Paul Thomas Anderson’s five favourite Robert Altman movies
It wouldn’t be unfair to call Paul Thomas Anderson the modern-day equivalent of Robert Altman, who has inspired the One Battle After Another filmmaker to no end.
Altman’s influence is clear to see, and you can imagine the pair becoming close pals during the New Hollywood era in which the elder director thrived. Instead, they got to meet in the 2000s, when Anderson was hired to work on Altman’s final movie, A Prairie Home Companion. He must’ve been bloody over the moon at the thought of working closely with one of his cinematic idols, a bloke who shaped his entire approach to filmmaking.
“Just in case anything happened with Bob, I was hired to sit next to him. I can’t tell you what I took from it. Obviously, it was a privilege and an honour and all that, but just such an amazing good time,” Anderson once revealed.
You can draw many similarities between the filmmakers, like their love of star-studded ensemble casts (who else has done it better than these two?), as well as their bold approaches to philosophical matters, expertly executed through long shots and a naturalistic style. You can easily fall for (or love to hate) both Altman and Anderson’s characters, who are always astoundingly complex, to the point that it’s sometimes hard to remember that they’re not real. They might as well be.
Anderson owes a lot to Altman, so it’s no surprise that when he once shared a list of his 65 favourite movies, five of them were directed by the cinematic legend. The earliest Altman on his list is McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which many consider an ‘anti-western’- western, which played with genre conventions in a way that proved the filmmaker’s keenness for innovation. This wasn’t your typical western, it was a New Hollywood revisionist western with enough grit to subvert expectation and highlight reality, not some glossy version of it.
Popeye is another favourite of Anderson’s, with the director borrowing Shelley Duvall’s ‘He Needs Me’ for his melancholic Adam Sandler rom-com Punch Drunk Love. Then there’s Nashville, of course, Altman’s atypical musical which challenged the traditional notion of the genre. It’s satirical and bizarre, with odd songs and a large cast of characters whose lives overlap (much like how Anderson allows his characters to overlap in Boogie Nights or Magnolia).
In fact, Anderson claims that he was “thinking a lot” about Nashville while creating Boogie Nights, which makes perfect sense. “It’s in my DNA,” he admitted, “I grew up watching those movies, so it’s just informed me and informed how I want to tell stories.”
Anderson’s other favourite Altman movies aren’t what you’d expect – 1984’s Secret Honor and 2006’s A Prairie Home Companion (although maybe he’s biased). Where is 3 Women? The Long Goodbye? M*A*S*H? Images? Anderson is never one to stick to convention, though, so it’s no surprise that he sidestepped some proper classics in favour of a few slightly less appreciated picks. A Prairie Home Companion isn’t considered one of Altman’s greatest films, but clearly the experience of working alongside his hero as the film was made was enough to cement it as one of his all-time favourites.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s five favourite Robert Altman movies:
- McCabe & Mrs. Miller
- Popeye
- Nashville
- Secret Honor
- A Prairie Home Companion
