SOURCE: "Reimagining Raymond Carver on Film: A Talk with Robert Altman and Tess Gallagher," in The New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1993, pp. 3, 41-2.

[In the following interview, which took place in July, 1993, Altman and Gallagher discuss the adaptation of Raymond Carver's short stories in Altman's film Short Cuts.]

Raymond Carver, who died all too early—at 50—of lung cancer in 1988, left a remarkable legacy of 11 volumes of short stories and poems, among them Where I'm Calling From, Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and Where Water Comes Together With Other Water. It is a body of work that brought him international acclaim while he was alive and that has now been translated into more than 20 languages.

It was his stories in particular, with their stark evocation of America's urban and small-town blue-collar world, that made the greatest and. perhaps, the most lasting impact. He'd come from there himself—a world of old factories and sawmills, of truck stops and diners, of bars, of run-down frame houses and the frayed nerves of the families inside; in short, a kind of life in the desperate zone, where the one thing one needs is a job, any job, but where all one does is stare at the tube and hang on, scramble, come up empty.

The appeal of Carver's stories lies in their raw, spare truthfulness, their grasp of what Freud, in his old age, liked to call "the foul realities," or what Carver himself might have thought of as just plain bad luck Yet it would be an error to dismiss the strains of hope or the theme of surviving against the odds in his work, for these, too are central to his far-reaching popularity.

To the millions of Carver readers here and abroad, one must now add the American film director Robert Altman. His list of films includes M∗A∗S∗H, Nashville, A Wedding, The Player and now the soon to be released Short Cuts, based on nine stories and a poem by Carver, which will open the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center on Oct. 1….

In July I met with Robert Altman and Carver's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, in Los Angeles to talk with them about their thoughts on the transformation of Raymond Carver's work into a film.

[Stewart:] How did the idea for Short Cuts first get started?

[Altman:] In the early winter of 1990, I was in Rome planning to make a film there about Rossini. But the situation got very ugly and my life was actually threatened. I told my wife that we were going back to America right away, and I asked my secretary to give me something to read on the plane.

I always keep collections of short stories by various writers around, because they often make good film material. I had heard of Ray Carver, of course, but I had never read him, and now there were four or five of his books in the pile put together by my secretary.

What were your first impressions?

[Altman:] I loved the stories. I read a couple of them during the flight. You have to understand that I was in a fragile state. I was coming from an aborted picture and a big defeat. I got off the plane, and I remember walking down the ramp and thinking. "There's a movie here." I think what I did is I made "Carver soup" out of these stories.

Can you remember what happened next?

[Altman:] I went to Tess Gallagher, who owned the rights, and I made a deal to option the stories. Frank Barhydt, a wonderful writer with whom I had worked before, started working with me. I went to Paramount, sold the idea to them. They gave me money to develop a screenplay. We bought some colored 3-by-5 index cards and put scenes from the stories down on them and pinned them up on a big board. When we finished, Paramount hated the script, turned it down, sent it back to us. But I had sent the Carver script to Tess. I was scared to death about what her reaction would be. I had no idea of what she would think.

What was your initial response, Tess, not only to the script but to the idea of Bob Altman wanting to do a film based on Ray's work?

[Gallagher:] I had seen other scripts based on Ray's stories and they had been very flat-footed. Their approach to his work was to copy Ray's dialogue exactly, copy the character's movements exactly. You couldn't really tell what was going to generate the film's energy in those scripts. But I thought that Bob was really a perfect match for Ray, because he wasn't coming out of literature, in a sense.

Do you mean by that that Ray came out of literature?

[Gallagher:] No, actually, Ray was very awkward in the halls of academe. He was a literary man by virtue of his writing and his reading. He was extremely well read. But the lives of the people he was writing about were the lives of pretty ordinary people and, in fact, that's what everybody was so excited about—that through Ray's stories these people started entering into the literature of the country.

So of all the others, Bob seemed to be the right film maker?

[Gallagher:] I thought if anybody could do it, he could. I thought he was doing something very new. He was using the stories as a kind of sourdough, a starter, like yeast. It was generative. It was very interesting to me that he broke the frames of the stories in such a way that the characters began to interact with each other and to glance off each other.

You're known to be careful about Ray's material. Were there reservations?

[Gallagher:] Well, there may have been one thing. I had seen The Player, and I knew that one of Bob's great gifts was his irony, that it was a great tool of his. I was very well aware that Ray eschewed irony, that he didn't distance himself from his characters or their dilemmas.

[Altman:] Yes, Tess made me very aware of that. I agree that real art is without irony. I think that irony is a product of something. It's not the reason for doing something. Irony is a cheap shot. But I can never get rid of all of it, because that's who I am.

Can you give an example from Short Cuts?

[Altman:] After I had cut the picture, Tess made a negative comment about the ending. It's from the story "Tell the Women We're Going." A young girl is brutally assaulted by a sex-starved, violent character named Jerry Kaiser. He beats her to death with a rock. The scene is followed by an earthquake, and it is reported on television that the only known casualty of this earthquake was a teen-age girl—the one he'd killed—caught in a rock slide, which, of course, has its measure of irony. And this was what Tess was responding to. So I immediately went back and recut the picture, the ending of it. I felt I was doing the right thing. Then I had another screening, and it went flat, and I said it's got to go back. When I took it out, it didn't give the audience an out, a way out of the picture somehow. If you just looked at that one moment, Tess was right. I should have taken it out. But if you looked at the picture as a whole, I needed it.

You said earlier that you had made "Carver soup" out of his stories. What exactly did you mean by that?

[Altman:] I meant that I thought of all of Carver's stories as one story. You know, I feel that all of Edgar Allan Poe's stories are really one story. I think of Shakespeare's plays as one big piece. That's the way I look at these things.

[Gallagher:] You saw Ray's world.

[Altman:] Yes, I saw his world. It was as if I was inside of an eggshell, his eggshell. I was inside of this kind of three-dimensional thing. Even the stories that we fabricated, the ones that didn't come from Carver's work, are of his work. Of course Carver is much, much purer. I love the work in the film and I'm not apologizing for any of it—but I don't think it has the power or the truthfulness of Ray's work. I think it has to do with the medium more than anything else.

In what way do you think it has to do with the medium?

[Altman:] When you read these things yourself, you are taking this information, this simple information that Carver is giving you, and you're taking it in and adding it to all the information that already exists in your brain; you are applying it to your own personal experiences, to things that you have seen, done, read, felt, thought before, and it's all judged and filed according to the information you already have.

Now a film audience does exactly the same thing. Except that we're hitting the film audience with visual material; we're hitting them with familiar or unfamiliar material, which is the actors. When you look at Tim Robbins on the screen, whether you like it or not, your mind is judging everything you've ever seen him do before. So if you've seen The Player, that's rubbing off on you.

So how would you describe what you do when you take one medium and put it into another?

[Altman:] I translate what I saw in Carver's work. I'm trying to use what was written and the effect it had on me. My authorship is shaky and doubtful in this. I'm trying to take an experience that I had in reading these stories and use elements and pieces of them to give a similar experience to a film audience.

[Gallagher:] It's a new experience. A fusion of the two consciousnesses, really, and visions—yours and Ray's—to create an entity which didn't exist before. What you do is move Ray's vision into the time in which we are living, the 90's. It's the difference between the vitamins the girl sells in Ray's story "Vitamins" and Jennifer Jason Leigh selling telephone sex in your film. Whereas Ray was considered a realist—and even called a "dirty realist"—you're showing us how much over the fence into fantasy we really live. There are any number of those instances in which fantasy is serving to prop up a reality which is spiritually bankrupt. Ray really had perfect pitch in the soul and the spirit department. He knew what was coming down. And you're saying it has come down and this is what we're living now.

[Altman:] I think that he and I see life from a very similar window.

[Gallagher:] A lot of randomness and luck, but striving too. Many of Ray's characters tried to do better, really struggled against chaos and bad luck.

[Altman:] The whole thing about lady luck is that she has to pick a side. You can say it's the toss of a coin, but lady luck has to pick the side of the coin that lands face up. The poem "Lemonade" is the basis of the whole picture for me. I think the film, the whole film, has more to do with the idea of the chain of events—call it luck or fate—in "Lemonade" than it has to do with any of the individual stories.

[Gallagher:] It's a poem about a child's accidental death and about how sequences of actions cause other actions.

[Altman:] Yes, but it's not that those actions cause those actions, it's that, in looking back, we blame those actions. And the idea of calling it Short Cuts. From the very beginning people kept saying: "Now is that a very good title?" "Why do you call it Short Cuts?" "What's it mean?" I couldn't defend it very well at first, but now I can, because when I look at a map, something happens. A child dies and it's devastating to the people who are close to that event. So they say, "Why did that child die?" But instead of retracing the steps that led to the child's death, as in "Lemonade," you can just look at the map and you say, well, there's 16th Street, Mulberry Street, the Pacific Coast Highway, Main Street. It's a kind of sign language that has nothing to do with the cause of the child's death, and yet it's the only thing you can trace.

[Gallagher:] Maps are like an aerial view of blame. It's a short cut to understanding what happened.

Ray said that he was a paid-up-in-full member of the working poor. And in the movie you moved the stories to suburbia, sort of raised them up in terms of class structure. Was that intentional?

[Altman:] In the way that I'm retelling Ray Carver this class thing is not necessarily an element that is making things happen.

So you didn't try to consciously change from a poor working-class environment to a qualitatively different one?

[Altman:] No, but I probably consciously, and unconsciously, changed it to something that was more familiar to me. To do a whole thing about people who are out of work would give some sort of meaning to this picture that I didn't want to give to it.

You didn't set out to reconfigure the class structure and bring it to Los Angeles, perhaps to appeal to a broader audience?

[Altman:] Oh, no, au contraire. My first reason for shooting the picture in Los Angeles was a practical one. I had a limited budget, and I knew I just couldn't go on location. Most of Ray's people were dislocated anyway.

[Gallagher:] Yes, from somewhere else, or going somewhere else.

[Altman:] I was also very conscious of trying to show that this isn't the Los Angeles of Bel Air or of Brentwood. Every house we used in every neighborhood was for sale. Across the street houses were for sale, cars were for sale. So there was an idea of transition, nothing was permanent.

I have a question about a different issue. When I reread the fishing story, "So Much Water So Close to Home," I realized that the woman is telling the story, that Ray used the woman as the narrator. In the film, it's told from the point of view of the men. Did you do that on purpose?

[Altman:] Well, I thought a lot about that story because that story presented a moral dilemma to me. We sat there and I said, I don't want to take sides in this. I don't want to load this thing one way or the other. So Frank Barhydt and I and my son Steve, who was the production manager on the film, would just sit there and we'd talk. And we'd say, "O.K. we are just three guys, now let's really talk about this. Here's where we are. We've walked into these woods. It took us four hours to get there. It's close to nightfall. We find this body. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to fish, or are we going to report the body to the police right away?" Now Barhydt still contends that he would not have gone fishing, that he would have addressed the situation of the body. And I said I would do the same thing if both guys agreed to that. But if they both said, "Oh, we're gonna fish," I wouldn't argue with them. I'd go along with them, which is what happens in the story. I could easily have done what those men did and not feel guilty about it. Now when he gets back and tells his wife about it, there's not a question in her mind about the moral irresponsibility of what he did.

[Gallagher:] Yes, and if you had had four women going fishing, it would have been different. It couldn't possibly work out the way it works out here.

[Altman:] You're probably right. And if it's true, Tess, then something of great value has been said in this story.

[Gallagher:] You have told us something we didn't know about the difference in the sexes.

Does that mean that you shifted the narrator from the woman because you didn't want to get into sex differences or feminist issues?

[Altman:] Yes. I didn't want to make any judgment whatsoever. I even had the guy take a leak on the body—and my wife, Kathryn, said, "Why did you have to do that, that's disgusting"—and I said, I know it's disgusting, but the point of it is that all he did was take a leak in the water. There happened to be a body there, and when you see that you think, "Oh, there's something revolting in that, that's a violation, that's a terrible thing." But I kept that in on purpose, because I didn't want to make it easy on anybody.

Do you worry that some critics may find your handling of the story sexist?

[Altman:] I don't care about that. When I made M∗A∗S∗H there were a lot of accusations. A woman stood up in a 5,000 seat auditorium in Ann Arbor, Mich., and said, "Why do you treat women the way you treated Hot Lips?" She hated me. She called me a misogynist. "Why do you treat women that way?" I said, "I don't treat women that way. I don't think women should be treated that way. This is the way I see women being treated. You make the moral judgment, I'm not going to make any moral judgment. That's propaganda."

[Gallagher:] I think Ray's story avoids propaganda, but he still manages to show that woman's revulsion at what her husband has done.

[Altman:] I think we did that in the film. And that's why I had Claire and Stuart make love that night when he comes back from the fishing trip. I thought that was a good balance—nice, loving, happy—they made each other happy. She says after they separate in bed, "Oh, you make me so happy." And then he says, "Claire, we found a dead body up there." And two minutes later she's in there and she's saying, "You're making me sick." And she's washing the slime out of her. The next day she gets in her car and she drives 75 miles to be at the funeral service for the dead girl.

[Gallagher:] In the story. Ray made more of a point of the man not telling his wife about the death of the woman until the next morning, until he had his "sexual welcome" so to speak.

[Altman:] I think we did that, too.

[Gallagher:] I guess I mean that you feel the delay more in the story. Time somehow collapses in films.

In the story "A Small, Good Thing." in which the child gets hit by the car, Ann ash her husband to pray for the boy. I was just wondering, Tess, if Ray ever thought in religious or spiritual terms, if he believed there was some kind of higher power in the world?

[Gallagher:] Well, Ray was a recovering alcoholic, and I think he did adopt the attitude of a higher power as a help to us. But he never articulated this. And he never preached to anybody, and I don't even know if he believed in a hereafter, really. He pretty much thought you had to do it all here. But he believed in right action.

I'm curious about the element of classical music and jazz that you've added. And you've created this character, Tess Trainer, a faded jazz singer, whose husband has died and whom you've named after Tess.

[Altman:] I did that simply because I wanted to have a reason for the music I didn't want the music to come from a sound studio outside and amplify the emotions. And yet I know that music does that. I knew I couldn't do this picture without music. That's tough for an audience. But I didn't just want to apply music.

Whatever the reason, you succeed rather well in creating a story that doesn't disturb the rest of the film.

[Altman:] Actually, it's the least Carveresque of the stories. Most of the people who have criticized the film have said, "Oh, you can do without that story."

What do you think of your namesake, Tess Trainer, Tess?

[Gallagher:] Well, widows don't get much applause in America, and there's a lot of applause built into this film for Tess Trainer. She's a real gift to me. I love her stamina, her wry courage, even her loneliness. "She's seen some things," as Ray would say. I certainly recognize some of the widowhood things from my own life, the painful quality that seeps into things because of how they used to be. I think you even poke fun at her—in the way that you make her so nostalgic. I mean I can even laugh at myself through her in the film, the way she's always looking over her shoulder at the past. Am I wrong?

[Altman:] Well, no, how can you be wrong if you're telling me what you received? But about the nostalgia. I think that's what music is. I think it comes from singing those same songs every day in bars and clubs. My feeling is that the music made her what she was, and the music made her daughter commit suicide. I think it was the sadness of the music.

If you were asked to review this film, Tess, how would you deal with this question of the adaptation of Ray's work?

[Gallagher:] I would be very careful about the comparative, in the way that I'm careful about metaphors. What I mean is that to say that something is like or unlike something else is already a kind of invasion. I would try to protect the integrity of your and Ray's vision. At the same time, I would say that I missed a certain inferiority of the characters in the film. The suffering in Ray's stories is more palpable; the empathetic qualities in Ray's characters are more present. I also think you're more societal than Ray was in his work. Ray got inside the individual, and any societal ideas that Ray may have had were very much a byproduct. But you actually make that more your terrain.

Do you think one of the things that might come out of this film is that more people will start reading Ray Carver?

[Gallagher:] I hope they are going to discover the great richness in Ray's work. And the interiors are going to stand out a lot more in the stories because so much of the film is action. Now they're going to go inside in a new way. They're going to take a story like "So Much Water So Close to Home" and wonder about those choices.

But despite the differences, Tess, the sense I have of it is that Ray and Bob would have gotten along extremely well.

[Gallagher:] Oh, absolutely.

[Altman:] I kind of think so. I think we would have argued a lot, but a kind of "discussing" arguing, the way I do.

[Gallagher:] I'm sure you would have laughed together, too—and told a lot of stories like the one in a poem of his in which a man goes walking by the river and an eagle drops a huge salmon right at his feet.