Robert Altman

Thirteen years divide Robert Altman's two Independent Spirit items in the directing category: he won it for Short Cuts and was nominated for A Prairie Home Companion. The institution also put him up twice in the best film category, in his capacity as producer. Nick Kimberley, separately, recalls an opera compilation of 1987, a set of shorts in which several directors answer an aria with cinema, and Altman is one of those directors alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Ken Russell and Nic Roeg. Kimberley counts the compilation a pleasant novelty but faults its handling of opera as a run of hit songs; for him those arias work best when they are not cut away from their dramatic settings. Don Boyd, who produced the compilation, also directed the film Kimberley was writing about.