Robert Altman on the Opening Scene in ‘The Player’ (1992): “Interviewer: What ideas did you have about visual style when you read Michael Tolkin’s screenplay [The Player] of his novel? Robert Altman: Early in preproduction I decided to do that first shot as a long take satirizing long takes. Setting up the time jump of the [different writers’] pitches and still doing it in one take, so it became very cinematic, in that there weren’t any cuts in it. Some of the characters tell you what I’m doing