The 1975 classic that blew Tim Robbins’ mind: “You can make movies like that?”
Everyone has that one film that made them realise the true power of cinema. For me, it was John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, which made me realise the sheer impact of cinematic realism. For Tim Robbins, it was Robert Altman’s singular 1975 film Nashville.
“When I was in high school… seeing Nashville in 1975? Blew my mind,” he told NPR, “I thought I had seen movies before that, but I had never seen anything that encapsulated the whole society in a movie”. At the time of Nashville’s release, it was highly acclaimed not just for its hours’ worth of musical numbers but also its scope.
The film has an ensemble cast of 24 incredible actors, including Lily Tomlin, Shelley Duvall and Jeff Goldblum, who portray characters from every echelon of Nashville’s country and gospel music scene. There are country music stars and hopeful groupies, chauffeurs and cooks, folk groups and independent presidential candidates, all of whom are considered main characters.
So Robbins isn’t exaggerating when he says it encapsulates the whole society. And while it might sound like an overly ambitious endeavour to the uninitiated, it was a smash. It’s a frequent feature on the four favourites lists of those in the industry, and it remains as relevant and beloved today as it was on its release.
“I thought, ‘You can make movies like that?’” Robbins explained, “And I was addicted to his movies after that”. Before Nashville, no one had ever taken on quite a feat in such an artful and sensitive way. But as Robbins points out, the 1970s were a “fertile time” for cinema, citing Scorsese, Hal Ashby and Alan Pakula as examples.
These up-and-coming directors were changing the film industry at the time, creating what was dubbed the New Hollywood era. The filmmakers were saying goodbye to the big studios and giving themselves the authorial power to tell stories in a different way. Which is how we got the more meandering, complex and human films like Altman’s Nashville, or Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
Lucky for Robbins, he was a sought-after actor in the decades following the New Hollywood movement, and he eventually got to work with the director who had blown his mind and taught him what cinema could be. “So then, to years later being in a room where I’m meeting Robert Altman for the first time,” he boasted, “No sides. No audition. He just wants to meet you…”
Eventually, this led to Robbins appearing in Altman’s soft Hollywood satire, The Player. It might not have had the scope of Nashville, but it still managed to have 24 actors nominated for an Academy Award and 65 celebrity cameos. Just small stuff, you know? The film followed Robbins as a Hollywood studio executive who, believing he’s been sent death threats, kills an aspiring screenwriter.
The irony of a film by a key director of the New Hollywood era being so widely celebrated by the Academy despite poking fun at that exact institution is the power of cinema.
