis Gürdal

I have a list of artistic non-negotiables for each location in a script. This can change depending on the project’s requirements. But the blocking has to work for the space above all. If it’s an exterior we are paying close attention to the sun to figure out what is the optimal way to shoot in this space. I’m also trying to keep potential safety concerns in mind. If there’s violent or sexual content, are we secluded from the public?

I’m also trying to maximize production value for whatever small amount of budget we have. A blank canvas can be a death knell because you have to fill it. I’d love to work with a larger production design team in the future but on most of my projects, the department is small. Therefore, we really have to find a location that is 80% of the way there and fluff it up a bit.

Jared Sprouse

First, has it been spoken for? I’m less interested in making movies in places like New York or Los Angeles that have had dozens of excellent films showcase them cinematically. I’m far more intrigued to create movies about places that may have never been onscreen or seldom are represented that way. La Grande Oregon, where Breakup Season was shot, had only ever been in two movies: 1969’s Paint Your Wagon, and a very obscure indie from 1999. That provides me more creative space to take audiences somewhere new.

H. Nelson Tracey

What is your favorite location that you've used in a film? And how did that inform the final film?

It would actually be the house I mentioned in the first question, because it wasn’t simply a backdrop, it was the origin of the story itself. The architecture sparked the emotional premise, so the location didn’t just inform the final film; it shaped its themes, tensions, and visual language from the outset.

Sis Gürdal

Probably the party store location from my last project. We needed several things from it; a store large enough to realistically employ 4-5 people during the peak season, a back office that resembled hell on earth, a supply closet, and a dingy bathroom (ideally with stalls). Oh and if the store could have the shelves somewhat stocked and also not actually be open that would be perfect. We simply couldn’t afford to close a business for several weeks. I went online and found a location listed that was admittedly a little far for our crew but fit nearly everything we could ask for.

We found an off season fireworks store stocked to the brim with inventory. This meant we saved a lot of money for the art department and they had a lot less work to do. We stacked fireworks in the back to create a nonexistent back office. Meanwhile we used the boxes to create a fake utility closet as well. Unfortunately it did not have stalls so I had to re-write a scene to be outside of the store hidden behind some trailers. Plus we had a location owner who was more than willing to help us. There are thousands of stories of people burning locations because the owners don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. This helped tremendously as we later needed some inserts and reshoots.

Jared Sprouse

I’d have to talk further about La Grande, since it’s such a central part of my biggest project to date. It’s a rural mountain town 4 hours from Portland, 3 hours from Boise, way out there. It’s inside the largest fully enclosed valley in the Lower 48 - 360 degrees of mountains. When I first visited in 2019, I likened it to a model train village; it’s got a train depot right next to downtown so feels lost in time in the best way. Stunning in the autumn, but also great in the winter, which is when we filmed in it. The truth is, I had been developing a different film for the region but then I would mention the logline for Breakup Season to locals -- a young recently broken up couple stuck together for Christmas due to a blizzard -- and everyone would say, “that happens every winter here.” Because the town is surrounded by mountains in all directions, it’s an annual occurence for there to be a snowstorm that shuts down the interstate. Boom. Now I had to make this movie here, it was tailor made for this location.

When we finally screened Breakup Season for the local audience, we packed the town’s biggest auditorium and sold out the show. During the snowstorm scene, the audience erupted with contagious laughter; it was like we were telling an old inside joke they all knew really well. This happened in other sequences as well: there’s a throwaway line where a non-local mispronounces the town name (non-locals frequently call it “La Grange”), and everyone in the screening laughed. This was music to my ears and showed that I had done my homework and captured these granular details that made the location unique. It was one of the proudest nights of my life.

H. Nelson Tracey

What is the strangest incident or encounter you’ve had while shooting on location?

I shot a short film this summer that involved a swimming scene in the sea. While scouting, I went into the water to check how shallow it was and whether it would be safe for filming. Unbeknownst to me, the area was home to an extremely poisonous type of seaweed. It only brushed against my legs momentarily, but within a short time I developed a severe rash that spread all the way up to my waist. I had to be rushed to hospital for a cortisone injection. Needless to say, we found a new location the next day.

Sis Gürdal

We partially shot a project in a funeral home. I was really interested in shooting in the room where bodies were temporarily stored, but it was occupied. But the funeral director was really nice and moved the body so we could look and later shoot in that space. I can’t remember if I mentioned to the extra played the dead person that a body was just there recently.

Another tidbit, we did have multiple people come into the Party store to buy things. That was pretty hilarious.

Jared Sprouse

I can’t say I’ve had anything truly strange happen in the paranormal or eerie sense, but I can recall shooting my first properly budgeted short film “Spare the Kid” at a bowling alley, and we had to do it in off-peak overnight hours. However, the bowling alley was open 24 hours, meaning for the majority of the evening, we had to deal with people bowling just down the way from us. They were loud, so we’d beg them to take cigarette breaks outside so we could shoot key dialogue scenes, and finally, they went home around 5am and we could crank through the rest of our shoot.

H. Nelson Tracey

What film’s use of locations really stands out to you?

I watched Columbus not long ago, and it really stayed with me. It’s not so much the locations themselves, but the way they’re observed. The cinematography frames the world (and particularly its architecture) through an analytical, almost reverential gaze, while the story explores the emotional and healing potential of those spaces through Casey, who sees the town’s modernist buildings not as tourist landmarks, but as places of refuge and inspiration. It’s a beautiful, incredibly precise marriage of visual language, location, and story.

Sis Gürdal

In contemporary cinema, The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023) has a perfect location. Small town diner in the desert with nothing for miles. However, the nooks and crannies they find to elevate the story, as well as the blocking layout in the hero location, are all expertly done.

In classic cinema, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is a perfect example. The town center square is perhaps one of the most jaw dropping use of space in all of film. The whole story hinges on the idea that love could be around this very corner, and Demy expertly glides the camera from one part of Rochefort’s town square to another. I imagine he wrote it specifically with many of the locations in mind. You can’t imagine it set anywhere else.

Jared Sprouse

I’m a big fan of Kelly Reichart’s work and that partially inspired my interest in shooting in Oregon: First Cow (2019), Old Joy (2008), and even her more subtle contemporary locations in Showing Up (2022) all make great use of their Oregon setting. Train Dreams (2025) is one of those recent “how did they do it?” examples, largely shot in Washington. Sean Baker’s work is a textbook perfect example of this, with The Florida Project (2017) being a masterclass in taking us to places we otherwise wouldn’t see on a big screen and characters feeling informed by setting.

I made an entire video essay about how the movie Widows (2018) utilizes Chicago. But the movie that inspired me the most is Todd Field’s In the Bedroom (2001). It’s richly detailed with how Camden, Maine informs the story. This is my high watermark in location-centric storytelling, and one of my all time favorites on all accounts.

H. Nelson Tracey

The series:

Introduction, Countdown, and That Cold Day in the Park

M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud

McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Images

The Long Goodbye and California Split

Nashville and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson

3 Women and Quintet

A Perfect Couple and Popeye

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers

Secret Honor and Fool for Love

The end of the eighties

Vincent & Theo

The Player

Short Cuts

Prêt-à-Porter and Kansas City

The Gingerbread Man and Dr. T & the Women

Gosford Park

The Company

A Prairie Home Companion

Movies, Now More Than Ever! three filmmakers on Robert Altman

A Conversation with Christina Kallas

At the 78^th Oscars (March 5^th, 2006), Robert Altman received an Honorary Award, “in recognition of a career that has repeatedly reinvented the art form and inspired filmmakers and audiences alike.” In his acceptance speech, Altman thanked the cast and crew of all his films, his family, and his doctor, and ended by recognizing his heart donor.

I got the heart of, I think, a young woman who was about in her late thirties, and so by that kind of calculation, you may be giving me this award too early. Because I think I’ve got about forty years left on it. And I intend to use it.

Indeed. That same month, the 81 year-old Altman directed Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues at London’s Old Vic. Five days after Oscar Night, A Prairie Home Companion (2006) opened Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival; it became a critical and commercial success in its summer wide release, grossing $26 million on a $10 million budget.

Seemingly powered by a much younger person’s heart, Altman began work on his next film. To quote an October 2006 Hollywood Reporter article,

Altman and writer Stephen Harrigan are developing a script inspired by the events depicted in S.R. Bindler’s 1997 documentary “Hands on a Hard Body: The Documentary,” which recounted a Texas endurance contest that offered a new Nissan Hardbody truck as the prize.

The last person left standing with a hand on the truck got to take it home. Altman has wanted to direct the project for years and now says it will be his next film.

But Altman died on November 20^th of leukemia complications. He received a wave of tributes from colleagues, other filmmakers, and critics. On February 20^th, 2007, which would have been Altman’s 82^nd birthday, a Hollywood who’s who assembled at the Majestic Theater on Broadway to celebrate his life.

Perhaps the most meaningful tribute came from protégé Paul Thomas Anderson, who dedicated There Will Be Blood (2007) to Altman’s memory. He described Altman as an inspiration in a press conference for the film:

I saw his film(s) when I was starting out, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller was certainly one them, Nashville, everything. All of them. We became pretty close in the last few years of his life. I got the job of sitting next to him on A Prairie Home Companion, for insurance reasons. My partner [Maya Rudolph] was in the film, and she was pregnant at the time. Just in case anything happened with Bob I was hired to sit there next to him. I can’t tell you what I took from it.

Obviously it was a privilege and an honor and all that, but just such an amazing good time. For 30 days, to sit next to him. Bob was very good at relaxing; he was a very relaxed director. I don’t know if he always was like that. I think he might have been. I would find myself getting uptight about things, and he just sort of looked at me like “What are you worried about? It’s all going to be fine.”

So we come to the end of this series, which grew from a very modest idea — writing a few Altman-related posts to tie in with a Criterion Channel retrospective — into my second-longest Substack project. At the beginning, I thought I might write one post per decade, but as I dove into Altman’s filmography I discovered that there was just so much to talk about. (A special thanks to , , and for their contributions to this series.)

Once, as a 19-or so year-old, I listened to the entire Beatles discography in chronological order. The music itself was and is wonderful and joyous and creative, but I also enjoyed experiencing the bigger narrative of the band’s career: the story of their rapid artistic development, their growth from “She Loves You” to “A Day in the Life” in less than four years.

This was a somewhat similar experience but with a longer, rougher trajectory, a rollercoaster ride of flops and comebacks. One full of really interesting films: classics, hidden gems, missed opportunities, fascinating failures and at least one straight-up terrible film. Robert Altman was inarguably an inconsistent filmmaker who didn’t always choose the best material, but it’s a testament to him that so much of his filmography is worth seeing.

Before we get to the inevitable top ten list, I’d like to take a moment to consider Altman’s career as a whole. First, I think it says something that feature filmmaking is only a subset of Altman’s body of work, which also included episodic television, cable miniseries, live theater and opera. He just loved working, creating, collaborating.

Altman’s long career also intersects with some of the big themes of postwar American film history.

Alongside John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn and Franklin J. Schaffner, he was part of a proto-New Hollywood generation of American filmmakers who honed their craft as television directors. With M*A*S*H (1970), he became a leading figure of the New Hollywood era, a filmmaker willing to push boundaries, to knock American icons off their pedestals. With his flops at Fox and especially Popeye (1980), he had a hand in the end of that era. His early 90s comeback saw Altman attain a new status as something of an elder statesman for the American independent film boom and, at the end of his career, he was one of the very first mainstream American filmmakers to experiment with the possibilities of digital cinema.

Altman crossed paths with a motley parade of actors, producers, musicians, executives and others, from Shelley Duvall and Robin Williams in their film debuts to Robert Evans, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks, John Williams, Leonard Cohen, the Joffrey Ballet, Jules Feiffer, Vilmos Zisgmond, Harry Belafonte, Jerry Weintraub, Chris Blackwell, Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan and so many others.

And he put together a body of work that influenced multiple generations of filmmakers and other creatives, as seen in my conversations with contemporary filmmakers about his work.

In all my years on Substack, I’ve never done a top ten list. But now seems like the right time. As for honorable mentions, I’d put A Prairie Home Companion (2006), Brewster McCloud (1970) – such an odd little film – and California Split (1974) and then perhaps Images (1972) in the next tier. Beyond Therapy (1987) is by far the worst film I watched for this retrospective.

Here’s my top ten essential Robert Altman films in chronological order.

• M*A*S*H: One of the biggest New Hollywood hits, a groundbreaking, boundary-pushing antiwar satire that represents the moment when a 45 year-old journeyman television and film director named Robert Altman became the cinematic auteur Robert Altman.

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Warren Beatty and an Oscar-nominated Julie Christie in a wintry anti-western with one of the most complex, alive, well-realized settings you’ll see in any film.

• The Long Goodbye: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe reinvented for the 1970s, with Elliot Gould as a slacker detective, Sterling Hayden commanding the screen as a tragic supporting character, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond capturing pastel California sunlight.

• Nashville: One of the great American films, Altman at his most Altmanesque, an epic panorama of life, death, politics, human connection and country music.

• 3 Women: Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek in a strange, beautiful film that was based on a dream and is one of the most dreamlike of cinematic experiences.

• Secret Honor: Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in a one-man show; a film that manages to turn one man monologuing in a room into compelling cinema.

• Vincent & Theo: My pick for the most underrated film in Altman’s filmography; a hidden gem and a moving telling of one of art history’s great, sad stories.

• The Player: The big 90s comeback, an endlessly entertaining, endlessly rewatchable Hollywood satire; Tim Robbins’s conniving Hollywood executive Griffin Mill is a standout character in Altman’s filmography.

• Short Cuts: Altman adapting Raymond Carver’s short stories into another epic ensemble piece that served as a template for Magnolia (1998).

• Gosford Park: An Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, a satirical look at the English class system and, above all, an Altmanesque exploration of a stately home’s daily operation.

If you search Altman on Google, the top stories won’t be about the filmmaker Robert but about the OpenAI CEO Sam. You’ll see news updates about the Musk v. Altman trial and think pieces about AI and its impacts.

Why watch Robert Altman movies in 2026? Because they’re the complete opposite of AI-generated content. Because they’re complex, chaotic, imperfect, spontaneous, improvised, noisy, cluttered and, in general, deeply, deeply human.

Greek-German-American filmmaker Christina Kallas is one of independent cinema’s most distinctive voices, known for disrupting traditional storytelling through complex, visually and sonically layered narratives. A two-time Berlinale and Slamdance alumna, she is the writer-director of the critically acclaimed Paris is in Harlem (2023), The Rainbow Experiment (2018), and 42 Seconds of Happiness (2016), and the writer-producer of the Golden Bear-nominated thriller The Commissioner, starring John Hurt. She is currently in post-production on her upcoming feature, Lost in You.

For the penultimate entry in this series, I invited Christina to discuss the films of Robert Altman, who is one of her inspirations.

How did you discover the films of Robert Altman?

I grew up in Thessaloniki. In my early teens I would skip evening class and spend my lunch money at a shady neighborhood cinema that smelled of stale tobacco, basement mold, and sweat. There were illicit couples around and men who clearly weren’t there for the films but for the privacy of the dark. I remember being always on the edge of my seat, ready to jump to another row should one of them come close. I should definitely film that scene…

That’s where I got my film education, long before film school. I watched The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Alice in the Cities, Camera Buff, The Last Metro, Nashville, 3 Women, A Wedding… Two films a week, every week I had school, for three years. These films opened my world. They surprised me. They satisfied my bottomless curiosity. They made me want to be a director.

Like David Lynch or Federico Fellini, Robert Altman's surname has become an adjective. What does Altmanesque mean to you?

Reviewers have called my films Altmanesque because of their large ensembles, overlapping stories, wide scope, and obsession with detail. But to me, “Altmanesque” means something harder to define. It means trusting that life doesn’t have a protagonist — that the person in the background is just as interesting as the person in the foreground, maybe more so. It means a kind of generous, restless attention. Altman’s camera is always curious about whoever it isn’t watching.

There is also a particular relationship to chance in his work: things happen in his films the way they happen in a crowded room: messily, simultaneously, without waiting for one another. That feels true to me. That feels like life, and I am fascinated by life more than by purely fictional stories. This is why I have never made a period piece.

You once proposed “a new storytelling epoch, corresponding to a more ambiguous and complex experience of reality.” One of the ways Robert Altman did that was through sound design: through a combination of individual lavalier mics and multitrack mixing that captured overlapping conversations and ambient noise. Does Altmanesque sound design inform your own approach to sound?

Absolutely. I cannot imagine capturing or mixing sound any other way. It’s like being in a café or a restaurant with people talking around you — you can choose to focus on one conversation or another, or let words from different tables collide to create entirely new meaning. I also use a boom mic and ask the sound mixer to live-mix on a separate track, which introduces another layer of presence: that of the mixer making an active, physical choice in the space.

This sonic layers-upon-layers approach connects directly to my obsession with split screens. With each film, I push that technique further. In the feature I am finishing now, I tell the story of a school shooting entirely through fragments of dialogue that correspond to fragmented moments in split screens that constantly appear and disappear. The parents have been called to a meeting with the school counselor. There is a gun in the backpack sitting on the desk the entire time. No one checks the bag. The kid walks back to class with it.

American gun violence is a running theme throughout your New York trilogy. Was the chilling, sadly prescient ending of Nashville (1975) an influence?

It’s fascinating because I thought I was done with that theme when I started writing Lost in You, the project I’m working on now. It’s a love story told in fragments over time between a filmmaker and a theater actor. All the while, the filmmaker is trying to get her next movie off the ground — and that movie (ha!) happens to be about a school shooter’s mother. So apparently, I’m not done.

I actually wrote the script she is working on in the film before I wrote the script for the framing film itself. It’s very meta.

The truth is that gun violence is simply part of American life in a way that I, as a European filmmaker, find impossible to ignore. I moved to the US in 2011, and one of the first major national events I experienced — while being a mother myself — was Sandy Hook. Twenty-six six- and seven-year-old children. It seemed so horrendous it was impossible to process, and surely traumatic enough to trigger gun control, as it has everywhere else in the world. It didn’t. At the same time, teaching film in college, I have to participate in active shooter drills. This is the reality. You can’t set an authentic story in America and leave that out. What I’m trying to do is take it out of the darkness where it hides — out of a black-and-white world where someone is either a pure victim or a pure perpetrator — and look at it as something more complex and more accidental. That’s also, I think, what Altman was doing in Nashville.

Altman was a lifelong jazz fan and his creative process is often compared to jazz improvisation. You’ve also made a film inspired by jazz, Paris is in Harlem (2023). How did you translate the jazz aesthetic into filmmaking?

With Paris is in Harlem, I didn’t set out to make a film about jazz so much as to make a film like jazz. I use improvisation extensively in my development and rehearsal process—less so during production, though I don’t enforce rigid blocking and I always encourage actors to go beyond what’s on the page, provided the text is covered. I am very familiar with improvisation, and with the fact that actors have to be extremely skilled to do it well—just like jazz musicians. It all feels so free and effortless, but it is actually an incredibly intricate, highly disciplined art form.

Structurally, I decided to compose the entire film like a piece of jazz music. We used a Steadicam for the melodic sequences and jump cuts for the more frenetic allegro passages. The split screens serve as the moments when the full band plays together after we have heard each solo separately.

It was no surprise to me to learn that Altman was a lifelong jazz fan. You need a distinct musical sensibility to successfully navigate a multi-protagonist story, whether you are writing or directing it. It is very much like conducting an orchestra. And before you ask—my background is in music. I play classical guitar, I studied opera, and I hold a double major in music and cinema. Cinema won, but music was my first love.

Like Robert Altman, you’re known for ensemble casts. One of the strategies Altman and his collaborators used to structure ensemble pieces was the ‘tour guide:’ a character who crosses paths with all the other characters and serves as the connective tissue between all the intersecting stories. Have you ever used a similar strategy?

That probably happens naturally when you tell these kinds of stories. Intersecting connections are inherently intriguing — whether it’s a shared location, a unifying event, or indeed a single character and the idea of six degrees of separation. What fascinates me personally is how these connection points allow you to capture completely different perspectives on one and the same event.

What I primarily use to structure my films is a methodology I call emotional structure — in fact, I wrote a book about it. Because of my background in music, I approach narrative structure much like a musical composition. In a multi-protagonist piece, you cannot rely on classic screenwriting models like the three-act structure, the eight-sequence breakdown, or the hero’s journey. None of them work.

Having analyzed an immense number of non-linear and multi-protagonist films during my cinema studies, the one thing I noticed early on is that these films are an experience rather than a traditional plot line. The audience goes on an emotional journey — moving from wound to wound, or from wound to healing. That internal movement is what the filmmaker is truly orchestrating.

To achieve this, I developed a system that allows me to stress-test my writing against its core emotional themes: the open questions and the underlying reasons I feel compelled to tell the story in the first place. Once that emotional framework is locked in, you can feel immediately when a scene goes wrong — when the tension drops, when the ensemble becomes unbalanced, or when the script begins favoring one character over another.

Nashville has an incredibly profound emotional structure. Short Cuts, A Wedding, The Player — they all do.

What is your favorite Robert Altman movie? And do you have a favorite underrated hidden gem in Altman's filmography?

Nashville, without a doubt. Though I do love A Wedding. And I adore The Long Goodbye, which operates in a different mode of that very same intelligence — the way dialogue bleeds into background noise, the way Altman keeps the camera at a slight, observant remove from what is traditionally considered dramatically important. The underlying sensibility is identical to Nashville‘s, even if the narrative structure is completely different.

As for an underrated hidden gem: Health (1980). Almost no one has seen it. It centers on a political convention for a health-food organization inside a Florida hotel, with an incredible ensemble cast that includes Glenda Jackson, Carol Burnett, James Garner, and Lauren Bacall. Altman made it right after A Wedding and Quintet, but it was shelved by 20th Century Fox for years and barely received a theatrical release. It is essentially Nashville transplanted onto the stage of American political absurdity — chaotic, hilarious, and structurally loose in the best possible way. It is criminally overlooked.

The series so far:

Introduction, Countdown, and That Cold Day in the Park

M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud

McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Images

The Long Goodbye and California Split

Nashville and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson

3 Women and Quintet

A Perfect Couple and Popeye

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers

Secret Honor and Fool for Love

The end of the eighties

Vincent & Theo

The Player

Short Cuts

Prêt-à-Porter and Kansas City

The Gingerbread Man and Dr. T & the Women

Gosford Park

The Company

Movies, Now More Than Ever! three filmmakers on Robert Altman

Robert Altman on the Criterion Channel

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

(a guest post by )

I’m a film school graduate, but you’d never know it. I never wound up on a set, and I can’t even find my diploma. Perhaps it was a fever dream. I’d doubt that education more, but I still recall every movie that was presented for critique during my tenure.

Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) stands as one of the strongest pieces of cinema I was introduced to. That spry study of burgeoning Americana set me off on a course to locate his entire oeuvre, which shoved me clear into an appreciation of the director despite all of the steps he took outside of his own weathered bounds. Even a tragic or tepid Altman film has always felt gleeful to me, vibrant.

You can imagine my elation when Robert began his rich documentation of the director’s intimidating film catalogue here on Substack for Earthly Delights, pouring over nearly all of his screen gets from start to finish, fine tooth comb and a copy of Altman on Altman in hand.

This week, I’ve dedicated my time to a heartfelt rewatch of Altman’s unwitting swan song, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), in hopes of honoring his wide-eyed legacy and adding to the already robust discussion over here in the Altmanesque universe. It’s been a ponderous excursion, and I’m so glad to have joined the train as it took off from the station — onward through a few nosedives amidst each set of treasures ol’ Altman delivered.

With a scratch and a ramble, this fable begins by framing a hillside at dusk. As the sun throws a pink hue to welcome the night sky, a radio tower compliments a water tower, silhouettes that dot each side of the scene as the waves volley. Static fills the space between each change of the program — from cooking, to evangelical worship, sports to advice, and smooth jazz to a traffic report. Slowly, an aurora erases the frolicking sound as a sly transition occurs, delivering the viewer to a rain soaked street in St. Paul, neon lights dancing off a puddle outside of a timeworn diner. We’re introduced to a cityslick private eye-turned-security detail sitting at the counter within who’ll go on to offer a fly-on-the-wall account of the final broadcast of a beloved live-audience variety show.

The plot is based on the titular meteoric radio program that saturated American airwaves every Saturday night. Led by charismatic ringleader Garrison Keillor from 1974-2016, out of St. Paul’s grand Fitzgerald Theatre, the show would go on to entertain with musician Chris Thile at the helm until 2020, supported by Minnesota Public Radio via its American Public Media arm. A mix of wry storytelling, local folk acts and comedic vignettes, the show became a welcome piece of midwestern nostalgia even before it was officially off the air.

Keillor courted Altman while he was shooting The Company (2003) in Chicago. Once locked, he’d go on to write the script alongside Ken LaZebnik and play himself in the film, which is as true a rendition of communal mayhem as possible. The scenes merge a stacked ensemble cast with professional musicians and the spirit of the broadcast is quickly established: chaotic, charming, arresting and unique, a crew of lofty artists palling around and giving audiences a taste of that same camaraderie, cultivating a sense of community. The true-life program that enraptured a steady listener base for ages was an apt canvas, and Altman filled it with astounding levity as he sketched intriguing portraits of grief, death, greed and togetherness over one boundless hootenanny of a farewell.

In addition to showcasing this rich history, a mischievous former listener-turned-harbinger and a hushed on-set death divert audience intrigue backstage; both subplots add suspense and whimsy that play like noir sidecars to the spirited performance numbers.

Altman’s behemoth of a cast is allowed to roam, and they repay him in kind by abiding his auteur mandates — both explicit and implied. As in prior frenzied features, Nashville and Short Cuts (1993), Altman denies his protagonists their real-world infamy and, when looking at each actor on screen, we see their persona long before recalling the latest tabloid article they’ve been featured in. The director forms such an intimate relationship with his talent, he’s able to elicit immense character building from them without extracting any of the limelight fatigue. It seems impossible to do when you see he’s called prodigal misfit Lily Tomlin to stand aside the likes of Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Maya Rudolph, Tommy Lee Jones, John C. Reilly, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson and Lindsay Lohan. Altman makes it appear as simple as cooking a fried egg on a preheated flattop.

Simultaneous banter reverberates through scenes like a fighter jet racing through the atmosphere at warp speed. In this, his last hoorah, the acting is immeasurably freeform, providing the sense that the viewer is at the other end of the camera cavorting with each protagonist in real-time, sifting through their minds for a needle in this astounding haystack, where each jubilant act attempts the grandest closing night imaginable to a studio audience and the dogged listeners who’ve supported them for decades.

Altman weaves a distinct thread through all of his films, though they’re each wholly different garments. For all of the spectacle A Prairie Home Companion delivers, Altman and his team injected a weighty dose of bittersweet armchair philosophy. Palpable and emotive talks on the grand ‘goodbye’ permeate nearly every scene — from a fallen peer, to a suicide-curious youngin’, a show in the shadows with nothing on the horizon for its stars. It all works to encompass the trepidation that comes with facing the inevitable: there comes a time when we all have to wind it on down, so we ought do our best to eat our toast before the butter melts. Dealing in several finales at once, the film is a near-perfect ode to a legendary radio outfit, and to the director who gave us a colossal smorgasbord of material to decipher for years to come.

The series so far:

Introduction, Countdown, and That Cold Day in the Park

M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud

McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Images

The Long Goodbye and California Split

Nashville and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson

3 Women and Quintet

A Perfect Couple and Popeye

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers

Secret Honor and Fool for Love

The end of the eighties

Vincent & Theo

The Player

Short Cuts

Prêt-à-Porter and Kansas City

The Gingerbread Man and Dr. T & the Women

Gosford Park

Movies, Now More Than Ever! three filmmakers on Robert Altman

Robert Altman on the Criterion Channel

When I think of ballet movies, my mind goes to The Red Shoes (1948) and its granddaughter Black Swan (2010): psychological dramas about the obsessive pursuit of perfection and the fatal collision of art and life.

The Company is a kinder, gentler ballet movie, directed by a man in his late seventies as his penultimate film.

Late style is a somewhat nebulous, somewhat contested idea in fields like art history and literary criticism. In probably its most common form, it refers to artists making more serene, meditative, pared-down work in their last years.

For me, cinema’s great example of this is The Dead (1987), the Joycean adaptation directed by a terminally ill John Huston in his last months. It’s Huston’s quietest film, a film ultimately about death and how the dead live on in the memory of the living.

The Company is not on that level, but it does represent late Altman, Altman and company very much working in a late style. Instead of melodrama, Michael Joshua Rowin calls it a “mellow drama:”

Altman shoots The Company with a grace and lightness befitting its subject matter, allowing the Joffrey’s rehearsals, board meetings, and costume changes to unfold as naturally as a perfect pirouette.

‘Mellow,’ ‘grace,’ ‘lightness,’ and ‘naturally’ are perfect words to describe this project.

After Gosford Park, Robert Altman began work on a project he once intriguingly, enigmatically described as a movie “about a bear” starring Paul Newman and Naomi Watts.1 But that project fell apart due to the machinations of Harvey Weinstein and Altman signed on to a project from an unlikely source, scream queen Neve Campbell.

After the success of the Scream movies, Campbell wanted to star in a more personal project, one inspired by her formative experiences at the National Ballet School of Canada. Altman’s friend and associate Barbara Turner2 — a colleague from his sixties television days — expanded Campbell’s idea into a script and pitched it to Altman, who was Campbell’s first choice to direct.

While Altman knew very little about ballet, he was a filmmaker fascinated by artists and performers, by the drama and comedy that occurs when a group of characters put on a show. His filmography represents almost a catalogue of different forms of media, from filmmaking itself to painting, country music, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, haute couture, jazz and radio broadcasting.

The Company is a film very much in this lineage. As the title suggests, its focus is the entire ballet company, Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, which had inspired Turner’s script. Before Turner, Campbell had turned down several treatments about, as Altman describes them, “the poor little girl who struggles to become a ballerina and finally makes it.” Campbell wasn’t interested in making that kind of movie and neither was Altman.

Instead, the opening credits list the cast as Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, James Franco and the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, which is exactly right. The ballet company itself is a main character; instead of following a protagonist’s narrative arc, the film follows the process of putting on a ballet, from meetings with the choreographer to rehearsal, dressing rooms, afterparties, fundraising dinners, performances, analyzing and critiquing performance footage, and dealing with injuries. In the film’s funniest moment, real-life Joffrey Ballet choreographer Robert Desrosiers pitches a new ballet to the dancers with the unforgettable hook “we start with a giant snake onstage.”

At the center of everything is McDowell’s Alberto Antonelli, a character inspired by Joffrey Ballet artistic director Gerald Arpino. McDowell has of course been typecast as a villain for decades, so it’s nice to see him play a very different character: a hardworking, sometimes prickly leader determined to keep the company operating despite financial challenges. Campbell is also good as the film’s protagonist, while Franco is her love interest in a minor subplot. But those three names are really the only actors in the film.

During preproduction, Altman and company faced the dilemma of hiring actors to dance vs. hiring dancers to act. Altman decided on the latter, reasoning that they were already experienced, disciplined performers who could adapt to a new challenge.

And they weren’t the only ones. Almost a half-century into his career as a director, Altman took on the new challenge of digital cinema. Cinematographer Andrew Dunn used a Sony HDW-F900, the same camera George Lucas had used for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002); The Company is one of the first major American films shot entirely on digital.

These “light, cheap, digital cameras,” Rowin writes,

record performances for extended periods of time… the possibility of quick retakes is absolutely essential for shooting dancers physically prohibited from waiting around and cooling off while a crew reloads for another run.

This sounds like documentary filmmaking, and if I had one major critique of The Company it would be that — as good as Campbell and McDowell are — I would have loved to see an Altman documentary about the Joffrey Ballet rather than a documentary-style drama. Altman was always up to try to new challenges, from tv miniseries to concert specials to opera, and his aesthetic and approach would have served him well in documentary.

But The Company is the closest we’ll ever get to a theatrical Altman documentary feature, and probably the best thing about is that it’s a fictional film that has a lot of the aesthetic pleasures of a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

The Company premiered in September 2003 at the Toronto International Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics gave it a limited release in December and, like many of Altman’s films, it underperformed at the box office. Todd McCarthy of Variety gives a good explanation in his review. The Company, he writes, eschews the “customary elements” of the backstage ballet movie — “the hysteria, imperious company manager, cruel choreographers, prima donnas, furious rivalries and everything-for-art obsessiveness” — for “an impressionistic, undramatic approach that will be too soft and uneventful for mainstream viewers.”3

Quite a few critics critiqued the film as unfocused, as lacking strong character arcs. In a 2/5 star review, for instance, Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw essentially criticizes it for offering middle class, middlebrow respectability instead of the “boldly vivid” entertainment of backstage melodrama. “The real problem with The Company,” Geoffrey MacNab writes in Sight and Sound, “is the lack of narrative drive… nothing much seems to be at stake here.”4 But McNab goes on to write that “The Company provides a subtle and absorbing insight into the inner workings of the Joffrey Ballet.”

Others read it as a veteran filmmaker reflecting on his creative process.

Slant critic Ed Gonzalez, who describes the film as a masterpiece, calls Malcolm McDowell’s character Altman’s doppelganger. Roger Ebert begins his review by asking “Why did it take me so long to see what was right there in front of my face — that The Company is the closest that Robert Altman has come to making an autobiographical film?”

“Altman has rarely had box office hits,” Ebert writes at the conclusion of his review,

and yet he has found a way to work steadily, to be prolific, despite almost always choosing projects he wants to work on. How does he do it? The Company offers some clues.

Indeed. While I’m not sure about direct autobiographical parallels, I think this film about a team of dedicated artists working together despite financial challenges does say something about Altman’s filmmaking process, about his career.

The series so far:

Introduction, Countdown, and That Cold Day in the Park

M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud

McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Images

The Long Goodbye and California Split

Nashville and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson

3 Women and Quintet

A Perfect Couple and Popeye

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers

Secret Honor and Fool for Love

The end of the eighties

Vincent & Theo

The Player

Short Cuts

Prêt-à-Porter and Kansas City

The Gingerbread Man and Dr. T & the Women

Movies, Now More Than Ever! three filmmakers on Robert Altman

Robert Altman on the Criterion Channel

A New Millenium

In Megadoc (2025), the endlessly entertaining Mike Figgis documentary about the making of Megalopolis (2024), George Lucas contrasts himself with Francis Ford Coppola. “He’s the opposite of me,” Lucas says. “I’m plan it out, plodding along, and he’s a jump off the cliff guy.”

Robert Altman was definitely a jump off the cliff guy. This makes his career both fascinating and frustrating. At times, his willingness to take that metaphorical plunge led to cinematic brilliance, to films like 3 Women (1977). It was based on a dream and fleshed out with what Altman and company discovered on a location scouting trip in the California desert.

At other times, it led to bloated, underbaked disappointments that underutilized great casts and flopped critically and commercially. For most of this series, I covered two films per post, a format that often juxtaposes a classic with a missed opportunity and thus illustrates the repeated roller coaster up-and-down movement of Altman’s career.

In the early 90s, Altman had a career comeback at the perfect time: during the American indie film boom, in a zeitgeist that hailed him as the grandfather of a new generation of maverick American filmmakers. By the late 90s, however, he had burned much of that newfound cultural capital on box office flops and battles with studios. After Y2K, he would need to reinvent himself yet again, and as a 75-year-old man.

Gosford Park (2001)

“I was inspired by the desire to get a movie made, first of all,” Bob Balaban told the Toronto Star in a 2001 interview.1 A veteran character actor with memorable roles in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Christopher Guest movies and Seinfeld, Balaban wanted to branch out in the late 1990s by becoming a movie producer.

He met with Robert Altman — a longtime friend he had never worked with —and pitched an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery set in an English country house. “I never really imagined,” he would later recall, “that this would be more than a series of entertaining conversations with a brilliant filmmaker with whom I’ve always wanted to work.” But Altman loved the idea and decided to jump off the cliff yet again.

“I’m sort of an Anglophile,” Altman told David Thomson in Altman on Altman. “I think most Americans are. We share a language and a literature, so it’s in our genes, I guess.”

The two American Bobs nonetheless decided that they needed to bring in a British writer more familiar with high society. They first approached another duo, Upstairs, Downstairs cocreators Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh. Altman found their script outline “fine and excellent, but the exact opposite of what I wanted to do – it was rather sentimental.” They nonetheless cast Atkins in a supporting role; her resemblance to costar Helen Mirren inspired Altman to rewrite the script while shooting and make their characters sisters.

They then turned to a writer born into the English aristocracy, a man now officially known as Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford. Fellowes, who currently sits in the House of Lords, brought a wealth of experience to the table from both his own family background and his marriage to royal lady-in-waiting Emma Joy Kitchener. After writing the script, Fellowes stayed on as a technical advisor alongside a trio of retired domestic servants who had worked in the 1930s.

“I was on the set for nearly every shot,” Fellowes told the Chicago Tribune in 2002.2 In his words, “Bob had this feeling that if he was going to start making fun of the English class system, he had to get the details right.”

The story of Gosford Park took shape. A large cast of characters — divided into ‘above stairs,’ ‘below stairs’ and ‘visitors’ in the closing credits — arrive at the titular stately home for a shooting weekend in November 1932. Someone murders their host, the wealthy baronet Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), and Inspector Thompson (Stephen Fry) arrives to investigate.

In the film’s most obvious break from the traditional murder mystery formula, Thompson is no Hercule Poirot and comes nowhere near cracking the case. His biggest mistake is his assumption that the killer must come from above stairs, whereas the solution to the mystery centers on the interconnection between the two worlds.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s hard to write about Short Cuts (1993) without mentioning its influence on Magnolia (1999); it’s even harder to write about Gosford Park without mentioning its influence from The Rules of the Game (1939), the Jean Renoir classic about French high society “dancing on a volcano” right before the German invasion.

The similarities are obvious. Both films follow an ensemble of characters arriving at a stately country house for a shooting weekend; both present the host and guest above stairs and the servants below stairs as two parallel societies with their own rules and hierarchies; both involve a killing that is eventually covered up.

The characters in Gosford Park also dance on top of a volcano. In Altman’s words, it takes place

during the hunting season in November 1932, the last shooting season before the fall of the Reichstag, which was also the end of that upstairs-downstairs world of indentured servitude. Society was opening up for women in particular; the social structure was changing.

The setting had different, more personal residence for Balaban, who grew up in a film industry family; most famously, his uncle A.J. cofounded the Balaban and Katz movie theater chain. 1932, he told an interviewer, “was the exact year my dad’s older brother Barney left to become president of Paramount.” In a “genetically satisfying” flourish, Bob Balaban plays an Old Hollywood producer in Gosford Park.

The cast was assembled basically the day Robert Altman said he wanted to do this movie,” Balaban told the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2001.

I’m teasing in a way, but when Robert directs an ensemble the question really isn’t how do we get them . . . (but) who didn’t we get. All sorts of wonderful people wanted to be in the movie, and we couldn’t have everybody.

Indeed, seemingly every RSC-trained British character actor alive in the early 2000s either appeared in this film or played a Hogwarts professor. Or both, in the case of Gambon and Maggie Smith. No fewer than seven Gosford Park cast members have a knighthood or damehood.

Like previous Altman ensemble films, Gosford Park features characters that Altman on Altman editor David Thompson aptly calls tour guides. Nashville has two obvious examples: Geraldine Chaplin’s self-appointed BBC interviewer and Michael Murphy’s political operative, who both navigate through the film’s world, interacting with other characters and connecting storylines.

Gosford Park has at least three. Below stairs, it’s novice lady’s maid Mary (Kelly MacDonald), who is new to life as a domestic servant and has custom and especially various gossip explained to her. “She’s the thread that takes up from the first shot to the last shot,” Altman notes; her presence is the perfect excuse for exposition.

Above stairs, it’s the duo of Hollywood producer Morris Weissman (Balaban) and his friend Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), the only historical figure depicted in the film. (In a three-tiered metafictional flourish, Balaban — the real-life coproducer of the murder mystery Gosford Park — plays a movie producer who visits an English stately home to find inspiration for a murder mystery film he plans to produce, only to experience a very similar scenario unfold around him.)

As a probably gay Jewish American and a gay Welshman, they fit uneasily into the world of English high society, in part because they don’t conform to normal behavior in that setting. For instance, the servants of Gosford Park are taken aback by the idea of Weissman’s pescatarianism and his unwillingness to actually shoot animals during a shooting weekend.

Together, they represent something equally alien in Gosford Park: popular culture, mass media, celebrity, sources of economic and social status that have nothing to do with being born into a noble family. Mary is much more starstruck by Novello performing his songs on a piano than by barons and countesses.

Listing all the key characters — and their actors, who maximize limited screentime — would take up this entire post. Instead, I’d like to focus on the gestalt, because Gosford Park is almost the protagonist of Gosford Park and this film, more than anything, is another Altmanesque exploration of a place. Todd McCarthy puts it well in his Variety review:

few films have ever taken so much trouble to show how a house like this actually worked in all its specifics. A composite of a couple of different homes as well as sets, Gosford Park is a virtual maze of public spaces and small private rooms.

Walt Disney famously compared the experience of riding Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean to a noisy cocktail party: a world with too much visual and auditory detail to take in on one go. Gosford Park is a cinematic experience like that, a film that feels like a tour through a big, buzzing, labyrinthine beehive of a stately home.

Altman, Balaban and company had a hard time finding an American distributor and eventually went with USA Films for half their asking price. Wall Street Journal columnist Tom King identifies two main reasons in a March 2002 article: Altman’s recent cold streak at the box office (illustrated with a graph labeled The Dow Jones Robert Altman Index) and fears that the British period setting might not appeal to American audiences.3

Gosford Park premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in November 2001 and opened at just nine American theaters on December 26^th. It generated an immediate buzz and received rave reviews. Roger Ebert gave it 4 stars, calling it “a joyous and audacious achievement.” “What makes the achievement of Gosford Park all the more remarkable,” Stephen Holden writes in a New York Times review,

is that Mr. Altman is 76. If the movie’s cool assessment of the human condition implies the dispassionate overview of a man who has seen it all, the energy that crackles from the screen suggests the clearsighted joie de vivre of an artist still deeply engaged in the world.

When Oscar nominations were announced on February 13^th, 2002, Gosford Park received seven, more than any other Altman film:

• Best Picture

• Best Director

• Best Supporting Actress (Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Helen Mirren)

• Best Original Screenplay

• Best Art Direction (Stephen Altman’s only Oscar nomination)

• Best Costume Design

Two weeks later, it received two BAFTAS (for Outstanding British Film and Jenny Beaven’s Costume Design) out of nine nominations.

On March 1^st, USA Films expanded Gosford Park to a domestic wide release of more than 900 theaters. It ended up grossing a total of almost $88 million (over $41 million domestically and over $46 million internationally) on a $19.8 million budget, making it the second biggest hit of Altman’s career after M*A*S*H (1970).

It’s not hard to understand why. Agatha Christie is the world’s best-selling novelist, the writer of the longest-running play in history; Gosford Park is the perfect, rare blend of the Altmanesque with extremely commercial subject matter. It’s a high concept with a great tagline — “Tea At Four. Dinner At Eight. Murder At Midnight.” — that Griffin Mill himself would have appreciated.

On Oscar night, it took home a single award: Julian Fellowes for Best Original Screenplay. (A few years later, BBC executive Gareth Neame reached out to Fellowes and pitched a television spinoff of Gosford Park, which evolved into Downton Abbey; both feature the late Dame Maggie Smith as a sharp-tongued dowager countess.)4 That year’s biggest winners were A Beautiful Mind and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

(Looking at the list of nominees, the 74^th Oscars represents a really interesting transitional moment: Altman, Lynch and Sissy Spacek’s last Oscar nominations, Wes Anderson and Christopher Nolan’s first nominations, the first Best Animated Feature Award. In Best Original Score, John Williams was up for both A.I. Artificial Intelligence — really the last Stanley Kubrick film — and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which seem like two different eras side by side.)

Robert Altman lost Best Director on his fifth and final nomination; Altman hugging and consoling fellow nominee David Lynch in the aisle as Ron Howard accepts the award onstage is one of the most memorable, poignant moments in his career. To end this post, here’s the late David Lynch recalling that moment.

The series so far:

Introduction, Countdown, and That Cold Day in the Park

M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud

McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Images

The Long Goodbye and California Split

Nashville and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson

3 Women and Quintet

A Perfect Couple and Popeye

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers

Secret Honor and Fool for Love

The end of the eighties

Vincent & Theo

The Player

Short Cuts

Prêt-à-Porter and Kansas City

Movies, Now More Than Ever! three filmmakers on Robert Altman

Robert Altman on the Criterion Channel

The Gingerbread Man (1998)

After Kansas City (1996) flopped, a new career opportunity fell into Robert Altman’s lap. Polygram had signed Kenneth Branagh to star in an original John Grisham story, in a deal that gave Branagh choice of director. Altman was on the shortlist and he both needed the work and thought that directing a suspenseful thriller would be an interesting new creative challenge.1

I’ve never read a John Grisham novel, but I know that he was one of the most commercially successful authors of the 90s and 2000s. In his prime, he had an almost Stephen King-level bestselling-novel-to-big-screen pipeline: The Firm and The Pelican Brief in 1993, The Client in 1994, A Time to Kill and The Chamber in 1996. At about the same time as Altman got the offer to direct The Gingerbread Man, fellow New Hollywood veteran Francis Ford Coppola began work on his John Grisham movie, The Rainmaker (1997). In both cases, adapting a hugely successful novelist seemed like the right step towards a career comeback.2

So Altman signed on to direct The Gingerbread Man for Polygram’s Island Pictures subsidiary.3 Before discussing the production, I’d like to discuss that title, which I think is one of the reasons why this film is mostly forgotten.

I haven’t really talked about the titles of Altman’s films in this retrospective because they generally work. M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player and even Prêt-à-Porter all aptly describe their respective films; Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Popeye, Vincent & Theo are the names of protagonists, and so forth.

As a title, The Gingerbread Man is strongly evocative of things that this movie is not about: childhood, baking, Christmas treats. Altman, Grisham et al do try to justify the title with a sequence where the protagonist’s long-suffering ex-wife (Famke Janssen) tells him the fairy tale about the gingerbread man deceived and devoured by the fox; this serves as an obvious metaphor for their dangerous situation. If the film felt like a macabre twisted fairy tale, then the title might work, but The Gingerbread Man on a poster or theater marquee just doesn’t communicate noirish John Grisham thriller.4 Grisham novels and their movie adaptations generally have much more straightforward titles: The Firm, The Client, The Chamber.

But, as we’ll see, there’s a much bigger reason why this film didn’t reach a wide audience.

Robert Altman made three key creative decisions for The Gingerbread Man.

First, he changed Grisham’s heroic lawyer into a flawed antihero; Rick Magruder (Branagh) is an impulsive philanderer who neglects his family. In a Hitchcockian move, his weaknesses make him the perfect target for the film’s overarching conspiracy, the perfect tool to accomplish their plot. He does have good qualities, as both a successful lawyer and a father very serious about his children’s safety, and this combination of virtues and vices makes him a compelling protagonist.

Second, Altman set and shot the film in Savannah, Georgia, one of the oldest cities in the United States: the capital of the British Province of Georgia, the endpoint of Sherman’s March to the Sea, the hometown of Flannery O’Connor. In the 21^st century, Georgia became the ‘Hollywood of the South’ and Savannah became a regular filming location. In the 90s, on the other hand, The Gingerbread Man and then Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) were some of the first major films shot there. The Gingerbread Man benefits greatly from its atmospheric setting, from historic buildings and rain dripping from the branches of live oaks covered in Spanish moss. Altman also set the film during the buildup to a (fictional) hurricane, which gives it a perfect cloudy, rainswept, almost Southern Gothic gloom for a thriller/neo-noir.

Finally, Altman brought on a new creative collaborator, Chinese cinematographer Gu Changwei. Gu was a major figure in the Fifth Generation of Chinese cinema, collaborating with directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige and earning an Oscar nomination for his work on Farewell My Concubine (1993). Altman saw that film and thought that Gu could bring a new visual style to The Gingerbread Man, which he does: via aerial photography, crane shots, a handful of handheld shots and the darkest palette in Altman’s filmography.

The Gingerbread Man looks different than any other Altman movie and its visual uniqueness begins with its opening sequence, a seemingly endless aerial shot with the camera flying over flood plains, snaking rivers and deltas with few visible signs of human civilization. It feels like something you’d see in a Werner Herzog documentary and begins the film on a strangely beautiful, strangely ominous note.

You’d have to return to Altman’s two sixties films that I covered at the beginning of this series to find a less Altmanesque Robert Altman film. The Gingerbread Man lacks pretty much all of his trademarks, except perhaps for a focus on flawed characters and a strong sense of place. Instead, it’s a pulpy nineties thriller with a big plot twist. It offers nothing particularly new, but I found it a pleasant surprise: a well-executed, atmospheric example of its genre.

The cast is a big reason why. I generally like Kenneth Branagh as an actor, at least when he’s not playing Hercule Poirot, and he does not disappoint here. A northern Irishman, he nails a southern accent and gives Magruder a very different speech pattern than any other character I’ve seen him play. Janssen (Dutch) and Embeth Davidtz (American/South African) do surprisingly well, accent-wise, as does Robert Downey, Jr. in his first role after his first drug-related arrest.5 And the late Robert Duvall was and is a Hollywood icon and brings a creepy gravitas to his backwoods patriarch.

The Gingerbread Man also has a good hook. Branagh’s Magruder has an affair with Davidtz’s Mallory and decides to protect her from her violent, unstable father (Duvall), a decision that entangles him in a web of deceit, arson and murder. It’s an elevator pitch that Griffin Mill could appreciate it. If things unfolded differently, The Gingerbread Man could have been Altman’s commercial comeback, a sign of his versatility as a filmmaker.

However, the film’s postproduction turned into a debacle. After Altman’s final cut underperformed with test audiences, Polygram hired a new editor to recut the film, which caused Altman to ask the Directors Guild of America to take his name off of The Gingerbread Man. Island Pictures CEO Chris Blackwell6 resigned to protest Polygram’s decision, setting off events that led Polygram to close Island at the end of 1997.

Looking to avoid more negative PR, Polygram buried The Gingerbread Man, giving it a minimal theatrical release in the ‘dumping month’ of January; their other late January release, the Spice Girls vehicle Spice World, clearly got the lion’s share of the marketing budget. Ironically, their recut tested even worse than Altman’s original cut, so it’s his version that got a very limited theatrical release (and is currently available on Amazon Prime.)

Dr. T & the Women (2000)

After the Polygram debacle, Altman returned to television, producing a short-lived ABC anthology series called Gun which is remembered, if at all, as the late James Gandolfini’s first television show. Altman directed one of the series’ six episodes, which was written by script supervisor-turned screenwriter Anne Rapp, who became a key creative collaborator.

Altman directed Rapp’s first feature screenplay, Cookie’s Fortune (1999), which premiered at Sundance, received three Independent Spirit Awards, and earned Altman his best reviews since Short Cuts (1993).7

Altman and Rapp began work on More Short Cuts but realized it would be an unnecessary sequel and abandoned the project. Instead, Altman expressed interest in one of Rapp’s story treatments about a Dallas gynecologist. She expanded the story into a feature-length screenplay, which Altman sent to Richard Gere.

“There were no big money discussions,” Altman would later recall, and the presence of a bankable star attracted the attention of both a production company (British producer Graham King’s Initial Entertainment Group) and a distributor (Artisan Entertainment, fresh off the out-of-the-blue success of The Blair Witch Project.)8 In Altman’s words, “once I had Gere, I had no particular problems.”

With funding secured, Altman and co surrounded Gere with a multi-generational galaxy of star actresses: Helen Hunt, Laura Dern, Farrah Fawcet, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler. They shot on location in Dallas, making Dr. T & the Women Altman’s third Texan film after Brewster McCloud (1970) and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982).

Unlike The Gingerbread Man, Dr. T & the Women has a title that makes sense in context: Gere plays gynecologist Dr. Sullivan Travis, or Dr. T for short, who is surrounded by women in his personal and professional lives. Both his clients and family are upper-class women, targets of a satire that many critics objected to. Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, for instance, called it “silly, supercilious, casually misogynist nonsense;”9 Jonathan Rosenbaum described himself as “uncomfortable with the blatant misogyny at its center.”

That center is the film’s inciting incident: Dr. T’s wife Kate Travis (Fawcett) develops a (fictional) psychological condition called a ‘Hestia complex,’ a disorder where overly privileged, pampered women regress to a childlike state. The loose plot follows Dr. T coping with her absence, which includes an affair with professional golfer Helen Hunt, dealing with recently divorced sister-in-law Laura Dern, and trying to be a good father to his daughters Kate Hudson and Tara Reid.

The defenses offered by Altman and his supporters are a) that the film was written by a woman and b) that its satire is aimed at a very specific target, e.g. the kind of person who would later star in one of the many Real Housewives spinoffs. In a 2000 Salon interview, Rapp herself defended the Hestia complex plot point as a parody of then-current discourse about women’s emotions in self-help books and on daytime tv.

My two cents? It doesn’t work as satire because it’s neither funny nor thought-provoking. It’s a glaring dissonant note in what’s otherwise a quirky, laidback, amiable dramedy, a movie that I could otherwise see as someone’s comfort watch. Besides that misstep, the most memorable aspect of Dr. T & the Women is its ending, which is both completely out of left field and surprisingly, weirdly satisfying. A Wizard of Oz homage that’s one of the strangest onscreen moments in a gloriously strange career.

After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, The Travel Companion (2025) has won multiple awards, received strong reviews, and earned a distribution deal from Oscilloscope Laboratories. To quote Indiewire critic Christian Zilko, writer-directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis capture

the bullshitting, navel gazing, and crushing anxiety of the film world so well that it’s easy to see a future where they find even bigger success by applying their observational skills to broader topics. As much as they understand the minds of directionless filmmakers, there’s no reason to believe they’ll join that group.

Observational skills is a key phrase here, as Wood and Mallis bring extensive experience in documentary filmmaking to their debut narrative feature. I virtually met with the duo last month to discuss The Travel Companion, which is currently on a nationwide tour of theaters and film festivals. Our conversation focused on that transition from documentary to narrative filmmaking and how it shaped the film.

Wood and Mallis’s documentary background becomes apparent in the film’s first shot; The Travel Companion begins and ends with indie documentarian Simon (Tristan Turner) at an awkward film festival Q&A session. To quote Zilko again, this opening scene has true verisimilitude through “the cringe-inducing details — the rambling questions that don’t actually contain a question, the generic platitudes from filmmakers trying to sound smarter than they are.”

In between these bookends, Simon works on his documentary film project, searches for inspiration, and tries to navigate his changing relationship with his best friend/roommate Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck), whose new romantic partner Beatrice (Naomi Asa) begins to transform his life and priorities.

When I watched The Travel Companion, I was struck by just how much it does tackle a broad theme. This is a film about prolonged adolescence, about millennials in their thirties, about friends growing apart. The title, for instance is a perfect, simple metaphor. Airline employee Bruce gets the perk of free standby tickets for one designated travel companion, which is Simon at the start of the film. Travel companions side by side on the same adventure: a certain kind of friendship summed up in three words, in a single mental image.

The Travel Companion resonated with my own life experiences, and a big reason why goes back to documentary filmmaking, to that eye for details and openness to serendipity that makes a cinematic space or relationship feel lived in.

The biggest difference between documentary and narrative filmmaking, as Mallis told me, is that the former is waiting whereas the latter is manifesting.

Both emphasized a major difference in the preproduction process. As Wood put it, narrative film preproduction involves solidifying as much as possible before actually shooting. The duo’s previous documentary experience, on the other hand, involved much more spontaneous, unplanned observation.

Despite this difference, they both sought to bring a documentary aesthetic to The Travel Companion. In Mallis’s words, a documentary filmmaker is a “dancer with a camera:” constantly moving, spontaneously capturing shot after shot. Something similar happens in the film itself. Simon and Bruce’s favorite shared pastime is the “walk around, fuck around,” in which they follow the footsteps of 19^th century flâneurs and devote a block of time to wandering down city streets.

To replicate this sense of unstructured freedom, Mallis and Wood would occasionally tell the cast and crew that “this is doc time now.” Doc time: time for improvisational, intuitive movement through space and trusting that something will emerge from the process.

The duo’s documentary experience makes them bolder than many narrative filmmakers, Wood told me, more willing to just go to a location and start shooting in ways that would leave many other filmmakers mortified. Mallis recalled spontaneously requesting to film in various locations and getting good responses; asking on the spot, he added, gives location owners less of a chance to change their minds.

The duo’s documentary experience also informed their post-production process. “When cutting a documentary,” Mallis told me, “There’s no expectation of the edit matching your original vision. It gets chopped up, reordered. The writing happens in the edit.” This made them open to restructuring The Travel Companion in editing, which they did by reordering the film’s first act.

During the production of The Travel Companion, Wood and Mallis came to realize just how blurry the boundary between documentary and narrative filmmaking is. Mallis compared it to the coastline paradox, where the length of a coastline depends on how minutely you measure its various irregular curves; the high-level distinction between documentary truth and narrative fiction might not hold up for a given scene or shot, which can involve both waiting and manifesting.

“Nothing prepares you for your first feature,” Mallis told me. And, after this learning experience, The Travel Companion won’t be their last. “Traveling around the country meeting new people and sharing the film in dark cinemas has been such an affirming joyous and affirming experience,” he said. “Best of all, people are reacting very positively—even if our protagonist might test the limits of their patience!”

While the duo plan on continuing to make narrative features, they also plan on bringing their documentary sensibility to their next film, which Wood describes as both inspired by real life and a perfect opportunity to “bring things to life we wish we’d filmed in a documentary.”

The series so far:

Introduction, Countdown, and That Cold Day in the Park

M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud

McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Images

The Long Goodbye and California Split

Nashville and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson

3 Women and Quintet

A Perfect Couple and Popeye

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers

Secret Honor and Fool for Love

The end of the eighties

Vincent & Theo

Movies, Now More Than Ever! three filmmakers on Robert Altman

Robert Altman on the Criterion Channel

Prêt-à-Porter (1994)

Robert Altman was fond of saying that casting was 90% of his job as a director. Based on that metric, Prêt-à-Porter (renamed Ready to Wear for the American market) is 90% there: Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Tim Robbins, Julia Roberts, Lauren Bacall, Richard E. Grant, Kim Basinger, Forest Whitaker et al in Altman’s third star-studded ensemble piece in a row.

The remaining 10%, however, sinks the film. I won’t bury the lede here; this film is a massive disappointment considering its cast and a director coming off two Best Director Oscar-nominated films. As I’ve discovered throughout this entire series, Altman was nothing if not inconsistent and Prêt-à-Porter is a strikeout after three base hits.

On the surface, Prêt-à-Porter seems like a spiritual sequel to Nashville and The Player: an Altmanesque exploration of another media industry. That’s certainly how the film was marketed. To quote a one-sheet poster,

Every year in Paris, the top designers and supermodels stage the world’s greatest fashion show. It’s called the Prêt-à-Porter. Now, what Robert Altman did to the Army in M*A*S*H, Country in Nashville and Hollywood in The Player, he’s about to do to the world of High Fashion.

But those three films worked as satires. Nashville and The Player have provocative, sometimes troubling things to say about media consumption and American culture, especially in their juxtaposition of real violence and entertainment. Prêt-à-Porter is so obvious a satire of the fashion industry that it literally has Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” on the soundtrack. The film’s ending, a literalization of the emperor’s new clothes, has nothing on Nashville’s mix of trauma and the show must go on or The Player’s metafictional twist. If anything, its closest parallel in Altman’s filmography is Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting’s Bull’s History Lesson (1976), another overloaded, unfocused ensemble piece about putting on a show.

One obvious issue is that Prêt-à-Porter lacks the strong source material foundation of Altman’s three previous films. Vincent van Gogh is an enduring cultural icon; his life, work and early death continue to fascinate. Michael Tolkin’s The Player is a really entertaining novel that works as both a Hollywood satire and a darkly comedic crime novel. And Raymond Carver’s short stories are of course classics of American literature.

“Almost every scene in the film was improvised,” Altman later recalled.1 It feels like it, with broad performances and repetitive scenes of characters introducing themselves to each other. Kim Basinger’s clueless Texan fashion reporter Kitty Porter is a clear but pale imitation of Geraldine Chaplin’s Opal in Nashville. Opal served a functional role in that film — providing exposition, linking the various plotlines — but also brought comedy and, through her unsuccessful attempts at neatly summing up the places and events around her, spoke to that film’s ambitious panorama of American life. Kitty’s awkward interviews might be realistic simulacra of Paris Fashion Week tv coverage, but they don’t really work as cinematic satire.

Altman himself uses the word ‘mockumentary’ to describe Prêt-à-Porter in Altman on Altman. I wish it was a Christopher Guest mockumentary.2 Guest, who appeared in Altman’s worst film, brings something of an Altmanesque sensibility to the films he directs, which combine ensemble casts with extensive improvisation.

The quintessential Christopher Guest movie follows a group of eccentric characters who converge on a single location to put on a show: the community theater musical in Waiting for Guffman (1996), the dog show in Best in Show (2000), the folk revival reunion concert in A Might Wind (2003). In other words, he would have been the perfect filmmaker for a fashion industry mockumentary. As for Prêt-à-Porter, I’m tempted to say that it’s ironically as glitzy, star-studded and ultimately empty as its satirical target.

Prêt-à-Porter received deservedly negative reviews and underperformed at the domestic box office, grossing about $11 million on an $18 million budget. However, it was the biggest international hit of Altman’s career up to that point, grossing a worldwide total of almost $47 million presumably on the strength of its haute couture subject matter, Parisian locations, and European cinematic icons Mastroianni and Loren.

In other words, it sold significantly more tickets than The Player and Short Cuts combined and Altman had his highest box office gross since Popeye (1980). You can never tell.

Kansas City (1996)

Robert Altman was about seventy before he made a film about his hometown. Born in 1925, he grew up in Great Depression Kansas City under the Prendergast political machine, when it was a hotspot for both jazz and organized crime.

“I have a glamorized, teenaged view of that world,” Altman recalls in Altman on Altman. As a teenager, he saw jazz legends like Lester Young perform, experiences that catalyzed a lifelong love of jazz music. In his words, the film Kansas City represents “an exaggerated kind of memory of the time,” a blend of jazz, crime, political machinations and the movies.

Set in 1934, it follows the consequences of a botched robbery attempt by small-time hood Johnny O’Hara (Dermot Mulroney.) Enraged by the robbery of one of his wealthy clients (and Johnny’s use of blackface), crime lord/jazz nightclub owner Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte) takes him hostage and spends most of the film contemplating a suitably cruel punishment. In return, Johnny’s wife, Jean Harlow fangirl Blondie O’Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kidnaps the laudanum-addicted wife (Miranda Richardson) of politician Henry Stilton (Altman regular Michael Murphy) to force him to use his pull to free her husband.

Steve Buscemi shows up later as a violent, enthusiastic election fraudster and his presence — combined with the double kidnapping plot — made me think of the Coen brothers. Like Fargo (1996), which came out the same year, this is a film about amateurs committing crimes and getting in way over their heads. I don’t think it’s nearly as good, as tight, but it has some of the same spirit.

Kansas City is, to use a critic’s cliché, an entertaining minor entry in Altman’s filmography. I don’t think it all adds up to a great film, but from moment to moment I enjoyed the performances, the period detail, the music. Especially the music. Altman and his team assembled a band of nineties jazz stars (including Joshua Redman, James Carter and Geri Allen) to play thirties Kansas City jazz legends Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Mary Lou Williams, Ben Webster and others. (A teenaged Charlie Parker is also a supporting character.) Their jam session is a highlight of the film, a digression away from the narrative that completely works on its own terms.

It works so well, in fact, that Altman and his collaborators expanded it into an Emmy-nominated episode of PBS’s Great Performances series, Robert Altman’s Jazz ‘34. Jonathan Rosenbaum praised the extended home video version, which he liked much better than Kansas City.

Kansas City got mixed-to-positive reviews — Ebert gave it three stars, Rosenbaum panned it as “ another piece of dime-store fatalism and knee-jerk crosscutting by a TV veteran” — but bombed at the box office, grossing $1.3 million on a $19 million budget. Maybe it had too much noir for a jazz movie and too much jazz for a film noir,3 or maybe it was just a solid, well-made film that lacked a strong, marketable hook. Either way, Altman’s next film would be as a director for hire in need of work, not as an auteur pursuing a nostalgic passion project.

Altman became seriously ill during the production of Kansas City and had to use a respirator at night. In December 1995, shortly after he finished work on the film, he went to the hospital to receive a total heart transplant. A thirty-something female donor gave him another decade of life and filmmaking.

One of the best film-related books I’ve read since the pandemic is Hollywood: The Oral History. Editors Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson assembled thousands of excerpts from American Film Institute (AFI) interviews with filmmakers, actors and other industry figures into a panorama of Hollywood filmmaking from the silents to the present.

In my own, smaller way, I’d like to do something similar in a new feature for Earthly Delights: a chronicle of contemporary indie filmmaking, featuring discussions with filmmakers on various topics. I’ve already published the first edition as part of my Robert Altman retrospective and plan on making this a monthly series.1 (If you have any suggestions for filmmakers to spotlight or topics to cover, please let me know in the comments.)

For this post, I invited four filmmakers to reflect on the very beginning of their creative processes. As a writer myself, I know that very few things in life are quite as energizing as finding that initial idea that opens up a whole new creative pathway and I’m fascinated with how that plays out for other people. I can’t think of a better way to begin this new series.

Michael Kellman has, from his earliest moments, been passionate about film, television, theater, performance, and comedy. He spends his time working on his craft as a writer and director as well as a performer. Say Less represents Michael’s feature film debut. He is currently finishing his second feature, Burn Pretty, a micro-budget inspired by the French New Wave.

Matthew Levine is a writer/director from Los Angeles and recent graduate from NYU Tisch, where he was selected for a directing workshop with Jon Watts and a Semi-Finalist in the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films contest. His thesis film, The Roswell Report, is hitting the festival circuit this year.

H. Nelson Tracey is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His directorial debut Breakup Season, starring Chandler Riggs (The Walking Dead) and Samantha Isler (Captain Fantastic), premiered at 39 film festivals nationwide ahead of an 18-city theatrical run and video-on-demand release in December 2024. He has also produced and edited numerous documentaries: his non-fiction work can be seen on Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. He is currently developing his next feature film.

Kevin Walls is a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award-winning filmmaker and actor based in Glasgow. His debut feature film, Premature, is slated for a UK theatrical release in September 2026.

What was the initial moment of inspiration for your film?

The inspiration that ultimately led to Say Less sprang entirely from budgetary constraints. My mission was to make my first feature. I spent a year writing four different features, one after another, with the expectation for each that it would be the film I made. The first version, which I spent the most time on of the unmade features, I went into thinking - I won't worry too much about budget, I'll just write the movie that I want to make. No explosions or car chases or anything of course, but if the characters went to eat at a restaurant, they went to eat at a restaurant. It ended up being perhaps a one million dollar movie.

Michael Kellman

While I was attending the NYU Screenwriting in London study abroad program, I had begun watching The X-Files, which constantly mentions the "Roswell Incident" as a key event in UFO mythology. I had heard of the Roswell Incident in my favorite pieces of science fiction for years, from Futurama to Indiana Jones. When I read that the alleged weather balloon that crashed was named "NYU Flight 4", I knew I had to dig deeper. My school was responsible for the Roswell Incident? What's the story there? The more I read, the more the story presented itself, and I knew it would be the perfect premise to fit my sensibilities for my senior thesis film.

Matthew Levine

In December of 2011, my sister and I were home for the holidays, she came over laughing saying “my friend is so mad at her brother right now. He brought his girlfriend home for Christmas, they broke up, and now she’s stuck with them for 5 more days.” Instantly I knew: that’s a great movie right there. But for a long time (over a decade) I could never get anywhere on the script because I was thinking about it like a typical Christmas movie, but my own breakups (which I went and experienced) were not points of comedy. Around 2022, when I was getting serious about making my debut feature, I reframed the film in my mind as a drama first, comedy second, and the pages started finally coming into some semblance of a strong script. The rest is history.

H. Nelson Tracey

I’d been struggling to write something I could realistically produce on a micro-budget, so I’d parked the idea of making a feature and focused on teaching, acting, and crew work. In summer 2024, I was working as a cinematographer on a PSA about drug driving. I bought a rig to mount the camera to a car for driving shots and was really pleased with how it turned out. That pushed me towards the idea of a road movie, loosely inspired by The Puffy Chair. The initial concept followed a disillusioned couple on a road trip to pick up a used crib from the Scottish Highlands.

Kevin Walls

How did you know that that idea was a feature film?

What immediately stood out to me within my research was the professor-student dynamic between the Director of Research, Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, and the project engineer, Charles Moore. They had worked together in World War II, when Charles saved their important balloons from freezing by attaching a blow torch and a mop bucket. However, when Spilhaus recruited him to work for him at NYU, he was never told the true purpose of the craft, the payload it was carrying, or even the classified name of the project. As soon as I saw this relationship, how their father-son dynamic and mentorship are tested by the project’s secrecy, I knew I had clear characters and a core conflict that was worthy of a film.

Matthew Levine

Debut features generally need to be contained ideas for budget reasons, and this one screams first feature because its entire cast could be the family without feeling like a small movie. It was never going to be a short film, but it felt like the right script for my debut feature, and a topic/storyline I could do justice to.

H. Nelson Tracey

I think it could have been a feature, but I quickly realised how difficult a road movie would be to pull off with very little money. I also wasn’t fully satisfied with the characters. So I shifted the dynamic. I made them flatmates instead of a couple, and introduced the pregnancy as the inciting incident. An unexpected pregnancy isn’t a particularly original idea, but that didn’t really concern me. I’d never told that story before, so I felt I could bring my own perspective to it.

Kevin Walls

How did you develop that initial idea into a script?

The movie that ultimately became Say Less went through probably 60 script iterations, and for me it's just a matter of writing each day and once there's a finished draft, looking back on it and seeing what works and what doesn't. If you allow yourself to be steered by your reactions to it, your instincts will tell you what the script wants to be - as filtered by your unconscious taste. It was originally a family drama in which the parents played a much, much larger role. I had actors do a table read of that script with a small audience of people I trusted. It was clear to me during that reading that this was the kids' story. We cared about them and wanted to follow them, and when things became more focused on the parents, it didn't work as well. So I pivoted. I did one more table read before finishing the script. For the record, I haven't done that since and it's not how I usually work, although a table read is always valuable.

Michael Kellman

Getting from the outline to a presentable draft was the greatest challenge in such a technical project. My early rough drafts contained way too much science, detailing the elements of their flight from materials to atmospheric physics. It was boring. The best note I got in my thesis class was, “Why am I watching your film, instead of a documentary about this?” It also had to be interesting for those with no familiarity with the subject. The final drafts were the improvement the story needed. Instead of just a high-level History Channel, we grounded the story back to the characters and their relationship.

Matthew Levine

It remained a simple outline of nothing for ages, I went and lived my life and worked on other things, then in early 2022 I sort of made a pact with myself that the next big step would be jumping to make a feature, and this one had the right materials to do so.

H. Nelson Tracey

I briefly considered seeking private investment, but as a first-time feature director, I didn’t think anyone in their right mind would fund it. So I outlined the film in a notebook and just started writing. The first draft came together quickly, but by the time we shot, we were on draft 17 or 18. They weren’t page-one rewrites. The structure was there early on. Most of the work was refining characters, tightening dialogue, and adapting scenes to make the film achievable on a micro-budget.

Kevin Walls

How did you pitch your idea?

I didn't do much pitching. I'm unfortunately pretty averse to it and not particularly good at it, and although I put lots of feelers out for potential investors, didn't get anything close to interest back. So all the "pitching" I did was for the IndieGoGo campaign I ran, which raised 25K, a quarter of the budget. I worked hard to make sure I created the best possible IGG campaign. I studied the most successful campaigns of all time and emulated them, and I shot both a teaser for the movie and an interview with the cast, in which I gave a little pitch for donating to the movie. 50K of the budget was my life savings, and the other 25K came from an extremely generous childhood friend.

Michael Kellman

To pitch the idea, I embraced genre conventions and how I can make the film feel familiar yet new. I compared it to investigative thrillers like The Insider and historical dramas like Oppenheimer or Chernobyl. The toughest part of pitching was clarifying that this is not a sci-fi film. Although it embraces sci-fi aesthetics and subject matter, it’s grounded, a dramatized version of a true story. UFO discussions had a big year in 2025, so while I took advantage of that, I also had to distinguish it. A way that we did that was by intercutting the launch scene from our film with real released footage from the 1947 experiments to create an authenticity. One of the most important parts of the pitch is that this is the story people have heard, but the angle that has not been explored. Although the general public has vaguely heard of the Roswell Incident, Project Mogul was only declassified in the 90s and no one has researched these characters like myself.

Matthew Levine

Early on I identified key allies and partners: Oregon Film and The Eastern Oregon Film Festival were the two most vital. It takes a village and people overlook that at first, the more orgs like this you can have, the better luck you'll have. I secured my seed funding and then proceeded to spend a year doing all the things filmmakers need to do to fundraise: meetings and outreach, majority of which were dead ends, but enough to get us on track to make the film in 2023. The script and deck were adjusted concurrently. We had a built in deadline: because it's a Christmas movie, we had to shoot the film by Feb 2023, or punt it a year. I knew if we did punt, we'd lose momentum, thankfully we didn't. Filmmaking is all about momentum, people want to join moving projects, but you have to keep that energy alive.

H. Nelson Tracey

How did your script evolve into the final film?

Say Less would be of much lower quality if I hadn't had the rehearsal time that I did with my actors. Rehearsal is extremely important to me. Rehearsal reveals a scene. It can reveal the scene doesn't work at all, or, conversely, that it's perfect. Often it's somewhere in between. It allows me to find the best and most natural blocking and develop a working relationship and shared language with each individual actor. Every actor is different, and as a director you should speak to each one differently depending on what they respond to. We rehearsed for 3 weeks leading up to the Say Less shoot, 4-5 days/week for 3-5 hours. That process changed the script as well. Often a scene would work well as written. But sometimes hearing some of my writing out loud made me wince - which means it's time to change a line. Good actors will have ideas for you, great actors will sometimes have ideas that are better than yours. I had great actors. So the script, and what Say Less would ultimately be, evolved through rehearsal. Not very much changed once the camera was rolling.

And then Say Less changed completely again in the edit. As they say a movie is made three times: when it's written, when it's shot, and when it's edited. I put this movie together in every configuration it could possible be arranged in the edit. The movie you watched is the best version I felt I could draw from the footage at that time, tempered by a tremendous amount of trial and error. It never ceases to amaze me how much a movie changes in the editing room. The edit, even more so than the script, will tell you what it wants to be. It'll show you clearly what is and isn't working, and you have to try to listen.

Michael Kellman

Through production, the script had not changed too much because we had such a high bar to focus on regarding the production design and making the period piece feel lived in. However, in post-production, the script evolved a lot as we were able to see the final product in a new light. The original opening was cut, and an alternate take from the 2nd act balloon launch was repurposed to create two separate balloon launches, and a stronger opening where we see Charles at what he is good at. We also had to remember the lessons learned from the rough draft, and several lines with scientific jargon were cut in exchange for showing more of the actors’ expressions. Less is more and show don’t tell feel like obvious statements, but make all the difference. I see a film as a blank cube of marble that takes time and effort to chip away until you see the sculpture from your mind’s eye. What matters most when you have a strong vision is to never keep searching for it.

Matthew Levine

The pitch and script remained malleable but solidified by December, when we started casting. One of the key things that helped is along the way, I did 3 live readings of the screenplay with actor friends, and each informed script improvements to get us to a shooting script. That’s now a vital step in my process. It’s a long road, but it can be done.

H. Nelson Tracey

We went into production in June 2025 and shot over 23 days. I handled the offline edit myself while cutting a trailer to launch a crowdfunding campaign for post-production. In October 2025, we raised over £10,000. The trailer reached more than 130,000 organic views, which completely blew me away. Now, at the end of March 2026, we’re about to screen the film for the cast and crew for the first time.

Kevin Walls