The Player

His work is genius, it's terrible, it's humorless, it's delightful: The only thing that can be said consistently about director Robert Altman is that he's never predictable. Now, with his latest caper, Cookie's Fortune, a critically hailed Southern tale of suicide and hysteria starring Patricia Neal, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Charles S. Dutton, Liv Tyler, and Chris O'Donnell, the man who has made more than 35 movies and earned five Academy Award nominations appears to be on an upswing.

As for Altman, he couldn't care less. ''I love all the films I've made,'' he says with a shrug. ''They're like your children. You tend to love the least successful ones the best.''

While this kind of box-office-be-damned attitude has helped earn Altman a reputation among studio suits for being ''difficult,'' his prestige and thriftiness (he brought in Cookie's Fortune for under $8 million) keep him in demand. And for better or worse, Altman, 74, keeps on delivering. ''For 30 years, I've thought 'God, these films are so different I don't have any signature or style at all,''' he says. ''As I look back on them, I see very clearly they're just different chapters of the same book.''

We asked Altman to give us a read on some of his work.

M*A*S*H (1970)
Altman moved from directing television shows to forgettable low-budget features. Then, at 44, he directed this antiwar dramedy about a medical surgery team serving in Korea. It earned Altman a mere $75,000 but established his reputation and scored him his first Oscar nomination for directing. ''It was about Vietnam for [the filmmakers], not Korea. But the studio was terrified that it have anything to do with Vietnam. They insisted that we begin with ''Once upon a time in Korea...'' When we were showing the film at universities, people would say, 'How dare you treat Hot Lips the way you do?' and I'd say, 'This isn't the way I treated her, that's the way I see her being treated, so don't jump on my ass about it.' I see things the way they are, not the way we hope they'd be.''

NASHVILLE (1975)
Part music convention, part political campaign, Altman's ode to the country-music capital earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, and launched the career of Lily Tomlin, who played one of the 24 central characters. ''I was concentrated [during filming] on making the circumstances comfortable for the actors, but when I started putting it together in the editing room, I knew we had a really good film. I make the actors do the work. I rarely give direction.''

POPEYE (1980)
Robin Williams starred as the spinach-eating sailor in Altman's highest-profile failure. ''Popeye got vilified. It didn't do well, and even today, [people] will say, 'Oh, Altman's return after the disaster of Popeye.' Well, Popeye's the least disastrous of all the films I've made, and I'm really proud of it.''

COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (1982)
Before adapting it for the screen, Altman staged Ed Graczyk's play — about a reunion of Texas girlfriends — on Broadway. The film version earned Cher her first serious attention as an actress, and a memento from the film — a neon sign that says ''5 & 10'' — hangs behind Altman's desk. ''We played 60-odd performances [on Broadway] and I went to every one of them. [New York Times critic] Frank Rich really did us in, but the day we moved out of the theater, we moved the [cast and the] set into one of those little studios on the West Side, put up a fourth wall, and shot it.''

FOOL FOR LOVE (1985)
Adapted by Sam Shepard from his play of the same name, Fool for Love starred Shepard and Kim Basinger as drifters/lovers. ''I couldn't resist doing the play with the author of the play playing the part. Sam only looked at his own dailies, and he was kind of shocked when he saw [the finished] film. He never supported the film — another of his plays had opened. He was very ungracious about it.''

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