Streep describes 'open' filming

The spontaneity of how the movie was shot took some getting used to, the actress said.
By MICHAEL O'SULLIVAN
WASHINGTON POST
When Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin presented Robert Altman with his honorary Oscar at this year's Academy Awards ceremony, the two actresses -- talking over each other in the alternately halting and pell-mell style that is the improvisation-loving filmmaker's trademark -- spoke of how the director doesn't want his actors to act. "He wants the kind of spontaneity that can only come from not knowing what the hell you're doing," joked Tomlin, who, along with Streep, plays one half of a country-music sister act, heading up the large ensemble cast of Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion," a film based loosely on the real-life radio show of the same name.
Reached by phone a few weeks before the film's opening, Streep agrees with her co-star, saying that the feeling of being kept off balance began, for her, the moment she picked up the script, written by "A Prairie Home Companion" host Garrison Keillor (who conveniently plays a radio host named G.K. in the film).
"This is the first thing that I've gotten, really, that I couldn't make heads or tails of within the first 10 or 20 pages," Streep says, laughing. "Usually you know immediately, if the screenplay announces its tone, its darkness, its -- you know -- you can sort of predict, from the first 15 pages, when things are going to blow up physically or metaphorically, and how it's going to resolve, and the whole schwing of it, and what the feel of the whole thing is. The gestalt just kind of announces itself. This one was just such an odd little creature. It just sort of danced along, seemingly on the surface of things, and had some laughs and some poignancy and some sweet characters and some odd things and some dirty jokes, and I didn't know" -- here the actress pauses dramatically before shouting into a reporter's ear -- "what they were doing."
Making sense
Until she closed the script, that is.
That's when Streep says the story finally began to make sense, in the way that its themes of life and death suddenly crystallized in the mundane events of its plot, which center around the final broadcast of the fictional show. In some ways, it's a lot like Keillor's rambling, detail-rich "News From Lake Wobegon" radio segments, she says. "Nobody really knows what Garrison's going to do, even Garrison, I think. He just sets off, and it's wonderful." In other ways, Streep likens the film to a poem. "It mixes the very tangible, practical things that great poets use to evoke the bigger questions."
Not that she always knew what she was doing on the set, either. According to Streep, Altman doesn't work like most directors. It's a lesson she learned on the first day of shooting, as she and Tomlin (along with Lindsay Lohan, who plays Streep's daughter) prepared to film a lengthy scene set in the dressing room of the theater from which the radio show broadcasts.
"It was a 10-page scene, you know, which I think would be shot over three days," Streep recalls. "And he says, 'Well, we're going to shoot the first scene today.' I said, 'Fine. So we'll wrap it up around Thursday?' He said, 'No, no. We're going to shoot the first scene today.' I went into a panic. I hadn't learned the whole scene. But we did. We shot the whole scene in one day."
That was facilitated by the fact that Altman was using high-definition video cameras, which allowed him to keep shooting longer than the 12 minutes before a typical film camera runs out of film. That, and the fact that the director doesn't seem to mind when his actors deviate from the script. So much so that he finds it hard to interrupt them, Streep says. "In the moments between when he says 'action' and 'cut,' you are aware that you're working, but there's a looong time before 'cut' comes, at least in my experience."