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Indeed not. As casting began, Altman knew he needed someone to play a movie star playing a smirky action-adventure hero, somebody else to play a movie star playing a humorless ingenue -- a Bruce Willis type and, say, a Julia Roberts type. He asked Willis and Roberts. "They were the first people we chose. I was going to start going from there -- I never dreamed we'd get both of them." He also got Burt Reynolds, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Cher and a horde of other six- and seven-figure actors to play themselves for a few hundred dollars apiece. "None of them were paranoid," Altman says. "None of them came wanting to read the script, none of them."
None of them read the script?
"No -- none of them. I'd say, 'I'm doing this film about a studio executive who murders a writer.' And they'd laugh and say, 'O.K.' "
The fondness of actors for Altman is legendary. Unlike directors who treat performers like two-year-olds -- bothersome, silly, not entirely rational -- Altman genuinely encourages them to help invent the film, not just do as he says. "I collaborate with everybody," Altman says, "but mostly the actors. You could point out any really good thing that happened in any of my films ((and ask)), 'Whose idea is that?' ((and)) it is almost invariably somebody else's. And I don't even know whose."
Of course, writers tend not to share Altman's easy, fungible attitude toward dialogue. And as in almost all things, he remains blithely impolitic in his regard for the screenwriting craft. "I get a lot of flack from writers. But I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing -- I mean, I think it's blueprinting." On Tanner, fortunately, because the story zigged and zagged according to actual events and incorporated real political figures, the writing was necessarily quick, sketchy, Altmanesque. "What Bob makes is a kind of visual jazz," says Trudeau, "and I thought of myself as providing scat lyrics for him. They were always just a departure point."
Altman may be a genius, but linear analytical rigor is not his thing. He lives and works amid a genial hurly-burly, with room for all kinds of stray inspirations and serendipitous touches to worm their way into his movies. What Altman pursues is not looseness for its own sake, but surprise -- both for himself and for moviegoers: he didn't know beforehand the tics and shadings performers like Lyle Lovett and Whoopi Goldberg (who play police officers) would bring to their characters, for instance, and the movie-within-a-movie surprise he gives the audience near the end of The Player is profoundly pleasurable.
When it works, his seat-of-the-pants filmmaking is grand. Yet it carries great risks. As disciplined and carefully plotted as The Player is, it's still an Altman movie. The end of the movie seems a bit contrived, he is told, not quite consistent tonally with the rest of the film -- and he freely admits, "We had no ending to the picture when we went into it. We had no way to end it that anybody liked."