Interviewin' Ronee Blakley on Robert Altman's Nashville and More

Robert Altman's Nashville was released in 1975 and ran for almost three hours. It had twenty-four principal characters. It was filmed in the city, used country music as both backdrop and subject matter, and was structured the way Altman structured most of his ensemble films: overlapping, not quite plotted, full of tangents that became the point.

Ronee Blakley played Barbara Jean, a country star in fragile health, beloved and overwhelmed. She wrote the songs her character performed. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She did not win. She has spoken about the film on and off for the thirty-five years since.

This conversation took place by phone in August 2010.

On the character

Barbara Jean is the emotional center of the film in the way that fragile people are sometimes the emotional center of a room: everyone orients toward her without quite touching her. Blakley described developing the character less from calculation than from trying to find the truth of a particular kind of performer, the kind who is genuinely connected to an audience in performance and genuinely lost outside of it.

"There are performers like that," she said. "The stage is where they make sense. Everything else is management, and they're not always good at being managed."

She talked about watching country performers before and during the shoot, about the way certain performers carry vulnerability as a performance quality and the difference between that and real vulnerability. Barbara Jean has real vulnerability. The performance quality is there too, but it is overwhelmed by what is underneath it.

On the music

Blakley wrote the songs her character performs in the film, which is an unusual arrangement. Actors in musical roles typically perform material that exists separately from the performance itself. Here the songwriting and the performance were part of the same creative act.

She described the songs as character songs rather than songs she would have written for herself. "Barbara Jean has a specific relationship to simplicity. She says what she means very directly. That's not always where I am as a writer."

The songs in the film — Idaho in particular, and the closing performance — work because they have the quality of real country songwriting: accessible melody, direct language, an emotional content that is available to a large audience rather than a small one. That accessibility is precisely what makes Barbara Jean both beloved and, in the film's reading of celebrity and vulnerability, endangered.

On Altman's working method

Altman's working method on Nashville was well documented. He used overlapping sound, many cameras, a loose structure that allowed scenes to develop through improvisation rather than scripted beats. For actors, this meant a different kind of preparation: not memorizing a fixed sequence of exchanges but being ready to work with whatever presented itself.

Blakley described the experience as more like being on a documentary shoot than a narrative film. "You were always in it. The cameras were always around. You were always the character."

She talked about a scene that was mostly or entirely improvised, a breakdown sequence that she said evolved differently from what had been planned. Whether it was the version that made the final cut or an earlier take, she did not say.

On what came after

Blakley had a music career before Nashville and continued it after. She made records that received less attention than the film performance. She worked in other films. She worked in theater. The trajectory did not follow the line that an Academy Award nomination might have been expected to produce.

She talked about this without apparent bitterness. The industry has a narrow definition of what a successful career looks like after a certain kind of attention, and it does not always match what the performer wants to do.

"I kept making music," she said. "That's the main thing."

The film

Nashville holds up as a document of a particular American moment: the mid-1970s, between Watergate and the bicentennial, country music becoming mainstream entertainment while retaining some of its original tension with mainstream entertainment, celebrity as both the thing that saves you and the thing that destroys you.

The ending of the film is specific and precise and still shocking even when you know what is coming. Blakley's performance in the final sequence is the emotional point toward which the entire film has been moving. What she does with it is not what a lesser film would have asked for.

For more context on the film: Movie Lounge: Midnight Cowboy, Soundtrack Music What Might Have Been and One for the Books: Greaser's Palace, an Absurd Acid Western. Full interviews archive: Interviews.