Paul Thomas Anderson
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
That's a really good question because I think you're right that the story of, you know, the filmmaker with the 8mm camera and then onto the video camera, it's like there's a million of them and that's generally how everybody starts.
But the writing part always excited me because I liked it.
I think I got lucky that I liked it.
I liked putting paper into a typewriter and typing out ideas and I...
I liked seeing it on the page.
I liked looking at that idea.
I don't know, from an early age, I've always liked writing and formulating things on paper.
And when you learn on a typewriter,
You learn how to make it right the first time because the last thing that you want to do is go through that.
And I had the one script.
Do you still use a typewriter?
From time to time, I will just for fun to mix it up.
But no, I don't use a typewriter anymore.
But I remember the one script that I had.
I think I have to credit my mother for this.
I had the script for Holy Grail.
It was published as a little book, and I loved that movie so much.
This would be like probably 78 or 79.
So I had what was the script for that, and then I just copied that.
I just copied how the formatting was of that.
It was a great way to learn.
So I think writing is either something that you like doing or you don't like doing.
I mean, you know, it's, yeah.
No, I don't, like, walk around like Rain Man or something like that.
This could be the best interview.
You don't get to talk, Paul.
I know, and this is why I like it.
I just want to hear you guys.
I have to tell you, my favorite, I listen to, I don't listen to.
You haven't listened to this.
But the one joke that stuck with me forever and ever and ever was,
was Will sing something about your father, Jason.
And by father, he meant the security guard at the 20th Century Fox.
That sounds about right.
It stuck with me where I think about it.
That's what I think about, Sean, when I'm driving down the road.
Every once in a while, I'll think about something pops into your head.
You think, God, that was really, really, really, really funny.
Sean loves the dirt, Paul.
That is very true, is that I asked Leo to be in Boogie Nights, and he spent many, many months agonizing and debating about it.
And ultimately, what I didn't realize, or kind of came to realize about halfway into that, this sort of long decision-making process, is that he had a choice to make, which was to either do Titanic or to do Boogie Nights, and he chose to do Titanic, which, of course, in the long run, catapulted him to this massive worldwide fame.
But on the other hand, I think, possibly, I think it was...
We laugh about it now, but he regrets missing the experience and doing it.
Well, I did like short treatments and shot lists and things like that.
But really, funny enough, that when I was 16, just about to turn 17, I wrote a short film that was called The Dirk Diggler Story.
That was what Boogie Nights became.
And it was like a 20, it was like a 23 or 24 page script.
in the format that was popular at the time.
And all I had was this sort of bad video camera.
So I realized it wasn't gonna look good.
It wasn't gonna look like a movie.
So I wrote this thing that was about 23 pages long.
And it was interviews with people looking back at the life of this guy, Dirk Diggler.
Oh, A Current Affair was a very popular show at that time.
I don't know if you remember that.
But they would always have these insanely overdramatic, you know, and it was so preposterous that it was so trying to find a way into the story that I thought was interesting, which is the pornography that had surrounded me my whole life, living where I lived.
Like, it was so obvious what was around me.
And then writing it in this format was like a doable thing.
Like, okay, I can get somebody and do an interview with them, you know?
I mean, it's a format that's still at work, you know?
But at the time, it was really like the most...
convenient and plausible way into a story with the equipment that you had at hand did you have you transferred that from from v8 was a vhs uh you know it was eight millimeter eight millimeter video so a high eight i think have you transferred it to something that'll last and are we ever going to see it hopefully not hopefully it's somewhere no it's it's it's transferred within an inch of its life it's available i think it maybe it's on youtube i'd have to look oh really
There's still some jokes that are the same and things and some pieces that, you know, remained in Boogie Nights.
You know, what was great about that was that what I didn't even realize at the time in terms of the writing, in terms of really learning how to write, was that I'd created this kind of these fictional characters in this fake documentary, right?
And then I realized what I had to do was adapt that, adapt these fake lives into a movie.
And I spent the next, well, probably about 10 years doing that.
So I wrote a 90-page version of this documentary.
And then I realized, well, I don't want to do that.
That's not the right format for this.
I want to write this as a fictional film.
So I did that, you know, for ten years.
I guess it was the way that I learned how to write, really, was practicing telling this story in multiple different ways.
You know, maybe there's leftovers and you're just, I don't know, how deep is your well, I guess.
No, I never have anything good like that.
I always have like, just like, I never ever have.
I have more like facts, like, well, what really happens here?
And some steal from real life, like...
Every story was essentially the same.
It was like if the exaggerated version was the guy who steps off the bus and kind of comes to Hollywood with big dreams and takes his pants off and then the next thing you know he's a big star.
Any classic rise and fall story.
So I'm always just sort of following any steps of reality.
I mean, I don't know, I never... I get so scared of writing to a theme or having anything like that beforehand.
I can remember at a certain point
maybe needing help, like, what is the story?
And luckily enough, coming across Singing in the Rain and being like, oh, right.
It's just the same thing as like silent talkies.
You know, it's this transitional time in whatever industry they're going from shooting on film to shooting on video.
Like use things like this to tell your story and whatever themes will...
I find that that's exactly what happens, with the exception that it does happen a little bit earlier.
You know, that once you... I mean, listen, I'm not blind.
You know, as you're writing something,
you're fighting off the idea that the theme is right in front of your face just because you want to try to tell something factually.
And what ends up emerging emerges and you can't fight it.
You're enjoying what's happening.
But I think you keep a half an eye on it, but really you keep the other eye on what are the facts?
What are the facts of the story?
I find films that overindulge in telling me the theme are annoying and boring.
But yes, to your point that once you, and then you get into shooting and you're seeing dailies and you're seeing stuff emerge that is really exciting or stuff that is unexpected and you either embrace it or you say, perhaps this is not going in the right direction, but very more often than not, you can't stop what's coming, nor should you, that you have to kind of be, surrender.
You're guiding a ship, but you're also surrendering a bit to the path that's happening.
And, you know, performances kind of get bigger or smaller, whatever ends up happening.
And then it just keeps on going and you keep refining that through the editing and all that.
Well, it's the great joy of collaboration, particularly when you're doing it with somebody that you love and work with.
Like, for instance, on that film, I had never worked with Jack Fisk, who's one of the great production designers who started his career with Terrence Malick and David Lynch.
They kind of go back to their beginnings together.
Anyway, I contacted Jack Fisk and had written the script and I needed to kind of create... I needed a lot of help with making oil derricks and the recreation of an early California town and there was only one person that helped do that so it started a great collaboration.
you know, we were kind of trying to learn how to get oil out of the ground and really trying to be really, you know, do our research.
And he said the greatest thing.
He's like, you know, I found that if we can just get a children's book about this, it's really better than trying to really understand how to do it with all these kind of books that are this thick.
And it was one of these great lessons and like, yeah, get the children's book first and don't be, you know, because it'll have drawings, it'll be simple.
Wow, Jack Fisk gets the children's book first.
All right, that's really good advice.
But we had the incredible joy of going to scout locations together and find a place to make this film.
And I learned from him one incredible trick that I still try to make true is that the more you can have a location
where everything's close together, the more freedom you have.
Here's what I mean by that is that if you shoot a scene over here and you see it a few days later, you think that's the worst scene that we've ever done, we should really try to do it again, is that you can go do it again.
You kind of create your own backlog, you create your own universe and try as much as you possibly can to not move too much but to have a variety of different looks and things happening.
So that, I don't know, I'm lost in whatever your question was.
It was kind of like the collaboration.
There was a piece of music that he had written for orchestra because he was already well-versed in how to write for string instruments.
It wasn't like, don't let him fool you.
It is really incredible.
And it's an opportunity.
You know, look, I think I don't know, there was no kind of crazy weird instrumentation or something like that.
He does do funny things with instruments where he'll detune certain pieces of the orchestra and keep others in tune.
And so he has the ability to make it sound very familiar.
You're hearing string instruments, but that sounds just out of body enough that you can't quite place it.
So he's brilliant like that.
But that sort of stuff, it's, you know, it's nice, it's trickery, but he writes beautiful music that complements the film and they go hand in hand and...
It was the beginning of a beautiful collaboration.
I mean, I had all kinds of... The stuff that I was listening to was stuff that he likes anyway.
Was it Penderecki or Schubert or, you know, even the piece that he had written for the BPC Orchestra.
So that was already kind of informing where my head was at.
And it was nice to go to him and say like, you know, the movie lends itself to just like wide open spaces and like a huge opportunity to fill long gaps of silence with music that can either be gigantically loud or even just simmering underneath.
So it was quite a good entrance into the game for him.
Well, they're already sick of that Smile record.
They've been hearing that enough.
They're like, enough with that.
Pearl is listening to, well, you know what she's listening to is anything, and I don't know many of the artists, but we're kind of obsessed right now with this film, The Worst Person in the World.
I don't know if you guys have seen it.
Oh, it's fucking magical, this film.
And it's got this great soundtrack.
So we've just kind of been listening to all this variety of songs on that soundtrack, which is everything from like,
Harry Nilsson and Todd Rundgren to a lot of new stuff that I've never heard in my life, you know?
I kind of, I don't know.
I mean, I like everything, you know?
I sound like Daniel Plainview, who's like, I like all kinds of religions.
They're all fucking, you know, to me.
I mean, to that point is there's probably, you know...
30 theaters in this country where it would look great and sound great and the rest are fucking filth i'm sorry but it's like you know it's and that's the sad truth of it is that i can understand why everybody says like oh piss off i'm staying at home you know what why you want me to pay for babysitter and pay for parking and come in and look at this shit and look at it on a fucking screen that that you guys haven't even you know i don't know it's hard to defend at a certain point
Right, but I don't know.
I think that's kind of bullshit too because the reason why is when all these theaters were opening up again, you have these huge, gigantic 25 plexes and stuff like that, and everybody was crying.
It was like, well, what did you fucking think was going to happen?
Any of the great theaters, let's say, in Los Angeles or New York that are playing specialty programming, they're packed with people.
They're all turning out.
They're people that you know are going to come out and turn out for this thing.
And because there's one theater with 400 seats that they can fill and they can do two shows a day or three shows a day and people will still turn up.
Everyone's scratching their head.
No one's coming back for the movies.
It's like, well, they're not coming back to these weird, horrible pyramids that we've built.
I slip in and out of it because I love... Part of loving movies as much as I do, the history of movies and my obsession with this work, which has been with me forever and is what I've made of my life, it does involve being fascinated with the...
the way that it moves, you know, like we were talking about before with Singing in the Rain, you know, that's a fantastic story, the way that what happened to the movie business when it changed from talkies to... So I constantly try to keep an eye on that or try to understand it or have enough friends in this business from over the years that I can call up and ask, you know, what does this mean?
What does this mean when this film is doing well?
Or what is going to happen here?
What ties do you see turning?
It's nice to gauge that stuff.
I love this business and I love movies so much that I have a real interest in seeing it survive.
But more often than not, the volume of my day becomes...
more about film preservation, you know, and film history and trying to keep that stuff alive.
And then just sort of looking to see what's happening and reacting, I suppose, but I don't know.
He's great about all that, but he's amazing about it, one of the best, but he also really runs in his own lane, you know, because he, the person who I collaborate the most with that is Scorsese because he has the film foundation.
He, since the 70s, since the late 70s, early 80s,
went around to every studio in town and said, look, this is when it was really tragic, when the products they had made since their existence were really fading away and dying and weren't being taken care of.
This is just on the cusp of VHS coming around and home entertainment.
So he was really out there at the very beginning with the Film Foundation saying, this is the biggest cultural historical thing that this country has to offer and we have to preserve it and we have to take care of it.
We have to invest money and time and manpower into figuring this out.
So being a part of his Film Foundation has been one of the great honors of my life.
I said, you were one of the first guests.
She's like, no, no, I was.
I said, I think you were.
She was like one of the first two or three, right?
He wants to hurt me, I know.
I'm not sure what it is.
I guess it's like anything like, you know, I don't know, there's like, you know, actors that wanted to be rock stars or, you know, musicians wanted to be actors.
Like people making serious films really just like, the one thing they really loved was comedies, you know.
Like I had made these films.
I thought that they were funny, but people were saying like, you know, it's not.
You make really funny shit.
Yeah, because everything that I watched or in my daily kind of existence was just like I just devoured that stuff.
And I met Maya when she started SNL.
Do you find that funny people are generally pretty serious when they're at home?
I really do want to know.
That was at the time with Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon.
And I had met Molly Shannon.
And she said, you know, you could come and you can see how we do this.
And at the time I was writing Punch Drunk Love and I was obsessed with that time that Sandler had been there, so I accepted that offer to come and look and then watch, you know, behind the scenes.
And then Molly said, well, you know, you can direct a short.
So I directed a short with her in it and just got to kind of witness the inner workings of this whole thing.
And at that time, I was also getting to know Sandler and asking him about his time there.
I was getting ready to make Punch Drunk Love with him, and as I was getting ready to leave after my week there, my head was spinning.
I was like, well, that was great, but I don't want to fucking do that again because it was so much.
It was a different pace of work, and I was thrilled to have done it, but that was enough of a taste.
They said there was a piece of paper that somebody had put in my hands or something like that,
and I looked at it, and the information was on it that there was a new cast member starting next week, and her name was Maya Rudolph.
And I can remember seeing her name on that piece of paper.
I don't know if you've had any feeling like this, but you see something for the first time and you realize that my life has just changed.
I don't know how, I don't know why, I don't know what just happened.
And so, but you quickly kind of move on.
You just, whatever, you have something else to do.
You have to eat it, you know.
But looking back, I obviously...
that impulse whatever that kind of that shining kind of feeling that that can happen to any of us if we're open to it happened yeah and so i um i roamed around and then i i saw her um on television and i saw what she was doing and i had stayed in touch with a few people from the show and my god this this woman's amazing and i on on my way back through um i stopped to watch and we met
at the show and then i had to go on to london and i to work on punch drunk love and then i got to london i said well something didn't feel right and i just came back to new york wow and i came back and then uh that's fucking beautiful man yeah for real so you come back to new york because you felt drawn back to her and called her and said let's go out
I think of it all the time.
We're, we're, we're one in the same, Sean.
I was born here in Los Angeles at what is now the Scientology Center, which was St.
No, it was Cedars of Lebanon, it was called.
Right there where Sunset and Hollywood meet, that big blue building.
Yeah, right around the corner from there.
Well, I always liked it when Adam would get angry.
You know, the violent part of him would come out.
And it was like, and I guess I saw, the story that I remember, there was a sketch called The Denise Show, where he's talking to his ex-girlfriend, Denise, who's played by Shannon Daugherty.
And it's a funny enough premise.
And he keeps trying to woo her back.
But there's a moment when he starts screaming.
I think his dad calls up and is on the speakerphone, and he starts screaming at his father.
And there was a moment where Sandler screamed.
He's so invested in it that the whites of his eyes turned black.
There was a level of anger and commitment to this performance.
That is something else, that he's not just screaming and being like... He potentially is completely psychotic underneath all of this and I loved it.
That's great, I love that.
Yeah, and it was... You know, he has a great physical way about him and I...
Yeah, loved working with Adam.
I want to be careful what I say here.
Because I only in the past couple weeks have become a little bit preoccupied with what seems to be a real unfortunate turn of events, which is...
80-minute stories being turned into, like, nine-part, you know, things that it just seems to be the kind of the call of the day.
Like, this is what we're doing.
When, in fact, you know, it's like, piss off.
I don't... This is stretched out way too much, you know?
I mean, I was watching...
The Purple Rose of Cairo last night, which is about 92 minutes and absolutely perfect.
And it packs so much story.
Yeah, just wait till the third one.
No, so I, but I only have been really feeling this lately when I'm, and I don't have a leg to stand on because I haven't really, I don't, I don't want to sound...
like an asshole here, but I haven't seen much of it because my viewing always goes, like, if I have opportunity to watch TV, I fucking end up, I'm watching old movies, you know, it's just sort of like my... gravity pulls me that way with the time that I have in the day.
But, you know, sometimes you have a story that's very large, like a large-scale story, any kind of epic stories, and those are great.
And there used to be this opportunity, they would have, like, The Winds of War or, you know, Roots or these huge miniseries.
It was like, okay, that's fantastic.
That used to be a kind of work of art in and of itself.
But now I feel this kind of slow-motion turn towards stories stretched out, um...
I guess underneath it, I have a fear that the painfully difficult challenge of telling a story in preferably under two hours, hopefully 90 minutes, will start to get lost because I think it's a very, very valuable storytelling.
That structure is great.
I don't want to see that get lost.
Trailers are their own little art form.
And I have cut them in the past or collaborated with people.
The last one that we did was not cut by me.
It was cut by a guy named Joel who's got a company called Aspect Ratio.
And it was one of those great moments where I just handed the film over and said, can you do something?
And it was so perfect right away that we didn't say anything.
We just said, that's it.
And that was a really fun feeling.
Yeah, I always... That was one of the joys to me of going to sit in a movie theater.
I guess there's people... There's probably two types of people in the world.
People that like to sit down and watch trailers and then...
people that like to watch the credits of movies.
People like to watch the credits and people that don't like to watch the credits.
I like to watch the credits.
Yeah, this is very dangerous.
I remember there's these great episodes with Lucille Ball doing these radio interviews from the mid-60s.
I don't know if you've heard those.
They were on SiriusXM for a little while.
And you hear all these people talking about their strengths as parents.
And then you sort of realize, you know, that time has really proven quite differently that, you know, there are these people talking about...
You know, we really spend time on the weekends and everything else, and you're like, uh-huh, uh-huh.
Stay tuned for the book.
But I don't know, you know, one of the benefits of writing, I suppose, is the ability to work from home, the ability to be present at home.
And shooting movies about the valley.
Well, that helps too, to not go too far away.
But even still, I think that, you know, I don't know.
When I went to London to make Phantom Thread, they did come for some of the time, but then they understood that for two months you're not going to see me, you know, but that's okay out of 12 months and a year.
As long as I'm with you the other chunk of time, you won't miss me that much.
Yeah, I catch him up once in a while.
I don't understand what he's on about that.
What else are you going to do?
I think, yeah, what else are you going to do?
Please say hi to my ass.
I hope I see you guys in person for real soon.
I hope I can come see your Oscar Levant play, Sean.
I would love for you to.
Who's playing Oscar Levant?
You're playing Oscar Levant?
Wait, but Oscar Levant is one of my heroes.
You know, there's a great Oscar Levant show that he did that was here on KTLA Channel 5, and Fred Astaire was one of the... That's exactly right.
It was impossible to find forever and ever and ever.
I have the whole thing if you want it.
No, but I remember it was this impossible-to-find thing, and then when this thing YouTube came around, I remember thinking, I'll see if this thing can really find something I want, and I put it in the Oscar Levant show, and there it was.
I said, oh, my God, I like YouTube.
What is it called officially?
It's where the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, you know, they did that.
But they also did the local news there.
I remember a big deal was that we were shooting and we had to, it was the days of Paul Moyer.
Do you remember Paul Moyer?
And we just needed to move his space over a couple spots.
And it was like three days of negotiations to move Paul Moyer's spot.
It was a hand-to-hand fight with him and Ron Burgundy would be great.
It was a very similar kind of, you know, thing.
I don't know for sure if that's exactly that technical thing, but that...
The image of that shotgun mic, you know, he would never go into the booth.
He wanted to do it in the control room.
I think that had something to do with it, too.
And I think he was smart enough or had done it enough to know, like, I'm not going in the booth.
I'm going to be with you guys.
You know, it's going to be exactly the same.
He also liked to smoke while he was doing it, too.
No, that sounds fantastic to me.
And it doesn't seem too far from accurate.
Even, you know, he did obsess over that kind of stuff.
And I probably passed a little bit of it on to me.
I got to go, you know, I had that opportunity to go to Prospect and Talmadge was where he would go to work at ABC.
And, you know, generally...
That was sort of my first taste of being around anything that was show business related, and that was magical to me.
How old were you at that point?
Anywhere between the ages of probably five and, you know, nine.
Um, it seems strange only because it was not, I was proud of him, but no one else could recognize this, the pride, you know, it's such a behind the scenes gig.
There's nothing, there's nothing kind of famous about it.
You know, you don't walk down the street and somebody say like, wow, there he is, you know, or your dad's a baseball player.
Well, you know, there's no recognition to it really.
But that's what he loved about it so much was that he could just kind of have this independent life coyoteing around town and, you know, doing his work and getting paid for it.
making films and making television you know television back then was like you know anybody can do it you know right movies was like this this gold ring like not everybody gets to make movies you know right so you started to experiment with little home movie and it's not an uncommon story right and no it's the same exact story as everybody else but i had the and i had the the
the camaraderie and that which is so crazy now i mean i look around my my life right now and i see my relationship to all the people in dark rooms that i work with engineers and things like this when it's the entire process of making a movie and you're like this is exactly what my dad did you go to a dark room each day and you know try and make something happen and the and the friendships that that he had with those guys i i look back and i think
I was really inspired by it.
I always just thought that's what a friendship was.
He was very close with all these technicians and guys that he worked with.
So those are the people that were around our house.
Well, the only people that don't need to be there are like studio executives and producers.
And, you know, what I learned probably from my dad, it was like, whoever's, whoever's, you know, kick all the people out of the room that are not completely, completely essential to the project.
You know, you learn pretty quickly who isn't, you know, they scatter.