How A Streetcar Named Desire Led John C. Reilly to Work with Robert Altman
Lights, cameras, action, but this was far from a movie set. Deep inside a theater actor John C. Reilly was taking a break from the stage play A Streetcar Named Desire daydreaming on what filmmakers he hadn’t worked with before. The Law of Attraction states when you visualize something or write it down, it has a higher chance of happening. The very first filmmaker John C. Reilly wrote down? None other than Robert Altman.
- Robert Altman
There it was at the very top of his list. The very first filmmaker he wrote down.
Cut to five or six days later and for the first time John C. Reilly got offered his first role in… a Robert Altman movie. He immediately signed up to play the role of Lefty in A Prairie Home Companion.
It’s hard to know how prescient John C. Reilly was considering this would be Robert Altman’s final film ever made. The stars aligned and he got to work with a dream filmmaker at the very end of their filmmaking journey.
Remembers John C. Reilly:
“It’s funny because when I was doing Streetcar, I was sitting there thinking about who do I want to work with, so I sit down and made this list of directors I hadn’t worked with before. The first one I wrote down was Altman, and I think I got maybe five or six more. Five or six days later he offered me the part of this movie. So that was pretty funny. I should look for that list and see who was second because I think that is the next thing I’m going to be doing.”
Now we are left wondering who was the second filmmaker on his list and has he worked with them yet?
- — -
This interview is dated from SXSW 2006 when John C. Reilly was there promoting A Prairie Home Companion. Covering SXSW as a film journalist is always a blast!
