Altmanesque 19

a conversation with Christina Kallas

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.

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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.

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