While waiting over a year for There Will Be Blood to find funding, Anderson went off in the summer of 2005 to work with another friend, as well as a major professional influence, the ailing Robert Altman—who was in the process of beginning to shot what would prove to be his final film, Prairie Home Companion, at the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. By this point, Anderson had been friends with Altman for nearly a decade—“but,” he said, “I had gotten to know him particularly well in the last three or four years.” Once such instance included Anderson screening Punch-Drunk Love privately for the elder director, hoping that—among other things—he would be pleasantly surprised by the film’s unlikely musical reference to Popeye (1981).On the set of Prairie Home Companion, meanwhile, Anderson was the standby director, an insurance mandated requirement that he be ready to take over the production in case the 80-plus year old Altman died midway through. Anderson didn’t pass up the chance: “Any hesitation? None. None at all, because I knew he wasn’t going to die." It was not the first time on an Altman movie for such an arrangement—Stephen Frears had served in an identical capacity during the shooting of Gosford Park (2002) four years earlier. Frears and Anderson were “being very generous, I think,” Altman said then, “to take their time to support my project.” But, the honor, of course, was all theirs.
Prairie Home Companion was an adaptation of Garrison Keillor’s famous radio program of the same name, which had been broadcast out of St. Paul in various guises since the 1970s. The public radio version of Prairie Home Companion is a folksy two-hour variety show, hosted by Keillor, that features light humor comedy skits and various musical acts, every Saturday evening. For the film version, Keillor wrote the adaptation and starred in it as himself (along with many of the program’s regular contributors). As with every Altman film, though, the dialogue was also, of course, in large measure improvised on set.
To fill out the cast, Altman brought back old regulars like Lily Tomlin, while also attracting a host of other major stars for the rich ensemble—Kevin Kline, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Virginia Madsen and Meryl Streep. Anderson’s old friend, John C. Reilly, and his live-in girlfriend, Saturday Night Live star, Maya Rudolph (who was several months pregnant during the shoot with Anderson’s first child), also had small parts in the movie.
Prairie Home Companion is more or less a soft-spoken but deeply moving depiction of a night in the life in and around a typical show radio broadcast, while also capturing the show’s pastiche historical image of a mid-20th Century populist media culture (equal parts country music and film noir). The only major plot change to the storyline was to set Prairie Home Companion on the fictional night of the program’s last broadcast, after an unnamed corporation from Texas buys it out and decides to shut it down for the sake of profit (in real life, the show is still running).
That said, there really isn’t a plot per se—in classic Altman fashion, the camera seems to meander around the Fitzgerald Theatre, capturing conversations, wandering actors, musical acts and other performances, as the moment comes and goes. Although it is not a direct adaptation of the program’s content (as much of the film reflexively explores the fictional theatrical life behind the curtain as in front of it), Prairie Home Companion does, like the show itself, capture ephemeral moments of whimsy—on and off the stage—as they pass.
While unquestionably an accomplished filmmaker on his own by then, Anderson no doubt still picked up a bit more by watching Altman work on the set. Ultimately, the influence had less to do with how Altman constructed his distinctive cinematic look—the long takes, the zooms, the overlapping dialogue, and so forth—and more to do with Altman’s on-set demeanor. The influence, Anderson said later, wasn’t “the films themselves. It’s him and the way in which he made films." On the set of Prairie Home Companion, Altman conceded a healthy amount of artistic liberty to his cast and crew, trusting that the professionals around him would do their jobs and—within that sometimes chaotic work environment—there would emerge fleeting moments of artistic beauty.
Kline, meanwhile, put Altman’s style slightly differently: “it’s trust [in cast and crew]. It’s a willingness not to control, to let things happen that you didn’t plan.” Looking back, Anderson took away from the experience a renewed appreciation for the collaborative spirit in which the legendary auteur worked. The cast and crew, he said in early 2008, “really made the film with Bob. How he did that was a lesson to me." Altman understood the important of surrounding one’s self with the best talent, and trusting their instincts.
Principal photography on Prairie Home Companion was a relatively quick, but also at times intensely emotional, experience—primarily because nearly everyone involved recognized that it might well prove to be Altman’s last film. This personal realization came into particular relief for everybody at the very end. On the last day of production, the cast and crew shot what ended up being the second-to-last scene in the film—Guy Noir (Kline’s character) playing a piano, while the Fitzgerald Theatre was being taken apart all around him, on the morning after the show’s last broadcast. Anderson recalled the experience:
[Altman] had a Starbucks coffee in his hand and his coat was zipped up because it was cold in there and he had his glasses on. He was staring at the monitor and he just looked really sad that it was ending. I think we only did the shot twice. I remember sitting there thinking, “Fuck, do it again, do it . . . do more, do more.” I wanted to do more—not ‘cause it wasn’t good, but I wanted to keep shooting.
Ironically, principal photography wrapped ahead of schedule in September of 2005. Always the professional, Altman finished production when the work was done, and didn’t draw it out for days or weeks just to prolong the experience of making a movie. Prairie Home Companion would indeed turn out to be his last film (although he did work on a play in London the following spring). What followed, however, was perhaps one of his career highlights—in March of 2006, Altman finally received an Oscar, not for the film, but an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award, from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Later, Prairie Home Companion was released in the summer of 2006 to mild business and favorable, but not overwhelming, reviews—but it wasn’t a film that was trying to be a masterpiece. Rather, Altman’s last film was a much more small-scale, passive mediation on something which largely went unsaid.
Like the radio program it was adapted from, Prairie Home Companion was a melancholic, nostalgic affair. But what Altman, along with Keillor, managed to draw out in the process of adaptation was the spectre of death, the fear of mortality, which underlines most all forms of nostalgia. On the surface, Prairie Home Companion is harmless, light entertainment—but between the cracks was also the question of something much more tragic.
In addition to being about the program’s last performance, Prairie Home Companion is also allegorically about the passing of one medium (radio) and of the era in which it was a dominant form of mass communication. Meanwhile, the theatre is quietly stalked by an angel of death (played by Madsen) who appears periodically and mysteriously to serve as a companion who guides characters on their journeys to the next life beyond.
When she ambiguously appears again at the very end of the film, it is unclear for whom she had come. But, symbolically, it is clear that she has come for Altman himself—particularly as she walks straight into the camera in one of the film’s final images. In October of 2006, Altman looked back on the film:
I didn’t get it until we got to the end. I mean, if at any time in the shooting of this, someone had said, “What is this about?” I could not have said, “This is about death.” Now, in retrospect, I can say this is about death because everyone is avoiding saying that. But that’s what it’s about.
But—in stark contrast to the rage and contempt for the world that barely suppressed itself beneath the cool, detached surfaces of such Altman classics as M*A*S*H (1970), Nashville (1975) or The Player (1992), the melancholic nature of Prairie Home Companion also revealed a quiet, even loving, resignation to the inevitably of time’s passing—a final elegiac acceptance of death, rather than its angry, or even just ironic, resistance. A month later, meanwhile, Altman had passed away, and Anderson, well into post-production on his own film by then, eventually dedicated There Will Be Blood to his old mentor.
