Saluting Hollywood's Maverick: Ron Mann and Kathryn Reed Altman discuss the Nashville director

"I couldn't make a conventional film about an unconventional filmmaker." That was the credo documentarian Ron Mann worked to as he developed his new film Altman, an affectionate and unusual portrait of the great Robert Altman. The task of covering Altman's entire life and work in a single documentary is an impossible one, so Mann instead focused on trying to capture his essence. He asked a number of the filmmaker's collaborators to define the word 'Altmanesque' and built his film around their answers, with their wide ranging definitions ("Fearless", "Expect the unexpected", “Inspiration”, “Making your own rules”) coming close to summing up his iconoclastic spirit.

Mann also felt it was important to preserve the director's unique voice, and that the best way to do so was let Robert Altman tell his own story. Spending a summer in the director's archives at the University of Michigan, Mann found enough interview audio and video footage to construct a narration, and he was astonished at the wealth of material he had at his disposal. "We accumulated over 400 hours of material, so to look at that in real time took ten weeks," he says, "Then I said to Kathryn [Alman's wife] one day, 'Were there any Super-8 films?' and Matthew and Bobby [two of their sons] had 150 home movies. A filmmaker doesn't usually have this kind of bounty or treasure trove of material available to them, and I'm not really a spiritual person but it almost felt like Bob was helping this film along."

As well as being a labour of love for Mann, who cites his viewing of M*A*S*H at the age of 12 as a formative experience, Altman is also a family affair, with the director's widow Kathryn Reed Altman being heavily involved in the production throughout. "I was not familiar with Ron or his work, so I did some research and I heard him described in interesting ways, which applied completely and thoroughly to the Altman aspect; words like quirky, not middle-of-the-road, a really good filmmaker but not your run-of-the-mill guy," she tells me, and she felt it was important that the film captured both the highs and lows of the director's storied career.

After making his breakthrough in television, Altman enjoyed enormous success in the 1970s before being exiled from Hollywood in the 80s, and then making a triumphant return with his acerbic industry satire The Player. "He just kept busy and kept thinking all the time; he was a creative force," Kathryn says. "One thing led to the other and he just wanted to keep branching out into something new, something different." She remains astonished at his capacity to keep going in the face of disappointment and rejection: "I don't know how to explain it. I've never seen it in somebody before or since and it always amazed me."

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"I couldn't make a conventional film about an unconventional filmmaker" – Rob Mann

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Watching Altman was an emotional experience for Kathryn, particularly the home movie footage featuring her husband and children and the remembrance of the night he received his lifetime achievement Oscar just a few months before he died. "He resisted that particular award, probably three or four years in a row, and he had a whole committee in the Academy who kept pushing for him," she recalls. "He kept saying 'I don't want that old man's award, I'm not through working.'"

Robert Altman's next film A Prairie Home Companion was to be his last, but his work lives on, feeling richer and more vital with every passing year, and when I ask Mann for his own definition of Altmanesque, the word he leans towards is "indestructible". "Bob's view of filmmaking was that they're sandcastles you get together to build with friends, the tide comes and washes the sandcastle away, and what's left is the memory," he says. "I think Bob built sandcastles that were indestructible."

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