If you think Robert Altman films have a lot of overlapping dialogue, try spending some time in conversation with Garrison Keillor, creator of the public radio sensation of the same name that inspired Altman’s latest effort, and the film’s stars Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. Fortunately, Hollywood.com was there to help keep the performers, who clearly delight in each other’s company, on track.
Hollywood.com: Garrison, how difficult was it to cede a certain amount of creativity to Mr. Altman, since you have been the sole master of this Prairie Home Companion universe for so long?
Garrison Keillor: It was a pleasure to have someone else be the boss, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun any other way. He’s been around and has made a lot of movies and he’s a great straightforward person to work for. It was a pleasure to see other people pick up characters that you had sort of sketched out loosely on paper and make them into something fascinating. It’s hard to do that on paper. It’s hard for me anyway and so it was an amazing experience for a writer to be there in the middle of the madness.
HW: When you set out to write the screenplay what did you want to say that you hadn’t said in your radio broadcasts?
Keillor: I wanted to finish a piece of work on time and have it not be embarrassing. That was my goal, and I was really working on assignment from Mr. Altman. He wanted to make a picture about a radio show. I was enlisted to write his movie and I volunteered to do it in order to keep someone else from doing it, because I can think of people that I would not want to write a screenplay about A Prairie Home Companion. So it was a dog in the manger sort of an act on my part. It had very little to do with wanting to express something. Anything that you want to say you can say on the radio.
HW: How did these performers shape up with the people that you normally work with?
Keillor: I don’t usually work with other people. I do the whole show myself. [Chuckles] It’s an amazing force. They were perfect and they were part of this picture before the screenplay was even written. I think that Meryl signed onto it somewhere around the second draft, when it was still kind of a crappy piece of work.
Meryl Streep: I don’t agree.
Keillor: And then Lily came on soon after. So I had these two people in mind as I was writing these characters. It’s just an amazing gift to a writer to have actors in mind–these two actors, I should say.
HW: Lily, you have your own distinct comic sensibility. Is it hard to master someone else’s or do you even feel that you have to?
Lily Tomlin: No. I’m a big fan of Garrison’s and I’ve listened to A Prairie Home Companion for a very, very long time–except for one period where he went someplace and we didn’t know where he went. We felt really left abandoned.
Keillor: She redid the whole part herself completely. She made it her own.
Tomlin: Yeah. I did. I did [Meryl’s], too. [Laughs]
Streep: She tried.
Tomlin: No. I didn’t think about it. You just think of yourself as an actor and you come in and I love Garrison’s sensibility anyway. So it’s something that I relate to and feel akin too and you just want to do the part. You just want to come in and do justice to your character and serve the movie and the story and I don’t want to embarrass myself with Mrs. Streep. I want to be good enough to be next to her.
Streep: Or if you do embarrass yourself, you want it to be really funny.
Tomlin: So I just wanted to be good.
HW: You seemed like real sisters. How did you get that camaraderie going?
Tomlin: You want to know something really hilarious? I thought that we looked so different that no one was going to believe that we were sisters.
Streep: I thought that we looked so alike!
Tomlin: I tried to make my nose like yours.
Streep: Is that what that was at night. I felt that kind of pushing.
Tomlin: I had noses molded and everything, but my nose is too wide and I couldn’t fit it on. When I put it on I looked like I had a really big nose. Bob [Altman] must’ve known. I don’t know how he would know because I looked and I thought that we looked nothing alike, and who would believe that we’re really sisters? But I believed that they would believe. In my mind, though, I had the doubt—and plus you need busy work to do. So I spent a lot of time having noses sculpted. I didn’t look like anyone when I had this other prosthetic on. I looked like–I don’t know who it was.
Streep: An anteater, probably.
HW: You use a lot of gospel music. Is there a reason for that in the show?
Keillor: I love gospel music. It’s what I grew up with. It’s got big, full four-part harmonies, and it just suits me. I don’t know.
Tomlin: And the rights are easy to get and they don’t mind if you change the words.
Keillor: Right. Well, within reason.
HW: Meryl, you worked with Kevin Kline before in Sophie’s Choice. Can you talk about working with him again on this film?
Streep: I really love watching him do this part because it’s like “Kevin Unleashed.” It’s like, “How can I make my part bigger?” He’s endlessly inventive and shameless, and it reminded me of the first time that I’d ever seen him perform, which was on Broadway, and I thought, “God. This guy should be drummed out of Actor’s Equity for what he did!” [Laughs] He was hamming it up and pushing it so far. People were screaming with laughter, but on film Kevin isn’t really known for that kind of thing. So it was really great to see him do that.
HW: You’ve done a little singing on film, but never like this. Did you spend a lot of time preparing for it?
Streep: I didn’t prepare too much. We had just, like, three days to get it [done], and I like to sing and it’s just really fun. I don’t get to do that much and at my house I’m not allowed to because you’re children can’t stand it when you sing.
Tomlin: Or show any kind of happiness whatsoever.
Streep: Exactly, or anything really. Don’t show anything, or just really even be there. So it’s been hard to wait until all the children are out of the house because there is a lot of them so that I can sing. Anyway, I was really glad to be able to do it. It was so much fun. So much fun. Pure joy.
Tomlin: I called him about me not singing well. I called him and told him that. I practiced for two months singing, because I’m not accustomed to singing. I had to sing the harmony, and it’s not so easy for me, and I called him part way in and I said, “Oh, God. Bob. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sing that well when I get there.” He said, “Oh, so if you don’t sing well you don’t sing well.” And it’s just that easy. However I would’ve sung is how Rhonda would’ve sung.
HW: Garrison, was it hard to get in front of a movie camera and play these parts that you’ve been doing on the radio for so long?
Keillor: I had written my part for myself, which is a great advantage, really. So you stay well within the boundaries of what you can do. I wrote a small supporting role for a tall, sort of clumsy, dour person, and I was adequate at doing that. And when you’re with a cast of terrific actors, people think that this would be intimidating, but actually it’s much less so than if you were a group of rank amateurs—people as rank as yourself—then this would be absolutely terrifying. But when you’re with Meryl and Lily and Kevin, you just bob along in their wake, really. You’re just drawn along and you just react. Be appropriate. That’s all you need to do… Lindsay Lohan did a scene with the three of us and a few others backstage, in which after a character has died she is upset that I am not going to do a little memorial on the show for him. Lindsay sits in a wooden chair and she rises up out of it and she comes towards me accusing me of being cold-hearted. We shot that, I think, six times and each time she had tears in her eyes. I have no idea how people do that. She had tears running down her cheeks, and then Meryl and Lily comforted her and wiped her eyes off and she kept weeping. That’s a whole other line of work than the one that I’m in. Either that or it’s just an innate talent that women have.
HW: Linsday plays a somewhat darker teen character than we usually see her portray. How did that compare to the real Lindsay?
Streep: I don’t think that she’s any darker than any of the other teens that I’m close to. [Laughs] In fact, she’s very easy to feel motherly towards, and in fact she is younger than three of my kids. I feel that it’s so hard for these young actors. I mean, she turned nineteen on this movie and it’s a different world that they’re coming up in, and there is so much money to be made off of their personal lives. People are bound and determined to make that money, and therefore I felt protective of her. I felt bad that in this world that we’ve given to a generation of these kids.
Tomlin: I wanted to go a rave club. I couldn’t believe that she didn’t relate to me as like a contemporary.
HW: Had either of you ladies seen a live production of Garrison’s show before doing this film?
Tomlin: I’ve only seen it once live. I saw it last summer at The [Hollywood] Bowl and Garrison is so funny, because on the radio you don’t get to see all of that, and his expression standing up there–I said, “This is so good for the movie!” I said, “This show is even funnier live than it is on the radio.” I mean, the sound effects and everything that went on that night at The Bowl was hilarious, doubly hilarious.
Keillor: You didn’t look that way while I was looking at you sitting in the audience. You sort of glazed over. I was watching you every moment like a hawk.
HW: Meryl, your character wears her heart on her sleeve and seems to be a 180 from who you play in The Devil Wears Prada.
Streep: It’s so nice to be this character in Prairie because it’s like the opposite, the unzipped woman. [Prada] was really fun, and it’s an eyeful for sure, but I was incredibly restrained. I just pulled myself all back, really, because that’s the way that really, really, really powerful people, in my experience, express themselves: minimally. This one was really fun, much more fun for me to play. The other was more money, though.
HW: There’s a lot of improvisation on this film. Garrison, did you know that climactic kiss was coming from Meryl?
Keillor: No. She threw that in. God knows what motivation there was there. Some kind of electric impulse or something–something that we need to discuss at a calmer moment.
Streep: He’s always trying to lurk off and recede into the shadows and watch and not be in it, and I just didn’t think that was fair. I went over and dragged him on.
Tomlin: Yeah, she ran out there and dragged him on.
HW: Meryl, you also force Garrison to dance at one point. How would you rate Garrison as a dancer?
Streep: He’s really…tall.
Keillor: I’m pretty good at the polka.
HW: What is the key to Robert Altman‘s genius behind the camera?
Tomlin: [The performers] not knowing where the camera is, and the fluidity, so you’re never performing for the camera or feeling that the camera is right on you and looking at you. And you’re not doing that sort of stopping and starting. Then he’s so unflappable. He’s just so even. He’s not absolutely uproarious about something. He’s not crestfallen about something. He so accepts whatever is presented to him, and yet he’s cast it so well, and he’s involved here with Garrison and whatever is going on that it just allows you to be.
Streep: Yeah. It’s confidence. There has to be something good about getting old, and one of the things is that you just don’t stress about the things that used to make you so worried and nervous. B.A.: Beyond Anxiety.
