It’s on days like this I’m reminded how much I love what I do. Recently I caught up with legendary director Robert Altman and legendary actor Malcolm McDowell, at the same table, no less, for a brief musing on their new film, the simple, lovely dance company canvas The Company.

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic.com: In many of your films you’ve often mounted satirical critiques or character-rich mosaics of particular worlds, such as The Player and Nashville, to name only two. What was your strategy in constructing The Company?

Robert Altman: I didn’t have any that I’m conscious of that I would draw on; anything similar. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do or how this was going to work. This was really walking into a fog and I didn’t know how the dancers and dance masters would work with me. And so I sort of just pussy-footed through until I saw what would work, and I just followed that path. I found, to my surprise, that the dancers- I had done a film before this called Gosford Park, and I had many, many actors in it—top professional thespians—they were great. They couldn’t have been more cooperative. But they’re actors, and when I’d say "Okay, let’s get this scene in," and then you get eighteen people saying, "Oh, am I late? I hope Maggie’s (Smith) here. I don’t like to go on the set before Maggie gets on the set," and all of these kinds of things that took a long time to get together.

And I thought dealing with forty or fifty people in this would be very difficult. And then I found out that they were all there. And I’d say, "Well, let’s just walk through where this dance is going to take you, so I can just see what space you’re going to take up." And I would say to one dancer, "Is it possible for you stop just this much short?" Forevermore, that dance would stop at that spot until told to go somewhere else. So they were so disciplined and so like one organism, that it was wonderful. And they’re not shy and they don’t have stage fright. They spend their lives in front of mirrors looking at themselves.

So we never gave a script to the dancers. I sure there was paper floating around and conversations going on and all of that, but just before we would shoot a sequence, because we couldn’t do a take seven—you could hardly get take three—sometimes you could get them to do it a second time, and so it had to be that way. We had many, many cameras going all the time, and then I just kept making this film, pushing forward with what I could get from them, because they’re the stars of the film.

I had nothing to say other than to present what they do. So in my mind it is a day in the life of, or a season in the life of. I decided to give you hints of the regular stories, so I was able to start a little story just so you could draw a focus on one or two of the dancers, the kid who got fired, the breakup, those kinds of things. But I didn’t give you the whole story, because you know the whole story—the audience does. And I just didn’t want to do that same stuff again, and this is a film about the joy and pain of dance, the dance company, period. That’s the drama.

And I had this great force I was able to put in there, Mr. Malcolm McDowell, and he was the force that gave it dramatic impact at every moment. And he’s sitting here in front of me and I don’t usually talk to him this way, but he managed to bring such a three-dimensional work to that character. I didn’t know what was going to be said in the scenes, and I said just play the scene the way you think it should be played. And I had no idea what he was going to say.

S: Malcolm, your performance in the film seems very spot-on, very funny and detailed. What’s the difference between working with Robert Altman and working with other directors? He normally expects a great deal from his cast in terms of collaboration.

Malcolm McDowell: When you work with Bob it’s another thing that’s required. With him it’s a great event. Making a movie with him is, thank God, very, very different. It’s exciting. It’s an event. You never really know what’s going on. So the worst thing you can do is come in with preconceived ideas, because that’s not going to work. You will find that out very fast.

He tends to say stuff like, "Sounds like dialogue. Pass on that." So it’s great because it really does free you up as an actor and it make you rethink what you’re doing. Of course, I’ve been doing this a long time, 40 odd years or something, and you tend to get a technique by then and pretty much know what’s what. But I’ve got to say that I’ve never worked in this way, and it’s very exciting because I’ve never done improvisation or really worked that way. It’s great because he takes the best of it and leaves the repetition and the worst of it.

Q: Robert, you’ve said that The Company is a dance, not a film. What exactly does that mean, and what are the specific challenges you face when making one art form into another, or translating the specifics of one into the other?

A: Well, I’m not making into anything, I’m just trying to record it. It’s a documentary film, I feel. We shot every foot of it and staged every foot of it. There were no real performances. We controlled everything. But in my mind it was a documentary film.

S: In the course of making this film, what observations did you make on the subject of dancers? What was revealed to you about their lives and struggles?

M: It is true that a sad state of the arts in this country, the funding anyway, is that really you get some dancers who can be an elite, primadonna type dancer, and the next day they’re out being a hostess or a waitress in a club to help pay their rent. And that’s where we are. Of course, they don’t do it for money, they do it because they have to dance and that’s the only thing they ever would want to do.

A: It’s a great melancholy. The girls start when they’re four and five years old, and about the time that they’re 19, their bodies have changed; they walk like a duck. I could take you out in the street and say, "She’s a dancer, there’s a dancer," just by the way they walk. And they can’t make a living at it, barely.

At 18 they start to look at themselves and they say, "I’m never going to be Susan Farrell. And I can’t win. I’ve spent my whole f*&%ing life getting my body to this. And they can’t have any social life outside. It’s very incestuous, because a girl can’t be on a date with a guy who has a job, because her demands are so- an hour and a half every day in class, a workout, they’ve got to watch their weight, they’ve got to get their sleep, many go through anorexia to keep their weight down. It’s very hard to go through your teenage and early twenty years under that kind of discipline. By the time they’re 33 they’re finished. They’re out teaching little kindergarten kids dancing. They’re really admirable.

Q: What observations can you offer on working in the movie industry of today versus the landmark work both of you did in the 70s?

A: Nothing changes. It’s the same going into each project. There’s great fear and trepidation, because you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you do know what you’re doing, you’d just as well not do it because why find out? In your mind, that’s history. In my mind, it’s just experience. We get our little creating group together, and you go in and say, "Here’s the problem. How do we solve it?" And you go in and do it.

But if you look back at the films of Malcolm’s or mine that go back to the early 70s, they’re part of a history for you. And you saw them at different times of your life. People will come to me and say, "That film just changed my whole life." They’re talking about Nashville or O Lucky Man! (McDowell). But think about the person who is saying that. They’re probably young and the experience is new for them, and they’re recognizing something and thrilled by that. It’s like when I walked out of Brief Encounter in 1946. You never forget those things.

M: Nothing changes. I’ll just give you a small story to illustrate that. A year or two ago, they made a new print of A Clockwork Orange and they showed it at the Egyptian, one of the most beautiful old movie houses in L.A., and I went to see it. I haven’t seen it in 20 odd years. I’m watching this and thinking, "Oh, my God, Kubrick is a genius. It’s exquisite. I missed that! I missed that the first time I saw it. I never really looked at that. His contribution was so amazing." So anyway, the film finished and when I came out there was a young guy who he came up to me and said, "Hey, yeah. A Clockwork Orange. Yeah, wow. Which part did you play?" I said, "Well, I played the guy. The guy." He said, "Oh, the old guy?" And I thought, it’s thirty years old. That just shows you how brilliant Kubrick was. He made a film that was really timeless. You know, this guy just thought it had been made a year ago. It was great. So there you go.