Paul Thomas Anderson on filmmaking — part II at filmschoolthrucommentaries
Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:
- Paul Thomas Anderson on filmmaking — part I
- Hard Eight (also known as Sydney) screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson
- Hard Eight audio commentary (1996) with director PT Anderson and actor Phillip Baker Hall
- This is an exclusive, it’s never been released on any DVDs of the film, it stayed on the Criterion LD for ages — until it was ripped a while ago. So the only way anyone could ever hear this is if they had a LaserDisc player. Well, not anymore. “You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ LaserDisc than you can in 4 years of film school.” Paul Thomas Anderson
![When Robert Altman made his final film A Prairie Home Companion, a standby director was required as no insurance company would cover the film without one. Paul Thomas Anderson acted as Altman’s backup on the set, saying, “Any hesitation? None. None at all, because I knew he wasn’t going to die.” Here he describes Altman’s last moments as a director.
The last day we shot the last scene, the one with Kevin with the garbage falling and him playing piano. That was the last thing we shot. And Bob definitely had a melancholy feeling about him, in his face. Because of the way the shot was, we were shooting the whole stage, so Bob was tucked over in Guy Noir’s office. Sometimes you get in these horrible places where you just have to be for the shot. And he had a Starbucks coffee in his hand and his coat was zipped up because it was kind of cold in there and he had his glasses on. He was staring at the monitor and he just looked really sad that it was ending. I think we only did the shot twice. I remember sitting there thinking, “Fuck, do it again, do it… do more, do more.” I wanted to do more — not cause it wasn’t good, but I wanted to keep shooting. Oh, I didn’t figure on this making me sad. I thought, “Oh great, I get to talk about Bob.” But it’s making me feel like I’m sure everybody feels — they really wish they could call him up. Yeah, fuck! Horrible, sad. He was so indestructible for so long.” —Paul Thomas Anderson on Robert Altman
That would explain the requirement that you have a stand-by director, who turned out to be Paul Thomas Anderson. Paul was very, very generous to do this. It’s amazing, I was really surprised. I never would have asked him to do it. He was at my side every moment I was shooting and he was a fantastic help. He never intruded, he never overrode me. I couldn’t even say goodbye to him, I would have broken down in tears. Certainly you aware of the homage he’s paid to you with films such as “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia.” He told me he was a big fan of mine. I saw him after “Boogie Nights” and he said, “I just ripped you off.” [chuckles]. —Robert Altman on Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson dedicated his 2007 film There Will Be Blood to Altman.
PTA on filmmaking:
First part of a series of informative selections from PTA and Philip Baker Hall together. PTA is a known cinephile who comes from the same camp as Quentin Tarantino. A man who had immersed himself in studying cinema by watching a plethora of films and utilized the knowledge gathered from laserdisc commentaries in the late 80′s and early 90′s to learn filmmaking on his own. Of course not many people know he had a leg up in the industry as much as he likes to milk the “non-film school” card, but one can still admire the dedication of learning the craft by being a sponge, soaking up all kinds of filmmaking information. —filmschoolthrucommentaries
Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:
Hard Eight (also known as Sydney) screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson
Hard Eight Audio Commentary (1996) with director PT Anderson and actor Phillip Baker Hall
Paul Thomas Anderson claims that everything he knows about directing he learned from John Sturges’ commentary on the Bad Day at Black Rock LaserDisc
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When Robert Altman made his final film A Prairie Home Companion, a standby director was required as no insurance company would cover the film without one. Paul Thomas Anderson acted as Altman’s backup on the set, saying, “Any hesitation? None. None at all, because I knew he wasn’t going to die.” Here he describes Altman’s last moments as a director.
The last day we shot the last scene, the one with Kevin with the garbage falling and him playing piano. That was the last thing we shot. And Bob definitely had a melancholy feeling about him, in his face. Because of the way the shot was, we were shooting the whole stage, so Bob was tucked over in Guy Noir’s office. Sometimes you get in these horrible places where you just have to be for the shot. And he had a Starbucks coffee in his hand and his coat was zipped up because it was kind of cold in there and he had his glasses on. He was staring at the monitor and he just looked really sad that it was ending. I think we only did the shot twice. I remember sitting there thinking, “Fuck, do it again, do it… do more, do more.” I wanted to do more — not cause it wasn’t good, but I wanted to keep shooting. Oh, I didn’t figure on this making me sad. I thought, “Oh great, I get to talk about Bob.” But it’s making me feel like I’m sure everybody feels — they really wish they could call him up. Yeah, fuck! Horrible, sad. He was so indestructible for so long.” —Paul Thomas Anderson on Robert Altman
That would explain the requirement that you have a stand-by director, who turned out to be Paul Thomas Anderson.
Paul was very, very generous to do this. It’s amazing, I was really surprised. I never would have asked him to do it. He was at my side every moment I was shooting and he was a fantastic help. He never intruded, he never overrode me. I couldn’t even say goodbye to him, I would have broken down in tears.
Certainly you aware of the homage he’s paid to you with films such as “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia.”
He told me he was a big fan of mine. I saw him after “Boogie Nights” and he said, “I just ripped you off.” [chuckles]. —Robert Altman on Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson dedicated his 2007 film There Will Be Blood to Altman.
PTA on filmmaking:
First part of a series of informative selections from PTA and Philip Baker Hall together. PTA is a known cinephile who comes from the same camp as Quentin Tarantino. A man who had immersed himself in studying cinema by watching a plethora of films and utilized the knowledge gathered from laserdisc commentaries in the late 80′s and early 90′s to learn filmmaking on his own. Of course not many people know he had a leg up in the industry as much as he likes to milk the “non-film school” card, but one can still admire the dedication of learning the craft by being a sponge, soaking up all kinds of filmmaking information. —filmschoolthrucommentaries
Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:
- Hard Eight (also known as Sydney) screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson
- Hard Eight Audio Commentary (1996) with director PT Anderson and actor Phillip Baker Hall
- Paul Thomas Anderson claims that everything he knows about directing he learned from John Sturges’ commentary on the Bad Day at Black Rock LaserDisc
![A truly magnificent scripts series, please read and study: Hard Eight (also known as Sydney) screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only.) With thanks to buenotrafeilio.
Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of his film Sydney during the 1993 Sundance Institute Directors Lab. Sydney renamed Hard Eight later premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.
The next summer Anderson came back to the Sundance filmmakers’ lab to work on his first feature. Although he was starting to avoid interviews and leave old friends like Stein and Conrad behind — which has left many of them hurt and puzzled — he was a great presence at Sundance, open to everything and friendly to everyone and completely absorbed in the entire history of movies at a level far beyond most other young filmmakers. He liked to tease the box-office lady about all the films he was going to sneak into. He would make people list their favorite directors and then defend their choices, Cooper says, arguing so fiercely they spent days questioning their judgment. There was no question where he was headed. And this is where the story of Paul Thomas Anderson becomes almost mythical, a parable about the necessity of real art. The evidence is in the scenes he shot that summer at Sundance, now available in the supplemental material on the DVD that was eventually released under the title Hard Eight. (But the working title, the title he still prefers, is Sydney, just as he told Carole Stevens back in high school.)
Although Anderson would soon become famous for some of the most dizzyingly ambitious sequences in the history of film, the DVD scenes are mostly just Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly sitting in a coffee shop and talking. There are no tracking shots, no fancy cuts. He barely moves the camera at all. Despite his youth and seemingly endless ambition, he already knew that a real story is about people talking around the things inside their hearts — in this case, an older gambler who speaks in an oddly formal diction while becoming a father figure to a lost young man. It seems inevitable that the fools who financed it locked him out of the editing room to cut it faster and more commercially, that Reilly and Hall faked sore throats to avoid dubbing that edit, that Anderson recut his original version from scraps and got it accepted into the Cannes Film Festival, that the resulting acclaim launched his career, that his next film (and first masterpiece) was a three-hour remake of something he shot on videotape when he was seventeen. An artist whose great theme would be the destiny coded in the seemingly random fragments of our lives was already standing in the doorway to his future, pulling together the fragments of his past, furiously fulfilling the person he already was and imagining the person he would become — anything so he wouldn’t have to go back. —The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson
Here’s the snippet of Paul Thomas Anderson discussing his horrifying experience on his first directorial feature, SYDNEY (aka HARD EIGHT), and how he survived and overcame (source)
Before you made Hard Eight I presume that this wasn’t the first script you wrote. How come you chose it to be your first one?Yes I had only written maybe one or two other scripts that I didn’t really like that much and I liked this one and it seemed that I could do it. It seemed that I could make a movie which was small with only four characters in Reno, Nevada and that I could raise money for it. It was really all I had.You had no choice!Yeah but I really didn’t need any other choice. It was that movie that I wanted to make. I got very lucky on that movie just to start making it but I got in a lot of trouble when I made the movie. There were some producers that fired me actually after I… It was my movie. I mean I wrote it and directed it and then I found these guys to finance it and they were real criminals.(Laughing)I put the movie together. And they had all these ideas for cuts that I wouldn’t make. Some of them were actually good ideas but I was too arrogant to like see that they were good ideas and they were kind of dicks too. But they ended up taking the movie away from me. It was like this amazing lesson very early on where I was hit fucking repeatedly over and over again and I fought and I desperately tried to get the movie back and it was just a long, long battle. And eventually I got the movie back but there was a period where I did get beat up enough and where I was swimming in the darkest depression and I thought my career is over and I will never get another chance. But I pulled my self out of it somehow and the only way that I could get things going again is if I go to work again. So I went and got Boogie Nights made and the amazing thing in doing that was I went to get Boogie Nights made and that became kind of easy, getting money for it and at the same time I reinvestigated the fight to get my first movie back. And I got that movie back so I was in pre-production on Boogie Night while I was re-cutting and finishing off my first movie. And it was kind of a this great lesson that I learned just having gone in this really deep and dark depression where I couldn’t get out of my fucking bed and the only thing that I could do is just get up and attack, attack and attack. And I am happy that that happened. So it was kind of a great first lesson on my first movie. And I was able to learn right then and there all kinds of mistakes that I have made. All that arrogance where I wasn’t seeing anything and where they were right and I was just too blind to notice it. But I also learned that I was right on a lot of stuff and I should have fought for what I believed. So it’s just kind of a great lesson on my first movie.This is a second great tip of the season. Beat depression by breaking it!Yeah! Absolutely!
Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:
Hard Eight Audio Commentary (1996) with director PT Anderson and actor Phillip Baker Hall](http://25.media.tumblr.com/bc444979a93142342e0e429d9c436733/tumblr_mky90xcp7q1rovfcgo1_1280.png)
A truly magnificent scripts series, please read and study: Hard Eight (also known as Sydney) screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only.) With thanks to buenotrafeilio.
Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of his film Sydney during the 1993 Sundance Institute Directors Lab. Sydney renamed Hard Eight later premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.
The next summer Anderson came back to the Sundance filmmakers’ lab to work on his first feature. Although he was starting to avoid interviews and leave old friends like Stein and Conrad behind — which has left many of them hurt and puzzled — he was a great presence at Sundance, open to everything and friendly to everyone and completely absorbed in the entire history of movies at a level far beyond most other young filmmakers. He liked to tease the box-office lady about all the films he was going to sneak into. He would make people list their favorite directors and then defend their choices, Cooper says, arguing so fiercely they spent days questioning their judgment. There was no question where he was headed. And this is where the story of Paul Thomas Anderson becomes almost mythical, a parable about the necessity of real art. The evidence is in the scenes he shot that summer at Sundance, now available in the supplemental material on the DVD that was eventually released under the title Hard Eight. (But the working title, the title he still prefers, is Sydney, just as he told Carole Stevens back in high school.)
Although Anderson would soon become famous for some of the most dizzyingly ambitious sequences in the history of film, the DVD scenes are mostly just Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly sitting in a coffee shop and talking. There are no tracking shots, no fancy cuts. He barely moves the camera at all. Despite his youth and seemingly endless ambition, he already knew that a real story is about people talking around the things inside their hearts — in this case, an older gambler who speaks in an oddly formal diction while becoming a father figure to a lost young man. It seems inevitable that the fools who financed it locked him out of the editing room to cut it faster and more commercially, that Reilly and Hall faked sore throats to avoid dubbing that edit, that Anderson recut his original version from scraps and got it accepted into the Cannes Film Festival, that the resulting acclaim launched his career, that his next film (and first masterpiece) was a three-hour remake of something he shot on videotape when he was seventeen. An artist whose great theme would be the destiny coded in the seemingly random fragments of our lives was already standing in the doorway to his future, pulling together the fragments of his past, furiously fulfilling the person he already was and imagining the person he would become — anything so he wouldn’t have to go back. —The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson
Here’s the snippet of Paul Thomas Anderson discussing his horrifying experience on his first directorial feature, SYDNEY (aka HARD EIGHT), and how he survived and overcame (source)
Before you made Hard Eight I presume that this wasn’t the first script you wrote. How come you chose it to be your first one?
Yes I had only written maybe one or two other scripts that I didn’t really like that much and I liked this one and it seemed that I could do it. It seemed that I could make a movie which was small with only four characters in Reno, Nevada and that I could raise money for it. It was really all I had.
You had no choice!
Yeah but I really didn’t need any other choice. It was that movie that I wanted to make. I got very lucky on that movie just to start making it but I got in a lot of trouble when I made the movie. There were some producers that fired me actually after I… It was my movie. I mean I wrote it and directed it and then I found these guys to finance it and they were real criminals.
(Laughing)
I put the movie together. And they had all these ideas for cuts that I wouldn’t make. Some of them were actually good ideas but I was too arrogant to like see that they were good ideas and they were kind of dicks too. But they ended up taking the movie away from me. It was like this amazing lesson very early on where I was hit fucking repeatedly over and over again and I fought and I desperately tried to get the movie back and it was just a long, long battle. And eventually I got the movie back but there was a period where I did get beat up enough and where I was swimming in the darkest depression and I thought my career is over and I will never get another chance. But I pulled my self out of it somehow and the only way that I could get things going again is if I go to work again. So I went and got Boogie Nights made and the amazing thing in doing that was I went to get Boogie Nights made and that became kind of easy, getting money for it and at the same time I reinvestigated the fight to get my first movie back. And I got that movie back so I was in pre-production on Boogie Night while I was re-cutting and finishing off my first movie. And it was kind of a this great lesson that I learned just having gone in this really deep and dark depression where I couldn’t get out of my fucking bed and the only thing that I could do is just get up and attack, attack and attack. And I am happy that that happened. So it was kind of a great first lesson on my first movie. And I was able to learn right then and there all kinds of mistakes that I have made. All that arrogance where I wasn’t seeing anything and where they were right and I was just too blind to notice it. But I also learned that I was right on a lot of stuff and I should have fought for what I believed. So it’s just kind of a great lesson on my first movie.
This is a second great tip of the season. Beat depression by breaking it!
Yeah! Absolutely!
Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:
Hard Eight Audio Commentary (1996) with director PT Anderson and actor Phillip Baker Hall
It is no secret that PTA is a master emulator: Robert Altman, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Mikhail Kalatozov, Francois Truffaut and Max Ophüls amongst the most obvious ones. Nothing wrong with that, every single filmmaker emulates someone else at some point in their life, even the great ones have done so and still do. It’s a case of inspiration or paying homage to the filmmakers one has grown to admire. Lately PTA has more or less come into his own with There Will Be Blood and The Master, and there are less distinct emulations of other filmmakers than in his previous films. Here, PTA discusses one of the films of Max Ophüls and the tracking shots which Ophüls was so influential with which in turn influenced not only him, but Kubrick as well.
Paul Thomas Anderson on Max Ophüls & emulating other filmmakers
Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story (1981) — Boogie Nights laserdisc commentary with writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (scene-selected – 34 mins.)
Boogie Nights screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)
A conversation with director Paul Thomas Anderson about his film “Boogie Nights”, which looks into the gritty world of the adult film industry of the 1970’s.
It will always boggle my mind that Paul Thomas Anderson made Boogie Nights when he was 27 years old, but it is a fact — one that’s hammered home when you watch old interviews of a young, nerdy-looking Anderson discussing the movie. Here’s a great two-part interview Anderson did with Charlie Rose around the time Boogie Nights arrived on the scene. During the chat, Anderson talks about Leonardo DiCaprio turning down the lead role in order to make Titanic, and how it was DiCaprio who suggested Anderson go meet with Mark Wahlberg. Years later DiCaprio would call that decision his “biggest regret” even though Titanic turned him into a megastar. “My biggest regret is Boogie Nights,” he said back in 2010. “I’m a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson but the first time I met him for that role I hadn’t really seen much of his previous work. Now I love that movie.”
The interview also touches upon Anderson’s fondness for shooting long takes, why he thinks film school is a waste of time, and, my favorite part, the origins of Rollergirl. Turns out Rollergirl is based on a character Anderson watched in a real porn movie that was hidden inside Robert Redford’s private stash. Wait, Redford has a porn stash? How Anderson wound up watching Redford’s porn movies is a funny story, and you can watch the filmmaker tell it below. —Erik Davis
Charlie Rose: What was the most important thing you learned from Robert Altman?
Paul Thomas Anderson: How to giggle and give in.
Cigarettes & Red Vines is proud to present the very first installment of “Making The Master,” our brand new series of in-depth interviews with some of the minds behind “The Master.” Between now and February 26th (the day of the film’s Blu-ray release), we’ll be talking to many of the production’s principal players and today we’re kicking things off with an exclusive interview with the man himself, Paul Thomas Anderson.
Making ‘The Master’ with Paul Thomas Anderson @ Cigarettes & Red Vines
Source: cigsandredvines.blogspot.co.uk
Hard Eight (also known as Sydney) is the first feature from skilled writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who established himself as an incredible talent with his subsequent retro-porn epic Boogie Nights. But Anderson wasn’t holding anything back in his debut and, though quite different in tone, Hard Eight is likewise a compelling character study set against a traditionally seedy backdrop. Listen to any Anderson commentary track and you’ll know immediately how highly he regards his actors, and none of them let him down.
PT Anderson is a brilliant filmmaker who emersed himself in audio commentary tracks from laserdiscs. In his ‘Sydney’ (aka ‘Hard Eight’) commentary (accompanied by Phillip Baker Hall) he unleashes a fury of discussion about his film, the process of writing it, the Sundance Lab, his struggles with financiers and the influences on the genesis of the story. It’s done by someone who loves audio commentaries and, therefore, knows exactly what makes a good one. He provides two more tracks on the DVD release of his second film, ‘Boogie Nights’, both of which are also excellent for different reasons, but that would appear to be where it ends. Luckily, he’s given us great examples of an audio commentary on his first two films. —Racking Focus
Hard Eight (also known as Sydney) screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only.) With thanks to buenotrafeilio.
Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of his film Sydney during the 1993 Sundance Institute Directors Lab. Sydney renamed Hard Eight later premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.
The next summer Anderson came back to the Sundance filmmakers’ lab to work on his first feature. Although he was starting to avoid interviews and leave old friends like Stein and Conrad behind — which has left many of them hurt and puzzled — he was a great presence at Sundance, open to everything and friendly to everyone and completely absorbed in the entire history of movies at a level far beyond most other young filmmakers. He liked to tease the box-office lady about all the films he was going to sneak into. He would make people list their favorite directors and then defend their choices, Cooper says, arguing so fiercely they spent days questioning their judgment. There was no question where he was headed. And this is where the story of Paul Thomas Anderson becomes almost mythical, a parable about the necessity of real art. The evidence is in the scenes he shot that summer at Sundance, now available in the supplemental material on the DVD that was eventually released under the title Hard Eight. (But the working title, the title he still prefers, is Sydney, just as he told Carole Stevens back in high school.)
Although Anderson would soon become famous for some of the most dizzyingly ambitious sequences in the history of film, the DVD scenes are mostly just Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly sitting in a coffee shop and talking. There are no tracking shots, no fancy cuts. He barely moves the camera at all. Despite his youth and seemingly endless ambition, he already knew that a real story is about people talking around the things inside their hearts — in this case, an older gambler who speaks in an oddly formal diction while becoming a father figure to a lost young man. It seems inevitable that the fools who financed it locked him out of the editing room to cut it faster and more commercially, that Reilly and Hall faked sore throats to avoid dubbing that edit, that Anderson recut his original version from scraps and got it accepted into the Cannes Film Festival, that the resulting acclaim launched his career, that his next film (and first masterpiece) was a three-hour remake of something he shot on videotape when he was seventeen. An artist whose great theme would be the destiny coded in the seemingly random fragments of our lives was already standing in the doorway to his future, pulling together the fragments of his past, furiously fulfilling the person he already was and imagining the person he would become — anything so he wouldn’t have to go back. —The Secret History of Paul Thomas Anderson
Here’s the snippet of Paul Thomas Anderson discussing his horrifying experience on his first directorial feature, SYDNEY (aka HARD EIGHT), and how he survived and overcame (source)
Before you made Hard Eight I presume that this wasn’t the first script you wrote. How come you chose it to be your first one?
Yes I had only written maybe one or two other scripts that I didn’t really like that much and I liked this one and it seemed that I could do it. It seemed that I could make a movie which was small with only four characters in Reno, Nevada and that I could raise money for it. It was really all I had.
You had no choice!Yeah but I really didn’t need any other choice. It was that movie that I wanted to make. I got very lucky on that movie just to start making it but I got in a lot of trouble when I made the movie. There were some producers that fired me actually after I… It was my movie. I mean I wrote it and directed it and then I found these guys to finance it and they were real criminals.
(Laughing)
I put the movie together. And they had all these ideas for cuts that I wouldn’t make. Some of them were actually good ideas but I was too arrogant to like see that they were good ideas and they were kind of dicks too. But they ended up taking the movie away from me. It was like this amazing lesson very early on where I was hit fucking repeatedly over and over again and I fought and I desperately tried to get the movie back and it was just a long, long battle. And eventually I got the movie back but there was a period where I did get beat up enough and where I was swimming in the darkest depression and I thought my career is over and I will never get another chance. But I pulled my self out of it somehow and the only way that I could get things going again is if I go to work again. So I went and got Boogie Nights made and the amazing thing in doing that was I went to get Boogie Nights made and that became kind of easy, getting money for it and at the same time I reinvestigated the fight to get my first movie back. And I got that movie back so I was in pre-production on Boogie Night while I was re-cutting and finishing off my first movie. And it was kind of a this great lesson that I learned just having gone in this really deep and dark depression where I couldn’t get out of my fucking bed and the only thing that I could do is just get up and attack, attack and attack. And I am happy that that happened. So it was kind of a great first lesson on my first movie. And I was able to learn right then and there all kinds of mistakes that I have made. All that arrogance where I wasn’t seeing anything and where they were right and I was just too blind to notice it. But I also learned that I was right on a lot of stuff and I should have fought for what I believed. So it’s just kind of a great lesson on my first movie.
This is a second great tip of the season. Beat depression by breaking it!Yeah! Absolutely!
Sage advice, don’t you think?
Quentin Tarantino & Paul Thomas Anderson on audience/violence.
Paul Thomas Anderson and The Master
An hour-long Q&A with the director of one of this year’s best films. Enjoy Paul Thomas Anderson sharing his ideas on film and filmmaking, his process, the making of The Master, and so much more.
What’s the most common mistake in written dialogue?
Complete sentences. Bad movie dialogue speaks in complete sentences without any overlapping or interruption, and avoids elliptical speech, which is truer to how people actually talk.
Paul Thomas Anderson
INTERVIEWED BY KRISTINE MCKENNA & DAVID KONOW
Creative Screenwriting, VOLUME 5, #1 (JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1998)
& VOLUME 7, #1 (JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2000)
Gold! The Creative #Screenwriting interview with Paul Thomas Anderson is.gd/rJ10ly
— LaFamiliaFilm (@LaFamiliaFilm) November 20, 2012
A conversation with director Paul Thomas Anderson about his film “Boogie Nights”, which looks into the gritty world of the adult film industry of the 1970’s.
It will always boggle my mind that Paul Thomas Anderson made Boogie Nights when he was 27 years old, but it is a fact — one that’s hammered home when you watch old interviews of a young, nerdy-looking Anderson discussing the movie. Here’s a great two-part interview Anderson did with Charlie Rose around the time Boogie Nights arrived on the scene. During the chat, Anderson talks about Leonardo DiCaprio turning down the lead role in order to make Titanic, and how it was DiCaprio who suggested Anderson go meet with Mark Wahlberg. Years later DiCaprio would call that decision his “biggest regret” even though Titanic turned him into a megastar. “My biggest regret is Boogie Nights,” he said back in 2010. “I’m a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson but the first time I met him for that role I hadn’t really seen much of his previous work. Now I love that movie.”
The interview also touches upon Anderson’s fondness for shooting long takes, why he thinks film school is a waste of time, and, my favorite part, the origins of Rollergirl. Turns out Rollergirl is based on a character Anderson watched in a real porn movie that was hidden inside Robert Redford’s private stash. Wait, Redford has a porn stash? How Anderson wound up watching Redford’s porn movies is a funny story, and you can watch the filmmaker tell it below. Erik Davis
Charlie Rose: What was the most important thing you learned from Robert Altman?
Paul Thomas Anderson: How to giggle and give in.
My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films. I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school. Film school is a complete con, because the information is there if you want it. Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson: A little tribute
Philip Baker Hall and Paul Thomas Anderson on filmmaking:
Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:
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