Robert Altman on Barbara Baxley
"Barbara was among those actors who reminded me that I don’t know how they do what they do. It’s alien territory for me."
When Barbara Baxley died in June of 1990, Dave and Oli Brubeck asked me to help them prepare a memorial service for their friend. We reached out to people to invite to the service, or to say something about the actress. I did not reach Robert Altman until the fall of 1990, long after the service, but he was aware of how much Baxley had praised him, needed him, and he respected her tremendously.
This conversation is from October of 1990.
Barbara was tough. She had no hesitation in calling you an asshole. Announcing how wrong you were. I was okay with that. I know people who were not.
Barbara was among those actors who reminded me that I don’t know how they do what they do. It’s alien territory for me. I cannot act. I don’t understand the—well, what?—the mechanism, the process by which they go about creating a character and transmitting it on film. I don’t even like talking about it. It’s like I’m talking about repairing a car, although I think I’m in better shape opening the hood of a car than telling an actor how to do something.
An actor creates the character, which has been given through words written by someone. Words are just the beginning. I have always felt that you need to give the words to an actor and see what happens. I’m reading these words—these hypothetical words—and I feel something, react in certain ways. I’m not an actor. I give those words to someone else, and the responses are entirely different. Barbara used to yell at me that I had gone and fucked things up by looking at the scene as just a director. Now give it me, she would say, and she would transform it. Why wouldn’t a smart director want an actor to expand the script? The possibilities?
Barbara’s Pearl [in Nashville] is hers. Barbara invested so much of herself in that part. Look, what I’m saying about Barbara, I could say about Warren [Beatty] or Julie [Christie] or Elliott Gould. Certainly about Lily [Tomlin]. I can’t do what they do. What any of them can do. I know a lot of musicians, some conductors. I told [Leonard] Bernstein that I could only imagine what he does because I try to do the same: To stand before and beside some artists and coax out a sound, an effect, a story. I don’t think Lenny can play all the instruments. I don’t think he pretends to have a mastery of all of them. But he knows the effect he wants. The sound. The transmission. Leonard—the other Leonard—Cohen, used to talk about transmission a lot. What are we transmitting? What is being said? Shared? I can’t do it. I know what I want to achieve, and I know I can only do it—and not always and not always well—if I work with everyone and get them to give me what they’ve got. To transmit. I can’t build a set, even though I know what I want to get that fucking scene to work. I can’t shoot a scene, but I can huddle with a DP to get the look I think might work. And maybe we’re all wrong. We’re all fucked. But we did it together.
A scary phrase is, You’re on your own here. Abandoned. Alone. Discarded. Barbara would say this to me when I was thinking only as myself, as the director. I had not consulted with anyone else to help me get where I was going. Bernstein doesn’t just ignore the string section and let it rip. I’m guilty of ignoring people and opportunities. I could never do that if Barbara was around.