Robert Altman summed up his philosophy of filmmaking better than anyone else could have when he received his honorary Academy Award in 2006:
I equate it more with painting than with theatre or literature. Stories don’t interest me. Basically I’m more interested in behaviour. I don’t direct. I watch. I have to be thrilled if I expect the audience to be thrilled. Because what I really want to see from an actor is something I’ve never seen before, so I can’t tell them what that is…[Filmmaking] is just such a joyous, collaborative art. When you start looking back, the real reward is the process of doing it and the people that you do it with…To me, I just made one, long film. I’ve always said that making a film is like making a sandcastle at the beach. You invite your friends and you get them down there and, say, you build this beautiful structure, several of you, and you sit back and have a drink, watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away. And that sandcastle remains in your mind.
The sandcastle analogy doesn’t entirely work, insofar as the films palpably survive and presumably will endure and be watched, enjoyed, sometimes reviled but studied and pondered as long as there are cinephiles. What comes through from these remarks, though, is Altman’s abiding interest in capturing the poignant, beautiful and spontaneous reality of experience rather than constructing a filmic commodity along the lines specified by industry and commerce – a healthy-minded impulse that always automatically placed him on the side of art, life and humanity and opposed to the authoritarian structures that continue to crush the human spirit.