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.

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.”

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

While Robert Altman died twenty years ago, his legacy lives on, most visibly through his protégé Paul Thomas Anderson, who won Oscars as a director, writer and producer earlier this month. After Altman’s death, the Film Independent Spirit Awards created the Robert Altman Award to honor his “uniqueness of vision” and “commitment to challenging the status quo and changing the landscape of independent film;” winners have included Anderson himself, Charlie Kaufman, the Coen brothers, Sean Baker and Kelly Reichardt.

“You can’t call too many film directors artists,” Anderson writes in his foreword to Altman on Altman. “But Bob is.”

For this companion piece to my upcoming post about The Player (1992), Altman’s unmistakeably Altmanesque film about filmmaking, I invited three contemporary filmmakers to reflect on his continuing influence.

is a seasoned indie filmmaker and the cofounder of the Slamdance Film Festival (and a fellow Substacker!). His next film is an upcoming Cold War thriller/comedy called Atomic Fondue. You can find him on this platform and on Instagram.

I met Robert Altman through my producing partner, Dana, in Omaha, who happened to be Bob’s grandson, and also worked on many Bob Altman films.

Robert Altman told me — much as he said to everyone — that casting was 90% of directing. And that’s definitely something I’ve taken to heart. The tricky part is figuring out what the other 10% is. I’m still working on that. But much of it would percolate up with his other techniques.

In terms of sound, for my films I’ve successfully adopted Robert Altman’s technique of putting individual lavalier mics on each actor and recording those on to unique audio tracks. This allows the actors to overlap dialogue freely, resulting in much more realistic performances. It really frees up the actors to simply act, and it’s a subtle technique that makes a huge impact on the audience. It also guarantees that there will be no need for ADR (or dubbing) that is always a distraction (and an expensive addition to post-production). As Altman once told me, “Why let the boom operator — the lowest paid member of the crew — decide who to listen to? That’s the director’s job.” By mic’ing actors on individual tracks, the director can make those decisions in the relative calm of post-production.

I’ve also used this same aesthetic philosophy and applied it to framing of the picture. With digital cameras now, this works well, especially if you shoot at a higher resolution than you’re going to end (i.e. shooting on 6K and finishing on 4K). There’s a lot more freedom for me to pan, scan and zoom in the relative relaxation of post-production, rather than simply relying on the framing we get on a harried set, struggling to make the day. Altman himself did some of this, too, with his use of “optical zooms” which were applied in post-production, sometimes in conjunction with in-camera zooms. That combo of both zooms is also something I’ve done on my films.

There’s a residual effect this has on actors. Especially on Altman’s sets where he used zoom lenses really far from the action, so that his actors never knew when either camera or sound were rolling. They got used to just staying in character longer between takes and continuously improvising. I saw this firsthand when I worked with the late, great Sally Kellerman (on our film Open House). On our set, the other, younger actors kept wondering why she was so in character before and after takes. We all realized this was the “Altman training” that she’d had, and it was a great example to the other actors.

Another key lesson I learned is to create a creative and fun community on set. I picked up on this from visiting the set of Kansas City as well as talking to actors like Carol Burnett who was in A Wedding and of course to Sally Kellerman, Dana Altman and Jules Feiffer, and to my neighbor, Dennis Parrish, a prop master on three Altman films. Bob’s films were famously (and/or infamously) known for being fun, laid-back productions where a party was likely to break out every night after everyone watched dailies. This was a good reason actors loved to come back and work on Bob’s films: They knew they’d have a good time off set, and have tremendous creative freedom on set. Carol told me Bob would just give scene partners a 3x5 card the night before with a few notes on it and they just had to improv the rest of their dialogue.

Probably, though, the single biggest lesson I learned from Bob is what he told Dana and me about his approach to starting a movie: “Pick a date and tell everyone the train’s leaving the station. Are you on or off?” That advice rings in my head every single day. On our last film, 18½, if we hadn’t picked a day (March 3, 2020) to begin filming, we never would have gotten 11 days in the can before having to shut down for Covid. Thankfully, we had enough to justify going back and finishing the last 4 days six months later. But if we had delayed our initial start for all the normal reasons (i.e. not enough financing, actors not cast, etc.) we likely never would have even started the movie, and therefore, likely never finished it either. Life, time and filmmaking is fragile — so set a date and make the movie you have rather than not make the movie you don’t have.

Josh Park is a writer/director in the Bay Area. His feature directorial debut, the indie horror Mary Kwon Mary Kwon, is hitting the festival circuit this year. You can find him on Instagram.

Early on in Hong Sang-soo’s The Woman Who Ran, we see Kim Min-hee’s character Gam-hee arrive at her friend’s apartment. The beginning of this sequence plays out on a doorbell camera, a conduit for interaction that renders intimacy into a screen object; we see the contemporary social condition through the eyes of a paranoid, neurotic device.

36 years earlier, we saw the same formal gag played out in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor. The point-of-view of his four surveillance cameras that cover Richard Nixon’s New Jersey study stream into monitors set on a table. These monitors illustrate the bifurcation (or quaturfication?) of Nixon’s mind: his paranoia, and by extension, America’s paranoia in a multivalent world. It also illustrates a shrewdness of Altman’s filmmaking: his grand ornate cinematic gestures on display even in a film that plays out in a single room in real time.

Like the opening of The Player, where the camera glides through a dizzying number of people engaging in movie bigwig shop talk before it settles on talent agent Griffin Mill, the camera “discovers” Nixon, its subject, as it surveys his office and catches the surveillance monitors. A much smaller scale and a much tinier blocking operation, to be sure, but still belies a technical and humanist observation. the camera often swings in a dialectic from closely following Philip Baker Hall’s Nixon and the granularity of his movements to being held captive by the technological data capture devices of his microphone and surveillance monitors. Here we see a microcosm of the medium of linear narrative filmmaking: to wrest a spiritual and sentimental truth from the claws of objectivity.

Ever since I saw my first Altman picture with Nashville, his work has arrested, charmed, and confounded me. often I find myself thinking “how??” when his films pull off an especially elaborate tracking shot or deliver a particularly trenchant observation. Even in his Popeye, a film I’m not the fondest of, he bypasses the foibles of contemporary IP adaptation by projecting the contradictions of a project like this. The inhuman mimicry of cartoons and the bizarrely accurate prosthetics create an effect that’s equally cute and monstrous, which is far more interesting than the smooth, tensionless corporate products that litter the box office today.

The lessons I’ve taken from Secret Honor, however, are material as well as theoretical. for those of us working in the low-budget indie space, I feel we often fall into the trap of diminishing our own formal capabilities. For me in particular, directing with tight budget constraints means I often think about survival shooting, getting the absolutely necessary coverage to tell “the story.” But what is “the story” in a cinematic context, if not the visual choices we make, flourishes and all? This is what is so instructive about Altman’s oeuvre: whether it’s a look at a whole city, an industry, or just one man, we should always seek to explore the contours of humanity and push the moviemaking methods and technologies at our disposal towards this purpose.

is an independent Director/Producer from the Southeast US. His most recent film is PARTY USA, his directorial debut which recently premiered at Cinequest and the Atlanta Film Festival. You can find him on Instagram or on this platform.

My first encounter with Robert Altman was when I was sixteen and watched Nashville for the first time. At that time, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The film was incredibly dense, with an ensemble cast in an electric frenzy of performances. However, one thing was certain. I had never seen such a unique depiction of the 1970s on film before.

Years later, after I had matured and seen more of his work, I revisited Nashville and finally understood what I was responding to. As a filmmaker from the southern United States, we often do not get many unique takes on the odd and quirky pockets that make up our region. Yet here was a film that stood alone, defying the pursuit of the next big trendy film. It is fun and rambunctious, but also a celebration of what Nashville is best at. Robert Altman discovered the fun where no one else dared to look, and I believe part of his success came from his own background growing up in Missouri. He embraced the peculiarities within the world he observed.

That realization was a turning point for me. It made me recognize that the most valuable thing I have as an artist is perspective. I remember visiting a small churchyard after my grandparents passed away and seeing generations of my family stretching back hundreds of years. It struck me that these places and these people contain stories we rarely see depicted with honesty or texture. That is why, in my writing, I have almost exclusively worked on films set in this region.

That philosophy extends into how I collaborate with actors. Like Altman, I believe directing is largely about casting. Simply telling an actor a short verb to alter their performance rarely works if the script is strong. In fact, I believe it can hinder the work they have already contributed. The only time I step in is when an actor has not quite captured where they left off in the previous scene, especially since we are almost always shooting out of order.

I’ve also learned to avoid over-determining blocking before we have had a chance to put the scene on its feet. If a character is moving, it should be tied to a thought, not my shot-list. Being overly rigid, especially in the ensemble pieces that I love and that Altman was known for, can stifle performances. There is nothing more damaging in a film than poor performances.

Altman was renowned for many things, but perhaps none more so than the collaborative environment he created on set. He fostered a sense that whoever had the best idea was the one that was implemented that day. Like him, I do not care where the idea comes from. It could be the actor, the assistant director, or even the caterer. If it aligns with the vision and enhances the work, that is what we do.

On Party USA, I had written a police interrogation sequence involving several characters tied to a missing person. During lunch, my actress, Ainsley Seiger, joked that it would be funny if the police also interrogated her character’s misfit brother, who was on his first day of work. It had not made sense to me on the page why the character would be in the scene, but it was too hilariously ridiculous to pass-up. I called in Ben Weinswig, who was not scheduled that day, gave him the setup, and let the scene evolve from the characters we had all built together.

It ended up being one of the most memorable moments in the film.

That experience reinforced something Altman understood deeply. The work improves when you create a collaborative space. If I had held too tightly to the script or the plan, that moment would not exist. The goal is not control. It is to build an environment where something better than what was written can happen.