By Kristin Hohenadel
"Let's see the feet - find the feet!" Robert Altman
was crying out last fall on the first day of shooting The Company,
his new film about backstage life at the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago.
Dancers were draped upside-down on overstuffed couches,
sewing their toe shoes, stretching their limbs, gossiping and shrieking with
laughter. "This is a whole new world to me," Mr. Altman said. He has
made a career of varying his landscapes, and the blistered, bloodied feet of the
dancers were today's tourist trophy. Now 77, he's still a good traveler, the
kind who gets off the bus and talks to the locals.
In this case, the locals are used to the exquisitely refined
language of ballet, not the improvised rough-and-tumble of a typical Altman
movie. But Mr. Altman has something of the lion tamer and the snake charmer in
him, an ability to earn the trust of whatever beast he has in the ring. His last
effort, the acclaimed "Gosford Park," took an irreverent look at the
underbelly of the English class system and turned a mob of British acting
royalty into an egoless group of equals. For "The Company," Mr. Altman
has persuaded the Joffrey's 40-member ensemble to let him strip away the perfect
image that is their daily preoccupation and to document the chain-smoking men
and women with mangled feet and ripped tights, unpaid bills and
bottom-of-the-barrel apartments, who flit and float across the stage.
After just a few weeks of rehearsals, the dancers, ballet
masters, stage managers and just about anyone else you talked to were comparing
Mr. Altman - tall, commanding, his long-fingered hands swirling in the air —
to a choreographer. They seemed flattered that the veteran director was
interested in taking a leap into their world. And they couldn't wait to find out
how he would recreate it on film.
"I cannot take 30 ballet dancers and make them
actors," he said. "That's why I'm not giving anybody any lines."
The cast includes only three professional actors - Neve Campbell as a young
corps dancer, Malcolm McDowell as the company's artistic director and James
Franco as a chef who falls for Ms. Campbell's character. But Mr. Altman told
them what he told the dancers: the last thing he wants them to do is act.
"We're just improvising," he said. "Because
this is not about words. There is no plot. This is a season in the life of the
Joffrey Ballet Company. Even if there is a little romance, that's going to have
no dialogue; I'm going to choreograph it like it's dance. This whole picture is
dance. It is not a movie."
The idea for this nonmovie, which opens on Dec. 25, came from
Ms. Campbell. A former dancer who at 6 began training at the National Ballet
School of Canada, she worked professionally until injuries overwhelmed her and
she turned to acting. "It was my whole life, and it was my first
career," she said during a cigarette break.
Her success in the "Scream" movies persuaded studio
executives to give her a shot at her dream project — a ballet movie that took
an honest look at the dance world rather than sentimentalizing it for a
"Billy Elliot"-style tale of self-realization. "I found that the
studio was happy to make a Neve Campbell movie and she happened to dance in
it," she said. "And what I wanted was to make a movie about dance and
Neve would be in it." She eventually took the idea to Killer Films, and
hired a screenwriter, Barbara Turner ("Pollock"), to spend what would
amount to a year and a half observing and interviewing the Joffrey's dancers.
"There are scenes that I constructed, that I
wrote," Ms. Turner said, "but it's essentially just a year with these
dancers."
From the beginning, Mr. Altman was not just their first
choice for a director — he was their only choice.
"I knew no one else would understand the whole ensemble
piece," Ms. Turner said. Ms. Campbell agreed: "When we were talking
about the script, we said we wanted it to be Altmanesque," she said.
"It's such a coup that we got him. I don't know who else could figure this
out. It's better to have a director who knows nothing about dance, because
that's going to be most of our audience. The first time Bob went to a class, he
called me and he was, like, `Neve! The dancers, they pick their leotards out of
their butt all the time! And they've got holes in their tights and their feet
are so bloody. I love that stuff!' " She giggled. "And he's like, `Why
do they do that?' And I'm like, `It's uncomfortable, Bob. If you put your leg up
behind your ear, it's going to change your leotard position.' "
Ms. Campbell said she hoped that audiences would be equally
tickled by such discoveries. "There are so many people who just aren't
aware of the ballet world at all or aren't interested," she said. "I
mean, we are so fascinated by how hardcore football players are, and I've never
gone to a chiropractor without them saying, `Oh, you do ballet, that's the
female version of football.' Because it's so brutal on the body." She said
she hoped the film would dramatize "the dichotomy between the intenseness
and the pain and what you see onstage — which is someone pretending to be a
butterfly."
To get ready for the role, she worked out for six months,
dancing seven hours a day. "I'm 29," she said. "I stopped for a
long time, and it should be impossible, what I'm doing." With a laugh, she
added, "But I'm insane." Mr. Altman made it clear to the dancers that
Ms. Campbell was to be treated as just another member of the company. "I
really tried to prepare myself before I came," she said, "so I
wouldn't feel bad or like I was going to slow down the company or be beneath
them."
On the first day of shooting, during a warm-up class, Ms.
Campbell stood in leotards, her chin-length hair yanked into a stout ponytail,
checking her posture in a cracked mirror.
"She's very disciplined, very intelligent, and applies
herself in very smart ways for someone who was a dancer and hasn't danced for
eight years," said the choreographer Lar Lubovitch, who plays himself in
the film and who coached Ms. Campbell in the duet she performs, "My Funny
Valentine." "She has dance in her body, she has it in her background.
But it's biting off a lot to suddenly carry a dance. She's really put herself in
this company as a member and gotten herself in shape."
Several of the dancers confirmed that Ms. Campbell seemed to
have no trouble becoming one of them. They seemed unfazed by having a movie star
and a camera in their midst.
"It's the first day, and I'm watching the monitor, and
they're so oblivious to what we're doing," said the cinematographer, Andrew
Dunn, who also shot "Gosford Park." "Actors are so aware of where
the cameras are; these people, just take after take, do the same thing."
The dancers' lack of self-consciousness and capacity for
endless repetition may have helped them endure multiple takes, but they had
trouble with cramping muscles during the long waits between shots. And many said
they had experienced a new kind of stage fright in exercising the one muscle
dancers rarely work, their vocal cords.
Mr. Altman said he was struck by the melancholy of young
lives sacrificed in the name of this most exacting, underappreciated and
ephemeral of art forms.
"These people start when they're around 3," he
said, "and they change the structure of their bodies — they walk like
ducks. And what do these dancers do? They become dance masters or
choreographers, if they're talented. But if you take the top of the barrel, they
don't make enough to send their kids to college."
Mr. Altman said that half his film would be pure performance,
and his biggest challenge was figuring out how to film the dance itself.
"Choreographers are dealing in three-dimensional space," he said.
"They always work in a proscenium. I think dance isn't photographed well a
great deal because people try to show close-ups of people's feet or faces, and
that doesn't mean anything in dance. It's about the whole. It's movement inside
of a fixed space — which is pretty much the way that we will film the
performances."
But Mr. Altman's notion of fixed space looks nothing like
traditional dance-performance videos. He filmed the dance with his fluid, agile
camera, from every conceivable angle. To the dismay of some of the dancers, who
are used to seeing themselves head-on in a mirror, he shot them from behind,
from the wings, even from above.
To do this, he had two to five cameras going at once. And
though he's famous for often acing a shot in one or two takes, capturing such
complicated motion often took him far longer. Had he been shooting on film, that
approach might have been prohibitively expensive, but he used high-definition
video, which allowed him to record the equivalent of 30,000 feet of film a day
without blowing the movie's $12 million budget.
The subject matter, he says, demands such precautions.
"Dancers can only do a couple of takes — not like 23, because they're
dead then," he said. He added that he wanted simply to capture the beauty
and excitement of dance on film without using cinematic tricks like slow motion.
"Why am I going to use slow motion?" he asked rhetorically, in a phone
conversation after the movie was finished. "Because it's there? It's a
false look. In dance the whole idea is to make it look like slow motion. I don't
think the camera enhances the dance. It should happen in front of the cameras.
Part of the reason you can't move those cameras is because you can't get in the
way. You have to let them have the space. I don't know how to be smart about it.
I just wanted to get behind the dancers, to kind of look under the rock. It's no
different from any other film I approach — what I'm trying to show you is what
it looks like to me."
Nevertheless, Joffrey dance masters and stage managers —
some of whom appear on camera — were on hand to ensure that Mr. Altman got the
physical details right and to lend authenticity to backstage glimpses of life in
the wings. The one character who was not playing himself was the company's
co-founder and director, Gerald Arpino, who was nevertheless a constant and
vocal presence on Mr. Altman's set.
"In our prayers, we never knew that our director would
be Robert Altman," he gushed. Mr. Arpino, who is as famous here for his
rotating hairpieces, powerful cologne and habitual use of the third person (as
in, "Arpino has always believed that dancers are athletes") as he is
for his iron-fisted directing style, continued: "We get along like two
buddies, you know. I kept saying to Robert — Mr. Altman: `I don't want a
documentary. I want a film.' "
A dark-haired, dark-eyed Italian-American, Mr. Arpino said he
found it curious that Mr. McDowell, a pale, blue-eyed British actor, had been
cast as his alter ego. "Well, that was a strange twist, I must say,"
Mr. Arpino said. "I thought he was going to say — who are those Italian
guys? I was thinking De Niro or Pacino. But I met Malcolm. Oh, we get along.
He'll do a good job."
On Day 2 of shooting, during an off-set break, Mr. Altman was
already anticipating the critics. "This will be reviewed in a certain way
by movie critics and probably in an entirely different way by dance
critics," he said. "The movie critics will, I think, not like it very
much, because it isn't going to have any big story and it is of dance. The dance
critics will probably look for flaws in it because it's a movie. We have an
uphill fight in that, but it doesn't make any difference, because I think it's
sexy. It's easy to watch — it's movement, it's bodies, it's people."
Mr. Altman watched dozens of videotapes of contemporary
dances, choosing works like "The Blue Snake," a colorful, dramatic,
oddly costumed spectacle by the Canadian choreographer Robert Desrosiers, and
"White Widow," the Momix solo by Moses Pendleton and Cynthia Quinn in
which a woman in a white dress spins suspended from a rope. He was looking for
pieces representative of the Joffrey's "eclectic" repertory that were
both unfamiliar and easy to edit down into fragments.
In trying to make one kind of art from another, Mr. Altman
seemed to be focusing on the human thread connecting them both.
"The leaps and the lifts are to give the illusion of
defying gravity," he said of dance, "in other words, of not being
bound to the earth. To be free like a spirit. I think almost all of the dances
are connected to emotion — not the story that's in them."
© 2003 NY Times
Archived 2003-10 by Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net