Robert Altman

i was reading Roger Ebert's reviews on some Meryl Streep movies, and it led me to a tribute article on Robert Altman's unintended final movie, A Prairie Home Companion, before he passed away.

I've heard so much about him, yet I've never seen his movies, not even when i have the Gosford Park vcd lying in my cabinet. A Prairie Home Companion was my first contact with what everyone calls "the actor's director", an auteur with a profound passion for the art.

Here's an excerpt from Roger Ebert's article, that not only captured Ebert's admiration for Altman's passion in films, but was also lovingly written, and bittersweet.

"Did Altman know this would be his last film? Certainly not. But he knew his time was limited. "Where the years have gone, I don't know," he told me backstage that day at the Lyric. "But they're gone. I used to look for a decade . Now I look for a couple more years." He got them. "When I'm not making a film," he told me on the set of "Gosford Park" in 2001, "I don't know how to live. I don't know what to do with the time. I don't have an assistant director taking me to this little restaurant around the corner, and a production manager telling me about my hotel, and a driver to take me where I have to go."

He said he kept track of time not by the years but by the film he was making. Given an Honorary Oscar in March 2006, he astonished his audience by revealing he had been living 10 or 11 years with a heart transplant. He didn't mention that he also had leukemia, listed as his cause of death on Nov. 20 of the same year. At the time, he had two films in pre-production."