Robert Altman (who died on Tuesday aged 81) never won an Oscar: belatedly he was given an honorary one last year by a shamed Academy. He refused to play the Hollywood game, preferring from the start . . . after Jack Warner saw the dailies for Countdown with its innovative use of overlapping dialogue, and had him locked out of the studio . . . to operate independently, making movies his own way rather than to please audience demographics.

"I would never have survived inside the system, " he said. "I would have been chewed up and spat out. So since then I've been underground all my life, and I have no complaints."

Educated by the Jesuits in Kansas City, he never went to film school but learned his trade making industrial films and working on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He delighted in recreating the genres that made Hollywood great, but without their familiar Big Moments. Thus Thieves Like Us (1974) was a 1930s gangster picture in which all the cliche climaxes were deliberately pushed into the background. The shootouts and love scenes occurred almost as asides. What intrigued Altman was the cinematic potential of the ordinary moments in between such supposed highlights, an area Hollywood didn't consider glamorous enough to record. Altman liked to create an ambience in which the actors were encouraged to behave rather than perform while the camera followed them around catching moments . . . most notably perhaps in Nashville (1975), which took the music capital of America as a metaphor for the country's values. "You're not planning any of this as you film, " he explained. "You're capturing. You can't even hope to see it, you just turn on the camera and hope to capture it. There's a structure, but you do what you do. You give the actors the basis to work around and they fill it in."

With M*A*S*H (1972) he revolutionised the war movie genre by ignoring the fighting to focus on the lives of ordinary men caught up in senseless anarchy. McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971) deconstructed the western . . . there's only one cowboy hat in the entire movie . . .

and the characters are nearly all immigrants rather than sounding (as he later recalled) "like George Bush from Texas." The Long Goodbye (1973) lifted the 1930s Raymond Chandler private-eye classic forward to the 1970s, while more recently with Gosford Park (2001) he appropriated the English whodunit genre and mixed it with a period drama drained of the genre's customary costumed preciousness. He took on the omnibus idea with Short Cuts (1993), but in a way in which an accumulation of small incidents in seemingly separate Raymond Carver stories all somehow interconnected.

Almost unique among contemporary American directors . . . John Huston is another example . . . he improved with age and was doing innovative work right to the end, despite a heart transplant in 1996.

Usually major directors can really only be remembered for a few great movies. Altman made so many great movies with so little fuss or hype that I suspect there are at least 10 that audiences will be watching with pleasure 20 years from now and thinking, so that was how life was.

If you were to ask me 10 reasons to remember Robert Altman I'd simply say, Nashville, M*A*S*H, A Wedding, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye, The Player, Short Cuts, Gosford Park and The Company. But Kansas City should be in there too, and Vincent and Theo, and The Cookie's Fortunef