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[M*A*S*H] didn't get released by FOX, it escaped.

Robert Altman

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Robert Altman
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: February 20
Died: 2006
Died: November 20
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Librettist
Screenwriter
Theatrical Director
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Escaped
Released
Foxes
Didn

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If something works for you, you continue to do it. I did a bunch of pictures for 20th Century Fox when Alan Ladd was over there, but I set the budgets so low that they'd approve and I'd deliver the film. They would have no say in it, which is the kind of arrangement I liked.
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Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.
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I don't know what Altmanesque means, though I suppose I'm flattered by it.
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If George W. Bush is elected president, I'm leaving for France.
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I was a heavy drinker, but the alcohol affected my heart rather than my liver. So I stopped. I smoke grass now. I say that to everybody, because marijuana should be legalized. It's ridiculous that it isn't. If at the end of the day I feel like smoking a joint I do it. It changes the perception of what I've been through all day.
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I'll give you the same advice I give my children: Never take advice from anybody.
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If you have a child who is seven feet tall, you don't cut off his head or his legs. You buy him a bigger bed and hope he plays basketball.
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Why should I keep doing things that I've done before?
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What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending.
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Most of my films I call arena films. I deal with a confined area -- an arena -- and I try to cover every aspect of it.
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I like audiences to crane their necks.
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Happy endings are absolutely ludicrous, they're not true at all. We see the guy carry the girl across the threshold and everybody lives happily ever after -- that's bullshit. Three weeks later he's beating her up and she's suing for divorce and he's got cancer.
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The minute you have more than one voice, you have more possibilities opening up. You have all the molecules in all of those bodies and their make up interacting.
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We make too much of the good and too much of the bad.
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That wasn't an ending. It was just a stopping point.
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I want to see something that I've never seen before, so how can I tell that actor what that is? I'm not trying to construct a document or situation that is what I want, because what I want is something new to me.
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I've had it-the agencies, the winking, the networks, the ratings. Anyone who thinks TV is an art medium is crazy-it's an advertising medium.
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Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you're finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there's something in there, but you're not sure exactly what it is until you find it.
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Titanic I thought was the most dreadful piece of work I've ever seen in my entire life. Another film that I think is equally bad was American Beauty. So badly acted and directed. But people like that.
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The Oscar for the films, it'd be nice. But I don't make those kind of films, and I don't think that will ever happen.
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