In good company: legendary director Robert Altmans's The Company shows the sweat, tears, and bloody feet that turn dance into art at the Joffrey Ballet.

In the gilded Auditorium Theatre on an afternoon last November, the director Robert Altman sat in an orchestra seat, his eyes darting between four monitors that captured the image of a spinning dancer onstage, suspended on a rope in Moses Pendleton and Cynthia Quinn's White Widow. Altman's cameras followed her from the audience, from behind, from the wings, and from above in a butterfly's view. [] This splice of live perfomance is just one of the arresting images in Altman's new film, The Company, a faux-documentary featuring the forty-one-member Joffrey Ballet of Chicago and actors Neve Campbell as a company dancer, James Franco as her love interest, and Malcolm McDowell as a character based on Joffrey founder and artistic director Gerald Arpino. The idea for the film came from Campbell, a former dancer with the National Ballet School of Canada who quit due to injuries and pursued a television career. Her idea was to make a behind-the-scenes picture about her first and unforgotten love: ballet. "I'm always sad l left dance," said Campbell. who stopped dancing full-time nine years ago but does a credible job performing in the movie. [] "I'm just in my element when I'm in the dance world. I'm so much more content in my heart when I'm sitting on a dance floor in a studio. It sounds so cheesy but it's just my home, it's where I grew up, I've been doing it since I was 6. It makes so much more sense to me than anything else I do."

The 30-year-old former dancer spent almost two years of intense training preparing herself to dance on screen. She sounds starstruck when talking about the position she now finds herself in. "I saw Robert Desrosiers's piece Blue Snake when I was 11 years old and it was so inspiring for me," she said. "So i called him, and I was like 'Robert, I used to go to the National Ballet School, my name's Neve and I act now and can we make Blue Snake?' And he's like 'Yeah!' He's just so psyched Blue Snake is getting made again--and I get to be a part of it. What other situation would you be able to do that--to call up an idol and say 'Come and play with me'?"

Campbell said it was no accident that she chose to focus on the Joffrey--a mid-sized company with an "all-star, no-star" system and an eclectic repertoire. "l didn't want this movie to be about a typical classical ballet company," she said. "I didn't want it to become that story of the girl who wants to go from chorus to principal. I also wanted a company that does a mix--I love modern and I love ballet, so I wanted to be able to have them both on film. I think this company is incredibly expressive. I think with some other companies, it's more about the technique and the ideal body. Jerry really chooses his dancers for their expressiveness, their art and their movement before he considers their bodies. And I thought that was really cool."

AFTER ABANDONING the idea of making a ballet movie with a commercial studio, Campbell decided to develop the project herself. She hired screenwriter Barbara Turner (Pollock) to spend a year observing and interviewing the dancers, collecting anecdotes and stories. "At first they were really guarded," Turner said, "then I took them out to dinner and put on the tape recorder. I just wanted to find out why they danced, when they started dancing, and what their feelings are, and to watch them." She honed untold hours of transcripts into a semi-plotless script, and sent it to Altman "The draft I sent Bob said 'A film by...' and then all the dancers' names," she said. "Because it's theirs. It's a love poem to them."

The movie is half performance, featuring work by choreographers including Gerald Arpino, Alwin Nikolais, Lar Lubovitch, Laura Dean and Robert Desrosiers. But it also explores the realities of the dance world with telling glimpses of life beyond the stage. Dancers were given a choice to change their names (about half did, though their names were listed in the end credits).

"This is a season in the life of the Joffrey Ballet Company," said Altman, a dance outsider who became fascinated by everything from the holes in the dancer's shoes to their penchant for smoking. "It has a little are to it, but mainly I want to see the bloody feel, I want to see the attitudes, I want to see the dance masters."

Altman is too subtle and perceptive a filmmaker to fall into the simplistic, sentimental cliches that plague most dance movies. He wanted to make a film about the dancers' discipline and passion, their sacrifices and camaraderie, the fleeting and poignant nature of their quest for perfection. More than anything, he wanted to show off the form itself, a visual art that often seems compromised when shot through a lens. "I think it's better that I direct this film than a choreographer," Altman said, "because a choreographer knows way too much about dance. I'm trying to take one step back and show what it looks like from where I am."

Nevertheless, Altman relied on Joffrey dancers, dance masters, stage managers, choreographers, and others for technical consulting. "I think he's trying to observe dance more than to re-create it," said Lubovitch, who helped coach Campbell and had to play himself on screen, giving corrections for his pas de deux My Funny Valentine. "He does want it as real as possible--he doesn't want anything artificial."

Company founder and artistic director Gerald Arpino said he told the dancers to make sure to wear their best leotards and cleanest shoes when Altman visited rehearsal for the first time. "He said, 'Oh no, I look for the holes in their shoes,'" Arpino remembers. "And I said 'I look for the soles in their shoes!' So there, we had an instant camaraderie."

Arpino said he was looking forward to what the veteran director would make of his company, but unlike many involved in the project, he wasn't keen to dismiss other dance films as missing the point. "I loved Billy Elliot," he said. "Because I was a young boy myself and I know what the kid had to go through. But this has nothing to do with Billy Elliot or all the other dance films, The Red Shoes or any of those.

"This is a Robert Altman film of what be sees in an American company truly rooted in the American ideals, and what you can do in this great country of ours if you have the talent. The truth of committing yourself to your art--that's what it's about."

Kristin Hohenadel is a writer based in Paris who covers the arts for a variety of publications.