Well, it looks like Magnolia was sort of snubbed (or the nice way of saying it was "overlooked") by the Hollywood Foreign Press who vote for the Golden Globes. Magnolia was nominated for only two awards: Best Supporting Actor - Tom Cruise and Best Original Song - Save Me by Aimee Mann. I have never been a huge fan of their selections, so let's hope this doesn't affect its chances come Oscar time.Hopefully those of you in Los Angeles and New York have had a chance to see the movie by now. I would love to hear your thoughts, so send me an email.I have a decent sized update today with some new articles and interviews. The Paul Interview/Q & A in Madison Magazine is especially good, but as usual, please read with caution as it does contain some spoilers.
joaquim pheonix, the master joaquin, anderson paul thomas, master blu ray, the master de paul thomas anderson
Thursday, 30 December 1999
December 30, 1999
Archived update from Cigarettes & Coffee, run by Greg Mariotti & CJ Wallis from 1999-2005
Sunday, 26 December 1999
Interview: Independent Feature Project
The Independent Feature Project, Written By Lisa Y.C. Garibay
December 1999
Anderson's Valley
Paul Thomas Anderson discusses his latest, Magnolia.
In 1997, Paul Thomas Anderson broke into the film world with two risk-taking films - Hard Eight and Boogie Nights - and immediately distinguished himself as a promising director with a personalized cinematic vision. With his new film, Magnolia, Mr. Anderson delivers a heartfelt portrait of a lonely city as seen through the eyes of a dying father, a young wife, a male caretaker, a famous lost son, a police officer in love, a boy genius, an ex-boy genius, a game show host, and an estranged daughter. Although the film follows nine characters, each role is written with such intimacy and emotion that the viewer feels almost intrusive at times. Magnolia brings together an ensemble of actors often featured in Mr. Anderson's films including John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, Philip S. Hoffman, and Melora Walters and also presents powerful performances from Julianne Moore, Jason Robards, and Tom Cruise. New Line Cinema will release Magnolia in theaters on December 24 (Editor's note: Actual release date is now 12/17 in NY/L.A. & 1/7/00 Rest of U.S.)
In your film, we follow nine different characters. Which one came first?
Claudia. I don't even know if there was a story in that, but I had an image of Melora [Walters], who I've always wanted to write a big part for. I've written small parts for her in the other two movies, but I wanted to really go and shine on Melora. I had this song Aimee Mann was working on at the time called Save Me, and I listened to little parts of it and got this image in my head of Melora, which is now the last shot of the movie. That led to the thought of Philip Baker Hall walking up these steps to her apartment, knocking on her door. And then it just started writing itself.
Also, there is a line in one of Aimee's songs, which is "now that I've met you, would you object to never seeing me again?" It's the greatest line and I said, "Aimee, I don't know if I'm ripping this off or adapting it or what, but it's mine now." The concept of maybe feeling so polluted that you feel you are unlovable or that love is too hard a work to even invest in. And I ran with that. That's the way I feel sometimes and that's where I am right now, so I was drawn to that.
And the prologue of coincidences: did you write that before or after you completed the other stories?
The first image was Melora, but the first thing on the page was the events in the prologue. The goal there was to have a lot of cinematic fun. But it's also a promise that can be made very quickly- weird stories, weird coincidences, and fucking strange shit will happen. And then I'm going to ask for three hours of your time to investigate a lot of emotional stuff. And hopefully the promise is kept.
What is the advantage of working with the same ensemble of actors?
Well, there is the advantage of laziness - there is a "speak" between us which is very easy and very casual and we know what each other means through gestures. But on the opposite side of that, there is the advantage of pushing each other further each time. I wanted to write a part for Phil Hoffman that was the opposite of Scottie in Boogie Nights. That was my goal. Plus, these are my favorite actors.
Tom Cruise came to you after Boogie Nights and said I want to work with you. Did he request in which manner he was interested in working with you?
He said, "whatever you are doing, I'd love to be a part of it." It wasn't so blanket as to, "I'll do whatever you want me to do." It was more like, "Hey, keep me in my mind." I was like, yeah, I'll keep you in mind, you're Tom fucking Cruise. I think that I had a perverse thrill of being able to write that character for him. I think it helped make it a great role because I wanted to impress him. But in the same way, I wanted to impress John Reilly.
One incredible scene in the film is when Frank Mackey [played by Tom Cruise] was being deconstructed by a journalist during an interview. So, I have to ask you as we sit in the same positions… After Boogie Nights and Hard Eight you were thrust into the public eye. And you were being judged, not only by your art, but you personally. What do you feel people have the right to know about you and what do you want to be judged by: your past, where you went to school, or your work itself?
What the fuck, is that a good question or what? The answer is the movies, the movies, the movies. The movies that I make. I do feel an obligation to not be a jackass in my life only because that will infringe on the view of the movie. I remember when Husbands and Wives came out and Woody Allen was going through that whole thing and it was so terrible because that was one of his best movies. But everybody would look at it and see all the parallels of his life and the mistakes he was making- it polluted the movie. I guess my goal is to do everything I can to not pollute the view of my movie. It is a hard thing because you want to promote them. You want to have attention. You want to be interviewed and be liked. But at the same time you want to balance out, step back, and have the movie. But if you're Kubrick and you don't do any interviews, that becomes a little cancer on the movie too, and they say the movies are cold and distant, which I don't think his movies are. It's a very tricky thing. I just want the film to survive.
In your opinion, what do you think makes a film successful?
You know it is funny, because if it's good, it's good. I can answer the question, does it connect to me emotionally? Okay, there's that. Technically it's good, oh great, there's that. Now, as if I'm avoiding the question, if it is financially successful, does that mean it is any good? I have this weird theory and this thing in me that if a film is financially successful, it's successful because if the job is to communicate, then for whatever reason, it's communicating. I think that I am way off topic here, maybe I'm not, but if I were to make a commercial, I wouldn't want to make a great short film, I'd want to make a commercial that sold the product. And if it sold five hundred million cases of Budweiser beer and I made the commercial for it, I'd think it was completely successful and that is the complete artistic triumph.
The music in the film plays a very distinct role. At what point did you begin working with Aimee Mann?
It was more while I was writing. A lot of those songs were practically done or written or some even done completely before we started shooting. She wrote a couple afterwards that were put into the movie. But I took those in the writing stage and ran with them. It was great to have the music too, so the actors could hear it, the crew could hear it and I didn't have to do any kind of conversing about it. I just said, you hear that? That's the vibe. Okay, let's shoot.
On top of that, there was the score which was very seriously in the movie as sort of carpet beneath the whole thing. I thought that would be a great way to connect all these different stories. It could be a vignette movie, but it could be nine plots about one story. And the great connector there could be the music.
The paintings on the walls in Claudia's apartment were beautiful. Who did them?
That is Fiona [Apple]. She did all that artwork.
After you got your Academy Award nominations and your Spirit Award nominations, when you sat down at the table to write again, did you feel pressure to deliver?
Well thank God, I started writing before that all went down. I think I intentionally started writing before I saw waves of things coming at me. And you know what, you feel the pressure but you don't feel it when you are writing. When you are writing, you are alone in your room and you are just typing. And that is not artist-y of me to say that, but honestly it just becomes like that. Now, the second you stop and the phone starts ringing and you are not writing anymore, you become self-conscious and you are little aware that this is expected of me maybe, or this is. Do I want to make a left turn just because of what people expect of me? I think it is a good thing to be aware of what people think of you because it will force you to try and do new things.
Now that you have these films behind you, is the process getting any easier?
It's a funny thing, but what I have realized is, you make the first movie with a two- million-dollar budget. Then you have a bigger budget on the second one, and an even bigger budget on the third one. But I swear to God, the same exact problems exist-it doesn't matter what it cost. And you are like, can't we throw money at it, can't we do this? No, the street is closed. No, there was an earthquake last night, the negative was damaged. No problem really goes away.
What advice would you give to aspiring filmmakers?
I would want to stress: never underestimate the power of writing. Because if you are a writer and you can write your own stuff and you get shit on. But writers don't realize they don't have to get shit on. They are dying for good scripts out there. If you have one, you have a gold mine. Any actor in the world is going to want to do a good script. Writers have all the power and they don't seem to realize that. Any young filmmaker should know. Just write and write really well because that means you can bribe anyone in the world that you have to direct it and then you are set.
December 1999
Anderson's Valley
Paul Thomas Anderson discusses his latest, Magnolia.
In 1997, Paul Thomas Anderson broke into the film world with two risk-taking films - Hard Eight and Boogie Nights - and immediately distinguished himself as a promising director with a personalized cinematic vision. With his new film, Magnolia, Mr. Anderson delivers a heartfelt portrait of a lonely city as seen through the eyes of a dying father, a young wife, a male caretaker, a famous lost son, a police officer in love, a boy genius, an ex-boy genius, a game show host, and an estranged daughter. Although the film follows nine characters, each role is written with such intimacy and emotion that the viewer feels almost intrusive at times. Magnolia brings together an ensemble of actors often featured in Mr. Anderson's films including John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, Philip S. Hoffman, and Melora Walters and also presents powerful performances from Julianne Moore, Jason Robards, and Tom Cruise. New Line Cinema will release Magnolia in theaters on December 24 (Editor's note: Actual release date is now 12/17 in NY/L.A. & 1/7/00 Rest of U.S.)
In your film, we follow nine different characters. Which one came first?
Claudia. I don't even know if there was a story in that, but I had an image of Melora [Walters], who I've always wanted to write a big part for. I've written small parts for her in the other two movies, but I wanted to really go and shine on Melora. I had this song Aimee Mann was working on at the time called Save Me, and I listened to little parts of it and got this image in my head of Melora, which is now the last shot of the movie. That led to the thought of Philip Baker Hall walking up these steps to her apartment, knocking on her door. And then it just started writing itself.
Also, there is a line in one of Aimee's songs, which is "now that I've met you, would you object to never seeing me again?" It's the greatest line and I said, "Aimee, I don't know if I'm ripping this off or adapting it or what, but it's mine now." The concept of maybe feeling so polluted that you feel you are unlovable or that love is too hard a work to even invest in. And I ran with that. That's the way I feel sometimes and that's where I am right now, so I was drawn to that.
And the prologue of coincidences: did you write that before or after you completed the other stories?
The first image was Melora, but the first thing on the page was the events in the prologue. The goal there was to have a lot of cinematic fun. But it's also a promise that can be made very quickly- weird stories, weird coincidences, and fucking strange shit will happen. And then I'm going to ask for three hours of your time to investigate a lot of emotional stuff. And hopefully the promise is kept.
What is the advantage of working with the same ensemble of actors?
Well, there is the advantage of laziness - there is a "speak" between us which is very easy and very casual and we know what each other means through gestures. But on the opposite side of that, there is the advantage of pushing each other further each time. I wanted to write a part for Phil Hoffman that was the opposite of Scottie in Boogie Nights. That was my goal. Plus, these are my favorite actors.
Tom Cruise came to you after Boogie Nights and said I want to work with you. Did he request in which manner he was interested in working with you?
He said, "whatever you are doing, I'd love to be a part of it." It wasn't so blanket as to, "I'll do whatever you want me to do." It was more like, "Hey, keep me in my mind." I was like, yeah, I'll keep you in mind, you're Tom fucking Cruise. I think that I had a perverse thrill of being able to write that character for him. I think it helped make it a great role because I wanted to impress him. But in the same way, I wanted to impress John Reilly.
One incredible scene in the film is when Frank Mackey [played by Tom Cruise] was being deconstructed by a journalist during an interview. So, I have to ask you as we sit in the same positions… After Boogie Nights and Hard Eight you were thrust into the public eye. And you were being judged, not only by your art, but you personally. What do you feel people have the right to know about you and what do you want to be judged by: your past, where you went to school, or your work itself?
What the fuck, is that a good question or what? The answer is the movies, the movies, the movies. The movies that I make. I do feel an obligation to not be a jackass in my life only because that will infringe on the view of the movie. I remember when Husbands and Wives came out and Woody Allen was going through that whole thing and it was so terrible because that was one of his best movies. But everybody would look at it and see all the parallels of his life and the mistakes he was making- it polluted the movie. I guess my goal is to do everything I can to not pollute the view of my movie. It is a hard thing because you want to promote them. You want to have attention. You want to be interviewed and be liked. But at the same time you want to balance out, step back, and have the movie. But if you're Kubrick and you don't do any interviews, that becomes a little cancer on the movie too, and they say the movies are cold and distant, which I don't think his movies are. It's a very tricky thing. I just want the film to survive.
In your opinion, what do you think makes a film successful?
You know it is funny, because if it's good, it's good. I can answer the question, does it connect to me emotionally? Okay, there's that. Technically it's good, oh great, there's that. Now, as if I'm avoiding the question, if it is financially successful, does that mean it is any good? I have this weird theory and this thing in me that if a film is financially successful, it's successful because if the job is to communicate, then for whatever reason, it's communicating. I think that I am way off topic here, maybe I'm not, but if I were to make a commercial, I wouldn't want to make a great short film, I'd want to make a commercial that sold the product. And if it sold five hundred million cases of Budweiser beer and I made the commercial for it, I'd think it was completely successful and that is the complete artistic triumph.
The music in the film plays a very distinct role. At what point did you begin working with Aimee Mann?
It was more while I was writing. A lot of those songs were practically done or written or some even done completely before we started shooting. She wrote a couple afterwards that were put into the movie. But I took those in the writing stage and ran with them. It was great to have the music too, so the actors could hear it, the crew could hear it and I didn't have to do any kind of conversing about it. I just said, you hear that? That's the vibe. Okay, let's shoot.
On top of that, there was the score which was very seriously in the movie as sort of carpet beneath the whole thing. I thought that would be a great way to connect all these different stories. It could be a vignette movie, but it could be nine plots about one story. And the great connector there could be the music.
The paintings on the walls in Claudia's apartment were beautiful. Who did them?
That is Fiona [Apple]. She did all that artwork.
After you got your Academy Award nominations and your Spirit Award nominations, when you sat down at the table to write again, did you feel pressure to deliver?
Well thank God, I started writing before that all went down. I think I intentionally started writing before I saw waves of things coming at me. And you know what, you feel the pressure but you don't feel it when you are writing. When you are writing, you are alone in your room and you are just typing. And that is not artist-y of me to say that, but honestly it just becomes like that. Now, the second you stop and the phone starts ringing and you are not writing anymore, you become self-conscious and you are little aware that this is expected of me maybe, or this is. Do I want to make a left turn just because of what people expect of me? I think it is a good thing to be aware of what people think of you because it will force you to try and do new things.
Now that you have these films behind you, is the process getting any easier?
It's a funny thing, but what I have realized is, you make the first movie with a two- million-dollar budget. Then you have a bigger budget on the second one, and an even bigger budget on the third one. But I swear to God, the same exact problems exist-it doesn't matter what it cost. And you are like, can't we throw money at it, can't we do this? No, the street is closed. No, there was an earthquake last night, the negative was damaged. No problem really goes away.
What advice would you give to aspiring filmmakers?
I would want to stress: never underestimate the power of writing. Because if you are a writer and you can write your own stuff and you get shit on. But writers don't realize they don't have to get shit on. They are dying for good scripts out there. If you have one, you have a gold mine. Any actor in the world is going to want to do a good script. Writers have all the power and they don't seem to realize that. Any young filmmaker should know. Just write and write really well because that means you can bribe anyone in the world that you have to direct it and then you are set.
Thursday, 23 December 1999
Interview: The Village Voice
The Village Voice, Written By Chuck Stephens
December 1999
P.T. Anderson Let's It All Hang Out
"Without the pornography, I feel like I'm naked," writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson nervously confides, rapping his knuckles on a cluttered coffee table, less for emphasis than to break his own tension.
"With Boogie Nights," Anderson says, sitting in the family-style stone house in Bronson Canyon that now serves as his production office, "at least I had that 'topic' in front of me. The pornography aspect of the film was like some kind of armor. I know it's bullshit, but in a way, it let me step aside and say, 'Hey, if you didn't like that movie, well, maybe you just didn't connect with the topic.' With this one, it's just me, right out there, saying 'Don't you like me? Don't you like me?' "
A boyishly unkempt pre-30-year-old with a new Mercedes in his driveway, an Oscar nomination (for his Boogie Nights screenplay) on his track record, and a hopelessly slept-in white dress shirt on his back, Anderson's a mess. His metamelodramatic Magnolia finally in the can, he's too fraught with what looks like postpartum depression to squat on his laurels before he's seen them in print. "I woke up yesterday," he says, "really afraid that I'm going to take a beating from the critics. Three hours, baby. Three fucking hours! But I know what I've done. This is unquestionably the best film I will ever make."
An epic downer with an apocalyptic interlude, a score full of Aimee Mann's heart-scraping pop songs, and an oddly happy ending, Magnolia is all about families—the devastatingly unhappy kind. Much of the movie's wrenching emotionality is confessional, a result of the "cancer spiral" Anderson's friends and loved ones seemed to be succumbing to during the last few years. But he's managed to transform those losses into clarity, even to the point of admitting what others had been pointing out to him all along: that he's a director with a theme. "Who'd a thunk it?" Anderson crows. "Me, the 'family' guy! It's the simplest, most direct way I can say it: My movies are about family. But it wasn't like, there I was at seven years old, watching Close Encounters and planning it all out."
There's also an increasingly grown-up, settled-down aspect to his work. For one thing, Anderson claims that Magnolia was written with women in mind, and specifically for the women in his life. "First of all, I wrote it for Aimee, who has been my best friend and inspiration, like, forever. But on a much bigger and more personal level, I wrote it for Fiona Apple." Anderson and his significant pop-star other have been in a serious relationship for some time now, and when he mentions her, he's not just waxing slushy. Asked what he'll be doing with his time off during the next few months, the answer's immediate: "I just want to be the boyfriend for a while."
But he's not all through with his former bouts of big dick-ery just yet. In Magnolia, Anderson's hilariously humongous prosthetic is Tom Cruise, who plays a magnoliously oily expert on the art of seduction. "You never expect to get the world's biggest movie star for your film," he says, "but when you do, you run with it." Cruise clearly adored every raw, randy line Anderson wrote for him, and, on-screen, his every move appears coiled and ready for more—right down to the sea monster that seems to be straining in his briefs. But is that touch of Dirk Diggler for real?
Anderson smiles cinemascopically, a foam of Diet Coke still ringing his lips. "Tom Cruise is the biggest movie star in the world," he says, like a carny barker letting the promise of freakish grandeur sell his show. "Are you kidding? Of course he's got the world's biggest cock."
December 1999
P.T. Anderson Let's It All Hang Out
"Without the pornography, I feel like I'm naked," writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson nervously confides, rapping his knuckles on a cluttered coffee table, less for emphasis than to break his own tension.
"With Boogie Nights," Anderson says, sitting in the family-style stone house in Bronson Canyon that now serves as his production office, "at least I had that 'topic' in front of me. The pornography aspect of the film was like some kind of armor. I know it's bullshit, but in a way, it let me step aside and say, 'Hey, if you didn't like that movie, well, maybe you just didn't connect with the topic.' With this one, it's just me, right out there, saying 'Don't you like me? Don't you like me?' "
A boyishly unkempt pre-30-year-old with a new Mercedes in his driveway, an Oscar nomination (for his Boogie Nights screenplay) on his track record, and a hopelessly slept-in white dress shirt on his back, Anderson's a mess. His metamelodramatic Magnolia finally in the can, he's too fraught with what looks like postpartum depression to squat on his laurels before he's seen them in print. "I woke up yesterday," he says, "really afraid that I'm going to take a beating from the critics. Three hours, baby. Three fucking hours! But I know what I've done. This is unquestionably the best film I will ever make."
An epic downer with an apocalyptic interlude, a score full of Aimee Mann's heart-scraping pop songs, and an oddly happy ending, Magnolia is all about families—the devastatingly unhappy kind. Much of the movie's wrenching emotionality is confessional, a result of the "cancer spiral" Anderson's friends and loved ones seemed to be succumbing to during the last few years. But he's managed to transform those losses into clarity, even to the point of admitting what others had been pointing out to him all along: that he's a director with a theme. "Who'd a thunk it?" Anderson crows. "Me, the 'family' guy! It's the simplest, most direct way I can say it: My movies are about family. But it wasn't like, there I was at seven years old, watching Close Encounters and planning it all out."
There's also an increasingly grown-up, settled-down aspect to his work. For one thing, Anderson claims that Magnolia was written with women in mind, and specifically for the women in his life. "First of all, I wrote it for Aimee, who has been my best friend and inspiration, like, forever. But on a much bigger and more personal level, I wrote it for Fiona Apple." Anderson and his significant pop-star other have been in a serious relationship for some time now, and when he mentions her, he's not just waxing slushy. Asked what he'll be doing with his time off during the next few months, the answer's immediate: "I just want to be the boyfriend for a while."
But he's not all through with his former bouts of big dick-ery just yet. In Magnolia, Anderson's hilariously humongous prosthetic is Tom Cruise, who plays a magnoliously oily expert on the art of seduction. "You never expect to get the world's biggest movie star for your film," he says, "but when you do, you run with it." Cruise clearly adored every raw, randy line Anderson wrote for him, and, on-screen, his every move appears coiled and ready for more—right down to the sea monster that seems to be straining in his briefs. But is that touch of Dirk Diggler for real?
Anderson smiles cinemascopically, a foam of Diet Coke still ringing his lips. "Tom Cruise is the biggest movie star in the world," he says, like a carny barker letting the promise of freakish grandeur sell his show. "Are you kidding? Of course he's got the world's biggest cock."
Interview: NY Times Magazine
NY Times Magazine, Written By Lynn Hirschberg
December 1999
His Way
Thanks to the critical success of 'Boogie Nights,' Paul Thomas Anderson has total control over his new three-hour movie, 'Magnolia.' So why can't he calm down?
I don't want to be the angry guy," says Paul Thomas Anderson, crouching on the floor of his editing room in a house perched on a hill in Bronson Canyon, just north of the seedy outskirts of Hollywood. This is the "Magnolia" house: the entire place is devoted to the completion of Anderson's new film, a three-hour epic about family and responsibility and forgiveness. Anderson, 29, is tall and lanky and has the attractively tousled look of the recently awakened. He is wearing black baggy pants and an untucked white shirt, and he is dragging on a Camel and intently studying a poster for "Magnolia," which he wrote and directed.
He is not happy. Or actually, he is happy, but he's in a rage about this poster, a happy sort of rage fueled by anxiety and passion for his film and, above all, by a zeal for control. This is not an unbecoming state -- there is something beguiling about Anderson's obsessions, most of which revolve around moviemaking. His need to control all aspects of "Magnolia," from the length to the marketing to the theaters the movie will play in, is not unusual in directors, but there is something about this particular movie, which is ambitious and emotional, that has Anderson particularly obsessed. "I consider 'Magnolia' a kind of beautiful accident," he explains. "It gets me. I put my heart -- every embarrassing thing that I wanted to say -- in 'Magnolia.' "
It is late October, and a poster and a trailer for "Magnolia" should already be in theaters, awaiting the movie's opening on Dec. 17. The film is difficult to categorize, and Anderson and the executives at New Line, the studio that financed and will release the film, are not in agreement on how to market "Magnolia," which is, on a superficial level, a melodrama about a dozen characters and, on a deeper level, a meditation on accountability at the end of the century. Anderson felt New Line's marketing on his last movie, "Boogie Nights," a thrilling film set in the porno world of the 70's, was not all that it might have been, and "Magnolia" is not an easy movie to sell. Like "Boogie Nights," it is about intersecting lives, and how chance and coincidence create a fragile sort of order.
The movie is daring in form and content: there are five separate narratives, characters break into song, there are acts of divine intervention. It is long and stars a crew of wonderful actors who have become Anderson's repertory company -- John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore, among others -- joined by Jason Robards as a dying patriarch and Tom Cruise as his son, a charismatic sex guru who leads workshops in snaring women. Cruise gives a virtuoso performance, but he is not currently promoting the film, and his image is so buried on the poster that even his agent at Creative Artists Agency, Kevin Huvane, could barely find him. Cruise would have been a great marketing boost, but he felt his fame would overshadow the ensemble nature of the film and, besides, his character is so extreme, so inconsistent with the Tom Cruise trademark that, contractually, he insisted on distance.
"What do you think of this?" Anderson asks Dylan Tichenor, his editor and one of the two people (the other is his producer, JoAnne Sellar) whom Anderson really listens to. Mostly, he follows his own instincts. Anderson has developed a reputation as a brat and a genius, and it is not difficult to see why someone might come to either conclusion. "How do I respond to criticism?" he asks. "Critically," he answers. "I listen to all criticism critically." Which means, when the initial cut of "Magnolia" was 3 hours, 18 minutes, he would not trim it to a conventional running length of 2 or even 212 hours. His vision ran at 3 and that was it. "You have to sit in the movie and really absorb it," Anderson explains. "I am always looking for that nuance, that moment of truth, and you can't really do that fast." Anderson pauses. "I was trying to say something with this film without actually screaming the message," Anderson says. "Although three hours may be something of a scream, I wanted to hold the note for a while."
At the moment, Anderson's sense of mission is focused on the movie's poster, an image of a ripe magnolia flower with cast members' faces superimposed on various petals. "Can you see them?" he asks Tichenor. New Line wanted the faces more prominently displayed in a checkerboard behind the flower but Anderson fought for the subtler imagery. Now he is seeing details and omissions and tiny discrepancies that only a parent can see, and the more he looks at this poster, the more enraged he seems to get. The battle excites him -- it's Anderson's chance to convince the world that art and commerce can co-exist, that a three-hour film that is unique and independent in spirit can, if properly packaged, captivate a mainstream audience.
"I'm completely aware of the fact that I'm a control freak," Anderson says, pacing the length of the room. Even when he's still, Anderson appears to be jumping about. "It's a maniac gene." Tichenor ignores Anderson -- he has great respect for Anderson, but he has seen all this before. And anyway, Anderson's larger fight with the studio is not over the poster, but the trailer. "This is where I put my foot through the chair," he says, bounding over to a stack of machines and putting a cassette into a monitor. "This is their trailer," he spits. As Anderson jumps up and down and swears (and Tichenor smiles), the voice-over begins: "You can spend your whole life waiting for the truth. Today, for nine people, the wait is over. From Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of -" Anderson shrieks, "Don't say my name!" and throws himself onto the couch.
He has cut together his own trailer -- less Cruise, better music, no pretentious narration -- and he is sending it over to New Line today. "Directing a movie doesn't mean anything," Anderson says. "It's only 50 percent of the job. The other 50 percent is this gene of protectiveness and parenting and evil that safeguards your movie. It's not a gene I love having, but I have to use it."
His talent, as first seen in "Boogie Nights," has given him leverage. Directorially, Anderson has the rare combination of big and small. He can move the camera, setting up elaborate shots that dazzle, and he can also direct intimate moments that reveal character in subtle, startling ways. As a writer, Anderson alters conventional storytelling structure and reveals character through action rather than dialogue. "You have an internal clock when you're watching a movie," he explains. "You've been there before, you know what to expect. So I have to subvert that a little. In the first five minutes of 'Boogie Nights,' you meet all the characters and then you go back as the movie progresses and pick up the sticks. I'm the biggest subscriber to the gun that goes off in the first act, shows up again in the third. When you do that, there's a promise to the audience that weird, interesting stuff will happen. And it lets you buy the three hours."
Unlike most filmmakers of his generation, Anderson is not only technically astute ("I'm still young and I still have to show off"), but he seems to have a larger, moral imperative in his films. They are not preachy, but it's clear that Anderson was reared Catholic, that he believes in atonement and redemption. "When did you last go to confession?" I asked him. Anderson paused. "It's three hours long," he said. "Haven't you seen it?"
After "Boogie Nights" Anderson was It, the director of the moment, a sort of baby brother to Quentin Tarantino. "Pulp Fiction," with its huge critical and commercial success, had fused the worlds of mainstream studios and independent film and made Miramax, formerly known for its skill in acquisitions, a brand name for quality production. Every studio wanted its very own Quentin, and New Line, which had always been competitive with Miramax, was eager to get Anderson under its roof.
"Basically, New Line came to me and said, 'Whatever you want to do next,' "Anderson recalls. "I was in a position I will never ever be in again. For that moment, I was lucky and I could get the opportunity to make a movie like 'Magnolia.' Truly, truly. I don't want to sound egotistical, but my argument to them was, You didn't hire me to take your trailers and test them in Albuquerque. You hired me to be cool. You didn't hire me to make money -- New Line has Mike Myers and the Austin Powers movies to make them tons of money. If I make a good movie, it will help you get at that cool niche of the world." Anderson pauses. He knows the situation: Miramax has Oscars; New Line is the only major studio that has never had an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Miramax made its fortune on "Pulp Fiction"; New Line's first big hit was "The Nightmare on Elm Street." As Anderson puts it, "To pretend like I'm just this pure artist with no awareness of my position in the world would be a lie."
He understands timing. In the last year, directors like Anderson, David O. Russell ("Three Kings"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich") Sam Mendes ("American Beauty") and Wes Anderson ("Rushmore") have created a kind of directorial renaissance reminiscent of the 70's, the last time the studios tried to break away from formulas and embrace a more auteur-oriented approach. "The first time I've felt any millennium thing is this year at the movies," says Anderson, who has trouble watching other films when he is working on his own. ("I see the crew in every shot.") "Filmmakers seem to be thinking, What do we have to say?" Recently, even when their efforts have been flawed, the big studios have focused on an independent spirit in a big-budget context. "More filmmakers are trying to do their magnum opuses," says Michael De Luca, head of production at New Line. "It's generational. People who grew up on the 70's movies now have power around town. And there are more issues to examine now than there were in the 80's."
De Luca is Anderson's greatest advocate. He fought for "Boogie Nights" and made a blind deal for Anderson's next project, granting the director creative control without even hearing an idea for the movie. After reading "Magnolia" (Anderson drove the script to De Luca's house on a Sunday and watched movies in his screening room while he read), De Luca was ecstatic. "He said, 'Any chance of 2 hours, 45 minutes?' "Anderson recalls. "I said, 'No.' He said, 'Really?' I said, 'No.' "
When Paul Thomas Anderson was 7, growing up in the San Fernando Valley, he wrote in a notebook: "My name is Paul Anderson. I want to be a writer, producer, director, special effects man. I know how to do everything and I know everything. Please hire me." Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, like the other members of the Anderson repertory company, is a close friend, says: "You get the sense that Paul was always a director. He was born to the job."
"I did always kind of know," says Anderson. It is late afternoon, and he is sitting on the Warner Brothers lot, waiting to approve some special effects that have been shot for "Magnolia." His girlfriend, the singer Fiona Apple, with whom he lives a few blocks from the "Magnolia" house, is here, too, tagging along for the day. While Anderson is manic, Apple is still; she is tiny and all face, with long, tangly mermaid hair and moist blue eyes that are trained on Anderson. She watches, she listens, she seems to be absorbing through every pore. Anderson continues: "I've always been the type to have doubts only after the fact. It's usually a long time catching up with me."
Anderson, who is trying to do for the San Fernando Valley what Martin Scorsese did for the mean streets of New York, grew up in a flat suburb called Studio City in an extended family that combined nine children from two marriages and, at one point, 18 dogs. He has a troubled relationship with his mother that he won't discuss and was very close to his father, who died in 1997. Ernie Anderson did voice-overs for commercials and TV shows like "The Love Boat." "You'd recognize his voice in an instant," Anderson says. "He always encouraged me to become a writer or director."
In high school, Anderson made a short film called "Dirk Diggler," about a porn star with a 13-inch penis. It became the basis for "Boogie Nights." "As a kid," Anderson recalls, "I knew about these cinder-block warehouses where they shot porno in the valley. I lived a few blocks away from where 'Amanda by Night,' one of the classic porno films, was shot. That's the equivalent of living near the mansion they used in 'Sunset Boulevard.' "
He resisted college ("I thought, I know how to make movies and I should do this right now") but he feared that his valley background might be too limiting a canvas for a major movie director. "So I decided to go to N.Y.U. film school," Anderson says, lighting a cigarette. "And I went for two days. If you drop out fast enough you get your money back, and I realized I loved the valley. I went back to L.A. with around $7,000. I lived with my father and started making short films and working as a production assistant."
In his spare time, Anderson wrote a script about game shows (which he later integrated into "Magnolia"), and when he was 22, he wrote and directed "Cigarettes and Coffee," a 24-minute short about five people in a diner that was accepted at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. The short was a primer to the Anderson style: interlocking lives, exhilarating camera work, a melodrama that reveals itself slowly through detail, mood and conflict. Like many of the films of the 70's, Anderson's movies are primarily character studies. "That changes the narrative," Anderson explains. "I begin writing with a list of the characters' traits, everything about them. Most studio films begin with a concept and then fill in the characters, which are often generic. The great films give you a person, or people, and their world. That's my goal."
Anderson's first feature was "Sidney," the story of a gambler and his hapless protégé set in Reno, Nev. While arranging the financing for "Sidney," Anderson wrote a 300-page opus that later became "Boogie Nights." "He is always working," says the actor William H. Macy, who first met Anderson on "Boogie Nights." "He writes while he edits. He's in it at all times."
"Sidney" was terrible for Anderson -- the film was financed by Rysher Entertainment, which recut and retitled the finished movie. That experience haunts Anderson and has helped fuel his mania for control. "The fight over 'Sidney' " -- retitled "Hard Eight" -- was endless," he says, still sounding frustrated by the losing battle. "It was the most painful experience I've ever gone through."
Rebounding, Anderson began work on "Boogie Nights," a rise-and-fall story loosely based on the life of the porno star John Holmes, who died of AIDS in 1988. As in all of Anderson's films, the central relationships in "Boogie Nights" are between parents and children, natural or surrogate. "If you were a porno fan going to see 'Boogie Nights,' you'd be really disappointed," Anderson says. "And if you love 'Terms of Endearment,' you'd hate 'Boogie Nights.' That was the problem. Most people don't share my moral sense, which is, I'll masturbate, but I have to clean it up very quickly afterwards."
Although committed to "Boogie Nights" (which had a relatively small budget of $15.5 million), Robert Shaye, chairman of New Line, didn't really like the finished film, and Anderson feels that the lack of money spent on the campaign reflected Shaye's indifference. "He didn't get it," Anderson says. "Boogie Nights" was a critical success, and Anderson was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds were also nominated, for their performances), but the film was a disappointment commercially. Although Shaye reportedly loves "Magnolia," Anderson's aggressiveness with New Line seems fueled by his past experience. "Sometimes I think I probably take it too far," he admits. Yet he doesn't really question his determination to control every part of the process. "Maybe 'Magnolia' would be a bigger hit if it was shorter," he says. "But it would not be a better movie. I believe that completely."
Even before the release of "Boogie Nights," every studio was calling Anderson's agent, John Lesher, with offers, but Anderson decided to forge a partnership with New Line for his next movie, which would become "Magnolia." "I gave them a vague price tag," Anderson says, as Apple listens, "and they gave me so many contractual controls that I couldn't imagine we'd have any problems." Anderson smiles faintly. "New Line loves the movie, but I'm nervous about the fact that 'Magnolia' only cost $35 million. It didn't cost enough to scare them in a marketing way. If it cost $50 million or $60 million, it would be scaring them, but it didn't cost that, and it's got Tom Cruise in it. So, they're thinking, We're O.K., guys. We're O.K. We're gonna make X amount of dollars from Tom fans and X amount of dollars from 'Boogie Nights' fans."
Anderson reaches for Apple's hand. He has to go look at some frogs on film. The frogs are an integral part of "Magnolia," and when De Luca first saw the film, he said, "Thank God we don't have to test this -- audiences would never get the frogs." That cosseting attitude on the part of the studio seems to satisfy Anderson only some of the time. To Anderson, to push is pure instinct -- the movie is his baby, and he wants the world to admire her. "I know I'm a lucky guy," he says, "but I have to fight. I can have all this power and this great stuff given to me, but I still have to do a dance."
It's the next day, around 4 P.M., and Anderson, along with Tichenor, is fine-tuning a pivotal scene in "Magnolia." The movie should have locked today, but it isn't quite done, and it won't be for weeks. "I'm sending this baby to junior high," Anderson jokes. "But it's a long way from graduation." The editing room is cluttered with piles of magazines and plastic coffee cups and half-eaten bags of chips. There's a huge calendar on the wall with the days blocked out until the premiere of "Magnolia," on Dec. 8. Apple is downstairs, having her picture taken for a Japanese magazine. Her new record is due in stores any day, and a few weekends ago, Anderson shot her video. "Don't get me started on what her record company is not doing," he says, engaging in yet another battle for art.
On the monitor, Jason Robards is dying. Anderson is snapping his fingers to establish the rhythm of his deathbed monologue, which originally went 22 pages. "I like it," Anderson says, snapping and watching the cut, which lasts about 10 minutes. "It's long. It's indulgent. Let's leave it."
Anderson is (half) joking. In his work, he likes to stretch an emotion until he gets that pop. His directorial nerve can be both audacious and excruciating -- a riveting combination. In the most famous set piece of "Boogie Nights," a drug deal goes sour, and Anderson focuses the camera on the blank face of his hero, played by Mark Wahlberg, for an endless 45 seconds. Firecrackers are going off, "Jessie's Girl" is blasting in the background and the camera does not move. Wahlberg's expression -- sadness, confusion, distance, emptiness -- is the perfect summation of the movie: you want to look away, but you can't. "Someone actually mentioned cutting that scene," Anderson recalls, still sounding incredulous. "I mean . . . what can you say?"
The "Jessie's Girl" segment was part of what attracted Tom Cruise, who declined to be interviewed for this article, to Anderson. After the movie came out, Anderson received a call from Cruise inviting him to the set of "Eyes Wide Shut" in London. Anderson was thrilled to meet Stanley Kubrick, one of his idols (the others are Robert Altman, David Mamet, Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese), and he began to think of a part that would be, as he says, "un-turn-downable."
Cruise's character, Frank T. J. Mackey, was based in part on a strange recording that a friend gave to Anderson. "It was two guys talking," Anderson recalls. "One is giving advice to the other about women and sex. We transcribed the tape and did a reading with John C. Reilly and Chris Penn doing all the dialogue. I incorporated all that into the Mackey character and his sex seminar. And I wrote with Tom in mind. There are a lot of silent parts because I've always loved Tom Cruise silent. He's a really good starer."
After reading the script, Cruise consulted with his agent who, according to several people close to the process, convinced Cruise that he could not turn this part down. Cruise was intrigued but nervous, and De Luca actually drove over to the Creative Artists Agency office to help seal the deal. "New Line was excited," Anderson recalls. "If Tom hadn't been in the movie, I would have had to fight a couple more battles."
A few days later, Mary K. Donovan, head of New Line publicity, arrives for a lunch meeting at the "Magnolia" house with her staff. They have good news. Anderson has won the war. New Line will release his trailer, his poster, his campaign. "I guess I have to go and apologize," Anderson says over a salad. "And I have to do it without gloating." Donovan says nothing, but Anderson looks contrite. "I was right, but I should not have yelled. I put people down. I just lost it and I neutered them."
"Well," says Donovan, "but you got what you wanted." Anderson pauses. While his confidence and talent are admirable, they may also be destructive. If "Magnolia" does not find an audience, it is very unlikely that Anderson will have this sort of creative control on his next film. "I guess I have to learn to fight without being a jerk. I was a bit of a baby. At the first moment of conflict, I behaved in a slightly adolescent knee-jerk way. I just screamed. But I got what I wanted in the end. So everything's fine."
The meeting continues, and the premiere in Westwood is discussed and the Golden Globes and whether or not Newsweek should run a story before Time. Suddenly, Anderson looks cloudy. "New Line should be shaking hands with a distributor in Iowa," Anderson says. "I don't feel they are out there telling people to put this movie in their theaters." Everyone is silent. Another battle is beginning. "I guess that's not your department," Anderson says to Donovan. "I have to find out who is responsible."
He's trying to be polite, but you can see the anger and frustration starting to build. He can't help himself. "This all matters so much to me," Anderson says. "It's a revolution and it's just not happening well enough or fast enough." Again, silence. "It will be O.K.," Anderson says finally, trying to convince himself. "I can see it now. I'll start the revolution, but then I'll want to go home and make movies by myself." Donovan laughs.
"I think you should remember that you won," she says.
"I know, I know," says Anderson, regaining his passionate stance, "but world domination is very complicated."
December 1999
His Way
Thanks to the critical success of 'Boogie Nights,' Paul Thomas Anderson has total control over his new three-hour movie, 'Magnolia.' So why can't he calm down?
I don't want to be the angry guy," says Paul Thomas Anderson, crouching on the floor of his editing room in a house perched on a hill in Bronson Canyon, just north of the seedy outskirts of Hollywood. This is the "Magnolia" house: the entire place is devoted to the completion of Anderson's new film, a three-hour epic about family and responsibility and forgiveness. Anderson, 29, is tall and lanky and has the attractively tousled look of the recently awakened. He is wearing black baggy pants and an untucked white shirt, and he is dragging on a Camel and intently studying a poster for "Magnolia," which he wrote and directed.
He is not happy. Or actually, he is happy, but he's in a rage about this poster, a happy sort of rage fueled by anxiety and passion for his film and, above all, by a zeal for control. This is not an unbecoming state -- there is something beguiling about Anderson's obsessions, most of which revolve around moviemaking. His need to control all aspects of "Magnolia," from the length to the marketing to the theaters the movie will play in, is not unusual in directors, but there is something about this particular movie, which is ambitious and emotional, that has Anderson particularly obsessed. "I consider 'Magnolia' a kind of beautiful accident," he explains. "It gets me. I put my heart -- every embarrassing thing that I wanted to say -- in 'Magnolia.' "
It is late October, and a poster and a trailer for "Magnolia" should already be in theaters, awaiting the movie's opening on Dec. 17. The film is difficult to categorize, and Anderson and the executives at New Line, the studio that financed and will release the film, are not in agreement on how to market "Magnolia," which is, on a superficial level, a melodrama about a dozen characters and, on a deeper level, a meditation on accountability at the end of the century. Anderson felt New Line's marketing on his last movie, "Boogie Nights," a thrilling film set in the porno world of the 70's, was not all that it might have been, and "Magnolia" is not an easy movie to sell. Like "Boogie Nights," it is about intersecting lives, and how chance and coincidence create a fragile sort of order.
The movie is daring in form and content: there are five separate narratives, characters break into song, there are acts of divine intervention. It is long and stars a crew of wonderful actors who have become Anderson's repertory company -- John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore, among others -- joined by Jason Robards as a dying patriarch and Tom Cruise as his son, a charismatic sex guru who leads workshops in snaring women. Cruise gives a virtuoso performance, but he is not currently promoting the film, and his image is so buried on the poster that even his agent at Creative Artists Agency, Kevin Huvane, could barely find him. Cruise would have been a great marketing boost, but he felt his fame would overshadow the ensemble nature of the film and, besides, his character is so extreme, so inconsistent with the Tom Cruise trademark that, contractually, he insisted on distance.
"What do you think of this?" Anderson asks Dylan Tichenor, his editor and one of the two people (the other is his producer, JoAnne Sellar) whom Anderson really listens to. Mostly, he follows his own instincts. Anderson has developed a reputation as a brat and a genius, and it is not difficult to see why someone might come to either conclusion. "How do I respond to criticism?" he asks. "Critically," he answers. "I listen to all criticism critically." Which means, when the initial cut of "Magnolia" was 3 hours, 18 minutes, he would not trim it to a conventional running length of 2 or even 212 hours. His vision ran at 3 and that was it. "You have to sit in the movie and really absorb it," Anderson explains. "I am always looking for that nuance, that moment of truth, and you can't really do that fast." Anderson pauses. "I was trying to say something with this film without actually screaming the message," Anderson says. "Although three hours may be something of a scream, I wanted to hold the note for a while."
At the moment, Anderson's sense of mission is focused on the movie's poster, an image of a ripe magnolia flower with cast members' faces superimposed on various petals. "Can you see them?" he asks Tichenor. New Line wanted the faces more prominently displayed in a checkerboard behind the flower but Anderson fought for the subtler imagery. Now he is seeing details and omissions and tiny discrepancies that only a parent can see, and the more he looks at this poster, the more enraged he seems to get. The battle excites him -- it's Anderson's chance to convince the world that art and commerce can co-exist, that a three-hour film that is unique and independent in spirit can, if properly packaged, captivate a mainstream audience.
"I'm completely aware of the fact that I'm a control freak," Anderson says, pacing the length of the room. Even when he's still, Anderson appears to be jumping about. "It's a maniac gene." Tichenor ignores Anderson -- he has great respect for Anderson, but he has seen all this before. And anyway, Anderson's larger fight with the studio is not over the poster, but the trailer. "This is where I put my foot through the chair," he says, bounding over to a stack of machines and putting a cassette into a monitor. "This is their trailer," he spits. As Anderson jumps up and down and swears (and Tichenor smiles), the voice-over begins: "You can spend your whole life waiting for the truth. Today, for nine people, the wait is over. From Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of -" Anderson shrieks, "Don't say my name!" and throws himself onto the couch.
He has cut together his own trailer -- less Cruise, better music, no pretentious narration -- and he is sending it over to New Line today. "Directing a movie doesn't mean anything," Anderson says. "It's only 50 percent of the job. The other 50 percent is this gene of protectiveness and parenting and evil that safeguards your movie. It's not a gene I love having, but I have to use it."
His talent, as first seen in "Boogie Nights," has given him leverage. Directorially, Anderson has the rare combination of big and small. He can move the camera, setting up elaborate shots that dazzle, and he can also direct intimate moments that reveal character in subtle, startling ways. As a writer, Anderson alters conventional storytelling structure and reveals character through action rather than dialogue. "You have an internal clock when you're watching a movie," he explains. "You've been there before, you know what to expect. So I have to subvert that a little. In the first five minutes of 'Boogie Nights,' you meet all the characters and then you go back as the movie progresses and pick up the sticks. I'm the biggest subscriber to the gun that goes off in the first act, shows up again in the third. When you do that, there's a promise to the audience that weird, interesting stuff will happen. And it lets you buy the three hours."
Unlike most filmmakers of his generation, Anderson is not only technically astute ("I'm still young and I still have to show off"), but he seems to have a larger, moral imperative in his films. They are not preachy, but it's clear that Anderson was reared Catholic, that he believes in atonement and redemption. "When did you last go to confession?" I asked him. Anderson paused. "It's three hours long," he said. "Haven't you seen it?"
After "Boogie Nights" Anderson was It, the director of the moment, a sort of baby brother to Quentin Tarantino. "Pulp Fiction," with its huge critical and commercial success, had fused the worlds of mainstream studios and independent film and made Miramax, formerly known for its skill in acquisitions, a brand name for quality production. Every studio wanted its very own Quentin, and New Line, which had always been competitive with Miramax, was eager to get Anderson under its roof.
"Basically, New Line came to me and said, 'Whatever you want to do next,' "Anderson recalls. "I was in a position I will never ever be in again. For that moment, I was lucky and I could get the opportunity to make a movie like 'Magnolia.' Truly, truly. I don't want to sound egotistical, but my argument to them was, You didn't hire me to take your trailers and test them in Albuquerque. You hired me to be cool. You didn't hire me to make money -- New Line has Mike Myers and the Austin Powers movies to make them tons of money. If I make a good movie, it will help you get at that cool niche of the world." Anderson pauses. He knows the situation: Miramax has Oscars; New Line is the only major studio that has never had an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Miramax made its fortune on "Pulp Fiction"; New Line's first big hit was "The Nightmare on Elm Street." As Anderson puts it, "To pretend like I'm just this pure artist with no awareness of my position in the world would be a lie."
He understands timing. In the last year, directors like Anderson, David O. Russell ("Three Kings"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich") Sam Mendes ("American Beauty") and Wes Anderson ("Rushmore") have created a kind of directorial renaissance reminiscent of the 70's, the last time the studios tried to break away from formulas and embrace a more auteur-oriented approach. "The first time I've felt any millennium thing is this year at the movies," says Anderson, who has trouble watching other films when he is working on his own. ("I see the crew in every shot.") "Filmmakers seem to be thinking, What do we have to say?" Recently, even when their efforts have been flawed, the big studios have focused on an independent spirit in a big-budget context. "More filmmakers are trying to do their magnum opuses," says Michael De Luca, head of production at New Line. "It's generational. People who grew up on the 70's movies now have power around town. And there are more issues to examine now than there were in the 80's."
De Luca is Anderson's greatest advocate. He fought for "Boogie Nights" and made a blind deal for Anderson's next project, granting the director creative control without even hearing an idea for the movie. After reading "Magnolia" (Anderson drove the script to De Luca's house on a Sunday and watched movies in his screening room while he read), De Luca was ecstatic. "He said, 'Any chance of 2 hours, 45 minutes?' "Anderson recalls. "I said, 'No.' He said, 'Really?' I said, 'No.' "
When Paul Thomas Anderson was 7, growing up in the San Fernando Valley, he wrote in a notebook: "My name is Paul Anderson. I want to be a writer, producer, director, special effects man. I know how to do everything and I know everything. Please hire me." Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, like the other members of the Anderson repertory company, is a close friend, says: "You get the sense that Paul was always a director. He was born to the job."
"I did always kind of know," says Anderson. It is late afternoon, and he is sitting on the Warner Brothers lot, waiting to approve some special effects that have been shot for "Magnolia." His girlfriend, the singer Fiona Apple, with whom he lives a few blocks from the "Magnolia" house, is here, too, tagging along for the day. While Anderson is manic, Apple is still; she is tiny and all face, with long, tangly mermaid hair and moist blue eyes that are trained on Anderson. She watches, she listens, she seems to be absorbing through every pore. Anderson continues: "I've always been the type to have doubts only after the fact. It's usually a long time catching up with me."
Anderson, who is trying to do for the San Fernando Valley what Martin Scorsese did for the mean streets of New York, grew up in a flat suburb called Studio City in an extended family that combined nine children from two marriages and, at one point, 18 dogs. He has a troubled relationship with his mother that he won't discuss and was very close to his father, who died in 1997. Ernie Anderson did voice-overs for commercials and TV shows like "The Love Boat." "You'd recognize his voice in an instant," Anderson says. "He always encouraged me to become a writer or director."
In high school, Anderson made a short film called "Dirk Diggler," about a porn star with a 13-inch penis. It became the basis for "Boogie Nights." "As a kid," Anderson recalls, "I knew about these cinder-block warehouses where they shot porno in the valley. I lived a few blocks away from where 'Amanda by Night,' one of the classic porno films, was shot. That's the equivalent of living near the mansion they used in 'Sunset Boulevard.' "
He resisted college ("I thought, I know how to make movies and I should do this right now") but he feared that his valley background might be too limiting a canvas for a major movie director. "So I decided to go to N.Y.U. film school," Anderson says, lighting a cigarette. "And I went for two days. If you drop out fast enough you get your money back, and I realized I loved the valley. I went back to L.A. with around $7,000. I lived with my father and started making short films and working as a production assistant."
In his spare time, Anderson wrote a script about game shows (which he later integrated into "Magnolia"), and when he was 22, he wrote and directed "Cigarettes and Coffee," a 24-minute short about five people in a diner that was accepted at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. The short was a primer to the Anderson style: interlocking lives, exhilarating camera work, a melodrama that reveals itself slowly through detail, mood and conflict. Like many of the films of the 70's, Anderson's movies are primarily character studies. "That changes the narrative," Anderson explains. "I begin writing with a list of the characters' traits, everything about them. Most studio films begin with a concept and then fill in the characters, which are often generic. The great films give you a person, or people, and their world. That's my goal."
Anderson's first feature was "Sidney," the story of a gambler and his hapless protégé set in Reno, Nev. While arranging the financing for "Sidney," Anderson wrote a 300-page opus that later became "Boogie Nights." "He is always working," says the actor William H. Macy, who first met Anderson on "Boogie Nights." "He writes while he edits. He's in it at all times."
"Sidney" was terrible for Anderson -- the film was financed by Rysher Entertainment, which recut and retitled the finished movie. That experience haunts Anderson and has helped fuel his mania for control. "The fight over 'Sidney' " -- retitled "Hard Eight" -- was endless," he says, still sounding frustrated by the losing battle. "It was the most painful experience I've ever gone through."
Rebounding, Anderson began work on "Boogie Nights," a rise-and-fall story loosely based on the life of the porno star John Holmes, who died of AIDS in 1988. As in all of Anderson's films, the central relationships in "Boogie Nights" are between parents and children, natural or surrogate. "If you were a porno fan going to see 'Boogie Nights,' you'd be really disappointed," Anderson says. "And if you love 'Terms of Endearment,' you'd hate 'Boogie Nights.' That was the problem. Most people don't share my moral sense, which is, I'll masturbate, but I have to clean it up very quickly afterwards."
Although committed to "Boogie Nights" (which had a relatively small budget of $15.5 million), Robert Shaye, chairman of New Line, didn't really like the finished film, and Anderson feels that the lack of money spent on the campaign reflected Shaye's indifference. "He didn't get it," Anderson says. "Boogie Nights" was a critical success, and Anderson was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds were also nominated, for their performances), but the film was a disappointment commercially. Although Shaye reportedly loves "Magnolia," Anderson's aggressiveness with New Line seems fueled by his past experience. "Sometimes I think I probably take it too far," he admits. Yet he doesn't really question his determination to control every part of the process. "Maybe 'Magnolia' would be a bigger hit if it was shorter," he says. "But it would not be a better movie. I believe that completely."
Even before the release of "Boogie Nights," every studio was calling Anderson's agent, John Lesher, with offers, but Anderson decided to forge a partnership with New Line for his next movie, which would become "Magnolia." "I gave them a vague price tag," Anderson says, as Apple listens, "and they gave me so many contractual controls that I couldn't imagine we'd have any problems." Anderson smiles faintly. "New Line loves the movie, but I'm nervous about the fact that 'Magnolia' only cost $35 million. It didn't cost enough to scare them in a marketing way. If it cost $50 million or $60 million, it would be scaring them, but it didn't cost that, and it's got Tom Cruise in it. So, they're thinking, We're O.K., guys. We're O.K. We're gonna make X amount of dollars from Tom fans and X amount of dollars from 'Boogie Nights' fans."
Anderson reaches for Apple's hand. He has to go look at some frogs on film. The frogs are an integral part of "Magnolia," and when De Luca first saw the film, he said, "Thank God we don't have to test this -- audiences would never get the frogs." That cosseting attitude on the part of the studio seems to satisfy Anderson only some of the time. To Anderson, to push is pure instinct -- the movie is his baby, and he wants the world to admire her. "I know I'm a lucky guy," he says, "but I have to fight. I can have all this power and this great stuff given to me, but I still have to do a dance."
It's the next day, around 4 P.M., and Anderson, along with Tichenor, is fine-tuning a pivotal scene in "Magnolia." The movie should have locked today, but it isn't quite done, and it won't be for weeks. "I'm sending this baby to junior high," Anderson jokes. "But it's a long way from graduation." The editing room is cluttered with piles of magazines and plastic coffee cups and half-eaten bags of chips. There's a huge calendar on the wall with the days blocked out until the premiere of "Magnolia," on Dec. 8. Apple is downstairs, having her picture taken for a Japanese magazine. Her new record is due in stores any day, and a few weekends ago, Anderson shot her video. "Don't get me started on what her record company is not doing," he says, engaging in yet another battle for art.
On the monitor, Jason Robards is dying. Anderson is snapping his fingers to establish the rhythm of his deathbed monologue, which originally went 22 pages. "I like it," Anderson says, snapping and watching the cut, which lasts about 10 minutes. "It's long. It's indulgent. Let's leave it."
Anderson is (half) joking. In his work, he likes to stretch an emotion until he gets that pop. His directorial nerve can be both audacious and excruciating -- a riveting combination. In the most famous set piece of "Boogie Nights," a drug deal goes sour, and Anderson focuses the camera on the blank face of his hero, played by Mark Wahlberg, for an endless 45 seconds. Firecrackers are going off, "Jessie's Girl" is blasting in the background and the camera does not move. Wahlberg's expression -- sadness, confusion, distance, emptiness -- is the perfect summation of the movie: you want to look away, but you can't. "Someone actually mentioned cutting that scene," Anderson recalls, still sounding incredulous. "I mean . . . what can you say?"
The "Jessie's Girl" segment was part of what attracted Tom Cruise, who declined to be interviewed for this article, to Anderson. After the movie came out, Anderson received a call from Cruise inviting him to the set of "Eyes Wide Shut" in London. Anderson was thrilled to meet Stanley Kubrick, one of his idols (the others are Robert Altman, David Mamet, Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese), and he began to think of a part that would be, as he says, "un-turn-downable."
Cruise's character, Frank T. J. Mackey, was based in part on a strange recording that a friend gave to Anderson. "It was two guys talking," Anderson recalls. "One is giving advice to the other about women and sex. We transcribed the tape and did a reading with John C. Reilly and Chris Penn doing all the dialogue. I incorporated all that into the Mackey character and his sex seminar. And I wrote with Tom in mind. There are a lot of silent parts because I've always loved Tom Cruise silent. He's a really good starer."
After reading the script, Cruise consulted with his agent who, according to several people close to the process, convinced Cruise that he could not turn this part down. Cruise was intrigued but nervous, and De Luca actually drove over to the Creative Artists Agency office to help seal the deal. "New Line was excited," Anderson recalls. "If Tom hadn't been in the movie, I would have had to fight a couple more battles."
A few days later, Mary K. Donovan, head of New Line publicity, arrives for a lunch meeting at the "Magnolia" house with her staff. They have good news. Anderson has won the war. New Line will release his trailer, his poster, his campaign. "I guess I have to go and apologize," Anderson says over a salad. "And I have to do it without gloating." Donovan says nothing, but Anderson looks contrite. "I was right, but I should not have yelled. I put people down. I just lost it and I neutered them."
"Well," says Donovan, "but you got what you wanted." Anderson pauses. While his confidence and talent are admirable, they may also be destructive. If "Magnolia" does not find an audience, it is very unlikely that Anderson will have this sort of creative control on his next film. "I guess I have to learn to fight without being a jerk. I was a bit of a baby. At the first moment of conflict, I behaved in a slightly adolescent knee-jerk way. I just screamed. But I got what I wanted in the end. So everything's fine."
The meeting continues, and the premiere in Westwood is discussed and the Golden Globes and whether or not Newsweek should run a story before Time. Suddenly, Anderson looks cloudy. "New Line should be shaking hands with a distributor in Iowa," Anderson says. "I don't feel they are out there telling people to put this movie in their theaters." Everyone is silent. Another battle is beginning. "I guess that's not your department," Anderson says to Donovan. "I have to find out who is responsible."
He's trying to be polite, but you can see the anger and frustration starting to build. He can't help himself. "This all matters so much to me," Anderson says. "It's a revolution and it's just not happening well enough or fast enough." Again, silence. "It will be O.K.," Anderson says finally, trying to convince himself. "I can see it now. I'll start the revolution, but then I'll want to go home and make movies by myself." Donovan laughs.
"I think you should remember that you won," she says.
"I know, I know," says Anderson, regaining his passionate stance, "but world domination is very complicated."
Interview: Magnolia Shooting Script Book Introduction
Magnolia Shooting Script/Companion Book, Written By Paul Thomas Anderson
October 1999
I entered into writing this script with a massive dedication to writing something small and intimate and cheap. One hundred and ninety pages later, I feel pretty good about the result.
This is, I believe, an interesting study in a writer writing from his gut. Writing from the gut usually equals quite a many pages. Being a “new, hot young director” usually means that, for once, you can get away with not cutting anything. So for better or worse, consider this screenplay completely written from the gut.
I am from the San Fernando Valley. For many years, I was ashamed of this fact, thinking if I was not from the big city of New York or the farm fields of Iowa that I had nothing to say. Once I got over who I was and where I was from, I found my love for Los Angeles. I hope that this is a true Los Angeles Movie. In particular, I have aimed to make the Mother Of All Movies About The San Fernando Valley.
I write to music so I better own up to stealing quite a many lines from Aimee Mann, who provides all the songs in the film. The first line of Aimee’s song “Deathly” goes something like this: “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing me again?” This may sound familiar. You can find it somewhere in the final thirty pages of this script. I heard that line and wrote backwards. This “original” screenplay could, for all intents and purposes, be called an adaption of Aimee Mann songs. I owe her some cash, probably.
The connection of writing “from the gut” and “writing to music” cannot be found any clearer than in the “Wise Up” section of the screenplay. I had reached the end of Earl’s monologue and was searching for a little vibe – I was lost a bit, and on the headphones came Aimee singing “Wise Up.” I wrote as I listened – and the most natural course of action was that everyone should sing – sing how the feel. In the most good old-fashioned Hollywood Musical Way, each character, and the writer, began singing how they felt. This is one of those things that happens, and I was either too stupid or not scared enough to hit “delete” once done. Next thing you know, you’re filming it. And I’m Really Happy It Happened.
I’ll try and narrow down the blah-blah-blah here and get on with it, but being a writer, I can’t stop, so let me thank a few people who made this possible.
I’d like to thank Fiona Apple. She is my girlfriend and we share a home. She is a songwriter. She is one of the greatest songwriters, and she has taught me something that I’d never really known before: Honest and clear is possible and good and it makes for better storytelling. I think I knew this before I met her but I didn’t exactly know how to do it.
While I was writing this script, she was writing songs. I was able to witness the translation of emotion into verbs, nouns, and letters that equaled “Lines in a song.” She taught me about clarity and about something I’d only sort-a-had, which is this thing I’ve talked about: “Trust the gut.”
“Trust the gut” equals quite a many pages. So blame her. Thank you, love.
Thank you to My Actors. I like to call them “My Actors” because I’m incredibly possessive and protective of them, and all I do is in aid of watching them act. I think I’ve done best when I think of them. I aim to please them, I aim to watch them work and the result has meant quite a many pages. Blame them.
Thank you to my producer, JoAnne Sellar, for waiting patiently. Patience and constant support is what everyone needs, and adding some love and affection and parenting into potion usually equals quite a many pages. So blame her.
Thank you to anyone who wanted to listen or read or see this picture. I’ve never been so happy, emotional, embarrassed, humble, egotistical, or surprised with myself as I am with Magnolia. I hope all that that implies is good for reading. I set out to write a great movie. In the most honest and unashamed way, I truly set myself up to write a great movie. I’m not ashamed. I’ve written from my gut and I will not be ashamed. Besides, it’s far too late now.
And one thing I know is this: I’d do it again. So blame me.
Thank you, Dylan Tichenor, Jen Barrons, Daniel Lupi, Mike De Luca, “An Incomplete Education,” by Judy Jones and William Wilson, Charles Fort, Michael Penn, Jon Brion, Bumble Ward, Peter Sorel, Brian Kehew, Esther Margolis, Linda Sunshine, and Timothy Shaner.
Extra Special Thanks to John Lesher. Someday I’ll write the true thank-you page your way.
P.T. Anderson
Los Angeles, California
October 1999
October 1999
I entered into writing this script with a massive dedication to writing something small and intimate and cheap. One hundred and ninety pages later, I feel pretty good about the result.
This is, I believe, an interesting study in a writer writing from his gut. Writing from the gut usually equals quite a many pages. Being a “new, hot young director” usually means that, for once, you can get away with not cutting anything. So for better or worse, consider this screenplay completely written from the gut.
I am from the San Fernando Valley. For many years, I was ashamed of this fact, thinking if I was not from the big city of New York or the farm fields of Iowa that I had nothing to say. Once I got over who I was and where I was from, I found my love for Los Angeles. I hope that this is a true Los Angeles Movie. In particular, I have aimed to make the Mother Of All Movies About The San Fernando Valley.
I write to music so I better own up to stealing quite a many lines from Aimee Mann, who provides all the songs in the film. The first line of Aimee’s song “Deathly” goes something like this: “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing me again?” This may sound familiar. You can find it somewhere in the final thirty pages of this script. I heard that line and wrote backwards. This “original” screenplay could, for all intents and purposes, be called an adaption of Aimee Mann songs. I owe her some cash, probably.
The connection of writing “from the gut” and “writing to music” cannot be found any clearer than in the “Wise Up” section of the screenplay. I had reached the end of Earl’s monologue and was searching for a little vibe – I was lost a bit, and on the headphones came Aimee singing “Wise Up.” I wrote as I listened – and the most natural course of action was that everyone should sing – sing how the feel. In the most good old-fashioned Hollywood Musical Way, each character, and the writer, began singing how they felt. This is one of those things that happens, and I was either too stupid or not scared enough to hit “delete” once done. Next thing you know, you’re filming it. And I’m Really Happy It Happened.
I’ll try and narrow down the blah-blah-blah here and get on with it, but being a writer, I can’t stop, so let me thank a few people who made this possible.
I’d like to thank Fiona Apple. She is my girlfriend and we share a home. She is a songwriter. She is one of the greatest songwriters, and she has taught me something that I’d never really known before: Honest and clear is possible and good and it makes for better storytelling. I think I knew this before I met her but I didn’t exactly know how to do it.
While I was writing this script, she was writing songs. I was able to witness the translation of emotion into verbs, nouns, and letters that equaled “Lines in a song.” She taught me about clarity and about something I’d only sort-a-had, which is this thing I’ve talked about: “Trust the gut.”
“Trust the gut” equals quite a many pages. So blame her. Thank you, love.
Thank you to My Actors. I like to call them “My Actors” because I’m incredibly possessive and protective of them, and all I do is in aid of watching them act. I think I’ve done best when I think of them. I aim to please them, I aim to watch them work and the result has meant quite a many pages. Blame them.
Thank you to my producer, JoAnne Sellar, for waiting patiently. Patience and constant support is what everyone needs, and adding some love and affection and parenting into potion usually equals quite a many pages. So blame her.
Thank you to anyone who wanted to listen or read or see this picture. I’ve never been so happy, emotional, embarrassed, humble, egotistical, or surprised with myself as I am with Magnolia. I hope all that that implies is good for reading. I set out to write a great movie. In the most honest and unashamed way, I truly set myself up to write a great movie. I’m not ashamed. I’ve written from my gut and I will not be ashamed. Besides, it’s far too late now.
And one thing I know is this: I’d do it again. So blame me.
Thank you, Dylan Tichenor, Jen Barrons, Daniel Lupi, Mike De Luca, “An Incomplete Education,” by Judy Jones and William Wilson, Charles Fort, Michael Penn, Jon Brion, Bumble Ward, Peter Sorel, Brian Kehew, Esther Margolis, Linda Sunshine, and Timothy Shaner.
Extra Special Thanks to John Lesher. Someday I’ll write the true thank-you page your way.
P.T. Anderson
Los Angeles, California
October 1999
Thursday, 16 December 1999
December 16, 1999
Archived update from Cigarettes & Coffee, run by Greg Mariotti & CJ Wallis from 1999-2005
Paul Chat Session TonightPaul just completed a chat session tonight at 9:00 EST/ 6:00 PST with Yahoo! There were some decent questions and some typically funny PTA responses. I will post the transcript as soon as it's ready.
Magnolia Wins More Awards and NominationsMagnolia edged out Being John Malkovich and was named best film of the year by the Toronto Film Critics Association. Paul Thomas Anderson was also awarded Best Director and Best Screenplay (Tied with Being John Malkovich). I will update the site with any awards Magnolia wins as they are announced. Here is the complete list:Best PictureMagnoliaBest DirectorPaul Thomas AndersonBest ScreenplayMagnolia - Paul Thomas Anderson
The Golden Satellite nominations were also announced today. These are chosen by the International Press Academy. Magnolia garnered a few more:Best PictureBest Supporting Actor - Tom CruiseBest Director - Paul Thomas AndersonBest Screenplay - Paul Thomas AndersonBest Original Song - Save Me (Aimee Mann)Best Ensemble Cast
Interview: Time/Yahoo! Chat Transcript
Time-Yahoo Chat Transcript
December 16, 1999
Timehost: Thanks for coming to our TIME Auditorium tonight. We're really pleased to have Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of the new movie Magnolia, he's also the director of Boogie Nights. And the great movie, which many more people should go back and take a look at Hard Eight. Magnolia is likely to be an enormous hit this Christmas season...a serious, ambitious movie for adults. The first question concerns Boogie Nights. One of the chatters is writing a paper about it and sees the characters as using pornography to achieve their version of the American Dream. He asks if he is off the mark...
Paul Thomas Anderson: There's no way to be way off the mark with Boogie Nights. It's all incredibly coherent and completely contradictory. So when it comes to pornography, anything flies. The one thing I would say is that I don't think many people in pornography seek out pornography. It usually finds them.
film_fantom: Did you make short films when you were a kid?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Yes. On camcorders in my later teens. When I was 17 or 18 I started shooting things on film.
film_fantom: What advice would you give an aspiring young filmmaker like myself?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Writing is the key. When you write your own material you hold all the cards. All ammunition comes from the script. P.S. Watch all of Alexander McKendrick's movies.
major_danby: You made the Dirk Diggler Story ten years before Boogie Nights, where you surprised by the latter's phenomenal takings in light of its precursor? Which of the two do you prefer in all honesty?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Just to clarify, the Dirk Diggler Story was a 30 minutes story I made when I was 17 years old on videotape and structured as a fictional documentary. I have a sweet spot in my heart for it. But I'll reach for Boogie Nights any day of the week.
Timehost: Is it possible for people to see the Dirk Diggler Story?
Paul Thomas Anderson: It may be some time down the line...right now I'm keeping it to myself.
major_danby: Was getting the Magnolia cast together as hard as it looks on paper?
Paul Thomas Anderson: No. It was relatively painless because while I was writing I could call up to the actors who were my friends in the film and make sure that they could clear their schedules for my projected finish date on the script.
omphalos_99: What was the last movie you saw that you learned something from?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I watched Ace in the Hole, a.k.a., The Big Carnival, a few nights ago and it inspired me to really go back and learn the good old fashioned rules movie storytelling. I'll be watching a lot more Billy Wilder in my time off.
spredpanicwide: When will we be able to see Magnolia nationwide ?
Paul Thomas Anderson: January 7th.
pluigi13: What was it like visiting Kubrick's set in England when Tom Cruise got you in??
Paul Thomas Anderson: Everything a geek dreams -- and more. It was totally inspiring. He works with a very small crew, but that's what allows him to shoot for so long. It was wonderful to look at someone who had created their own very specific way of making a movie.
Timehost: Was there pressure to cut Magnolia down for the holiday ?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Which holiday? No, there was no pressure to cut it down. New Line was incredibly supportive of what I wanted to do.
superball9: How does Aimee Mann and Michael Penn's duet of "Christmastime" fit in with Hard Eight? I just saw that picture this past week and for the life of me could not figure out its relation to the film?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I'll have to go back and watch it myself to answer that one.
major_danby: In Hard Eight and Boogie Nights you wrote brilliantly about gambling and porn respectively.... is this from personal experience? (lol) How did you research, or did you just guess?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I researched pornography after I had written the film. I just wanted to verify that what I thought was the truth was in fact the truth. And I turned out to be pretty close. As far as gambling, I have done it since forever.
tpowell123_99r: Were you always confident in your writing/directing? I find myself constantly second-guessing myself. How did you feel about your writing when you were, say, 20?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I was very frustrated that I wasn't better faster. I knew what I wanted to write. I just wasn't able to get it down on paper properly. I'm not sure I've completely overcome that, but I have gotten much better and more confident.
retrovertigo24_1999: How long was the shoot for Magnolia?
Paul Thomas Anderson: 100 days. We were scheduled for 80 days but through the brilliance of my producer Joanne Sellar we went 20 days over and stayed UNDER budget.
Jerome_The_Overweight_Lover: What do you think of Digital Video?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Digital video for digital video is wonderful. Digital video projecting film is not wonderful. I don't ever want to see one of my films projected digitally in a MOVIE theater.
Necro56: Who are some of your idols as directors?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Jonathan Demme. Max Ophuls. Stanley Kubrick. And the traditional group of Altman, Scorcese and Welles. And the list goes on and on.
theirreal420: How did you pick the actors to play the roles? I thought you made an excellent choice with Mark Wahlberg. He brought sex appeal to the screen.
Paul Thomas Anderson: I write specifically for the actors that are in the film. Every once in a while I won't have someone, as in the case of Marky, and I'll just have to go looking. I love actors and I think that one of my main reasons for writing is only in aid of watching them act.
kv63: Paul, now that Magnolia is going to be released have you started thinking about your next project, and if so what will it be?
Paul Thomas Anderson: All I know is that it will be really, really, really, really short.
major_danby: What do you consider the turning point in your career - what one incident propelled you into the big league?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I suppose I would have to say the success of Boogie Nights. That's assuming I am in the big leagues and not just in my own big-headed league.
avrilincandenza: Do you have any literary influences?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Salinger, for sure, just like everyone. And Mamet, who I consider a literary influence. I love David Goodis, who wrote Nightfall, The Burglar, Black Friday, and Shoot the Piano Player.
tunaface: are there any particular actors or actresses you'd like to work with--some who might surprise us?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I would love to work with Daniel Day Lewis. Juliette Binoche. And I wish Chris Farley was still around, because I would have loved to have gotten my hands on him.
Bogart_100: Do you let your editor present you with a rough cut or do you sit down with him/her and bang one out?
Paul Thomas Anderson: It's a very weird combination of both. I don't exactly know how to describe our editing process except that it's very blurry. We don't cut in a very traditional way.
lil_cate: If you had an unlimited budget what would your dream project be?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Raise the Titanic 2.
TYLER22M_03: In the movie Boogie Nights, what ever happened to the Oriental Firecracker Man. He was there in one scene and we never see what happened to him?
Paul Thomas Anderson: You'll find out in the sequel.
pluigi13: Was it difficult to shoot the casino scenes in Hard Eight, with a movie like Swingers and Leaving Las Vegas the casinos where not too kind with letting the crew shoot.
Paul Thomas Anderson: We actually shot the movie before those two movies were shot. We were released afterwards. Besides that, we were shooting in Reno, which is far more amenable than Las Vegas.
tunaface: Have you acted yourself and would you consider a role in one of your own movies?
Paul Thomas Anderson: No, never, no way, not, NO, NO, NO. Maybe.
filmbuffmatt: Are you partial to the films of John Cassavettes or Jean Luc Goddard?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Not just as movies but as models for budgets and practicality. It's wonderfully inspiring to think of him using his own home as the set of his own films. I love Godard in a very film school way. I cant say that I've ever been emotionally attacked by him. Where I have been emotionally attacked by Truffaut.
lil_cate: Tell us about your rumored collaboration with J.Demme...
Paul Thomas Anderson: It's a rumor...and it's true. And it's not exactly clear on what it is. But it will be.
ticker74: What kind of camera did you first start using?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I started out using a video camera when I was a kid, then I started using 8mm film, and I realized that video was much easier. When I was 17, I bought a Bolex 16mm camera, and started to experiment.
Timehost: How did you and your producer meet up?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Joanne Sellar is Daniel Lupi's wife. Daniel Lupi was the production manager on Hard Eight. So I initially met her as his wife. She was independently producing her own things, and I just really fell in love with her way. So she became a producer of Boogie Nights, along with a few others, I hope it stays that way for her.
omphalos_99: I know you prefer writing your own material, but if you could adapt one piece from another medium, what would you choose?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I already feel like I've adapted songs -- Aimee Mann's music was a major source of inspiration for Magnolia. It could be considered an adaptation of her music. Someday I would like to adapt a book or do one of those TV show movies.
ticker74: In Hard 8 did you let the actors ad lib because the dialogue sounded so real.
Paul Thomas Anderson: In Hard Eight, there was a very minor amount of ad lib. In Boogie Nights, there was a very large amount of ad lib. Magnolia has almost no ad libbing.
major_danby: This isn't a question, more of a request.... if the timing fits - one day will you please, please, please bring something to the Edinburgh Film Festival (in Scotland) and do a masterclass (Spielberg has even done it with the ET launch and this year's was David Mamet)?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Sounds like good company to be in. I love Scottish food. McDonalds is my favorite restaurant.
Timehost: Our time is running out, so if you have any closing thoughts....
Paul Thomas Anderson: Let me say...vote Anderson. And please give me $8.50. Get two movies for the price of one. And one last thing: even if you don't like it, please say that you do.
Timehost: Thank you very much. We appreciate your joining us tonight. And thanks for all your questions. They were great.
December 16, 1999
Timehost: Thanks for coming to our TIME Auditorium tonight. We're really pleased to have Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of the new movie Magnolia, he's also the director of Boogie Nights. And the great movie, which many more people should go back and take a look at Hard Eight. Magnolia is likely to be an enormous hit this Christmas season...a serious, ambitious movie for adults. The first question concerns Boogie Nights. One of the chatters is writing a paper about it and sees the characters as using pornography to achieve their version of the American Dream. He asks if he is off the mark...
Paul Thomas Anderson: There's no way to be way off the mark with Boogie Nights. It's all incredibly coherent and completely contradictory. So when it comes to pornography, anything flies. The one thing I would say is that I don't think many people in pornography seek out pornography. It usually finds them.
film_fantom: Did you make short films when you were a kid?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Yes. On camcorders in my later teens. When I was 17 or 18 I started shooting things on film.
film_fantom: What advice would you give an aspiring young filmmaker like myself?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Writing is the key. When you write your own material you hold all the cards. All ammunition comes from the script. P.S. Watch all of Alexander McKendrick's movies.
major_danby: You made the Dirk Diggler Story ten years before Boogie Nights, where you surprised by the latter's phenomenal takings in light of its precursor? Which of the two do you prefer in all honesty?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Just to clarify, the Dirk Diggler Story was a 30 minutes story I made when I was 17 years old on videotape and structured as a fictional documentary. I have a sweet spot in my heart for it. But I'll reach for Boogie Nights any day of the week.
Timehost: Is it possible for people to see the Dirk Diggler Story?
Paul Thomas Anderson: It may be some time down the line...right now I'm keeping it to myself.
major_danby: Was getting the Magnolia cast together as hard as it looks on paper?
Paul Thomas Anderson: No. It was relatively painless because while I was writing I could call up to the actors who were my friends in the film and make sure that they could clear their schedules for my projected finish date on the script.
omphalos_99: What was the last movie you saw that you learned something from?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I watched Ace in the Hole, a.k.a., The Big Carnival, a few nights ago and it inspired me to really go back and learn the good old fashioned rules movie storytelling. I'll be watching a lot more Billy Wilder in my time off.
spredpanicwide: When will we be able to see Magnolia nationwide ?
Paul Thomas Anderson: January 7th.
pluigi13: What was it like visiting Kubrick's set in England when Tom Cruise got you in??
Paul Thomas Anderson: Everything a geek dreams -- and more. It was totally inspiring. He works with a very small crew, but that's what allows him to shoot for so long. It was wonderful to look at someone who had created their own very specific way of making a movie.
Timehost: Was there pressure to cut Magnolia down for the holiday ?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Which holiday? No, there was no pressure to cut it down. New Line was incredibly supportive of what I wanted to do.
superball9: How does Aimee Mann and Michael Penn's duet of "Christmastime" fit in with Hard Eight? I just saw that picture this past week and for the life of me could not figure out its relation to the film?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I'll have to go back and watch it myself to answer that one.
major_danby: In Hard Eight and Boogie Nights you wrote brilliantly about gambling and porn respectively.... is this from personal experience? (lol) How did you research, or did you just guess?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I researched pornography after I had written the film. I just wanted to verify that what I thought was the truth was in fact the truth. And I turned out to be pretty close. As far as gambling, I have done it since forever.
tpowell123_99r: Were you always confident in your writing/directing? I find myself constantly second-guessing myself. How did you feel about your writing when you were, say, 20?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I was very frustrated that I wasn't better faster. I knew what I wanted to write. I just wasn't able to get it down on paper properly. I'm not sure I've completely overcome that, but I have gotten much better and more confident.
retrovertigo24_1999: How long was the shoot for Magnolia?
Paul Thomas Anderson: 100 days. We were scheduled for 80 days but through the brilliance of my producer Joanne Sellar we went 20 days over and stayed UNDER budget.
Jerome_The_Overweight_Lover: What do you think of Digital Video?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Digital video for digital video is wonderful. Digital video projecting film is not wonderful. I don't ever want to see one of my films projected digitally in a MOVIE theater.
Necro56: Who are some of your idols as directors?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Jonathan Demme. Max Ophuls. Stanley Kubrick. And the traditional group of Altman, Scorcese and Welles. And the list goes on and on.
theirreal420: How did you pick the actors to play the roles? I thought you made an excellent choice with Mark Wahlberg. He brought sex appeal to the screen.
Paul Thomas Anderson: I write specifically for the actors that are in the film. Every once in a while I won't have someone, as in the case of Marky, and I'll just have to go looking. I love actors and I think that one of my main reasons for writing is only in aid of watching them act.
kv63: Paul, now that Magnolia is going to be released have you started thinking about your next project, and if so what will it be?
Paul Thomas Anderson: All I know is that it will be really, really, really, really short.
major_danby: What do you consider the turning point in your career - what one incident propelled you into the big league?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I suppose I would have to say the success of Boogie Nights. That's assuming I am in the big leagues and not just in my own big-headed league.
avrilincandenza: Do you have any literary influences?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Salinger, for sure, just like everyone. And Mamet, who I consider a literary influence. I love David Goodis, who wrote Nightfall, The Burglar, Black Friday, and Shoot the Piano Player.
tunaface: are there any particular actors or actresses you'd like to work with--some who might surprise us?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I would love to work with Daniel Day Lewis. Juliette Binoche. And I wish Chris Farley was still around, because I would have loved to have gotten my hands on him.
Bogart_100: Do you let your editor present you with a rough cut or do you sit down with him/her and bang one out?
Paul Thomas Anderson: It's a very weird combination of both. I don't exactly know how to describe our editing process except that it's very blurry. We don't cut in a very traditional way.
lil_cate: If you had an unlimited budget what would your dream project be?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Raise the Titanic 2.
TYLER22M_03: In the movie Boogie Nights, what ever happened to the Oriental Firecracker Man. He was there in one scene and we never see what happened to him?
Paul Thomas Anderson: You'll find out in the sequel.
pluigi13: Was it difficult to shoot the casino scenes in Hard Eight, with a movie like Swingers and Leaving Las Vegas the casinos where not too kind with letting the crew shoot.
Paul Thomas Anderson: We actually shot the movie before those two movies were shot. We were released afterwards. Besides that, we were shooting in Reno, which is far more amenable than Las Vegas.
tunaface: Have you acted yourself and would you consider a role in one of your own movies?
Paul Thomas Anderson: No, never, no way, not, NO, NO, NO. Maybe.
filmbuffmatt: Are you partial to the films of John Cassavettes or Jean Luc Goddard?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Not just as movies but as models for budgets and practicality. It's wonderfully inspiring to think of him using his own home as the set of his own films. I love Godard in a very film school way. I cant say that I've ever been emotionally attacked by him. Where I have been emotionally attacked by Truffaut.
lil_cate: Tell us about your rumored collaboration with J.Demme...
Paul Thomas Anderson: It's a rumor...and it's true. And it's not exactly clear on what it is. But it will be.
ticker74: What kind of camera did you first start using?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I started out using a video camera when I was a kid, then I started using 8mm film, and I realized that video was much easier. When I was 17, I bought a Bolex 16mm camera, and started to experiment.
Timehost: How did you and your producer meet up?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Joanne Sellar is Daniel Lupi's wife. Daniel Lupi was the production manager on Hard Eight. So I initially met her as his wife. She was independently producing her own things, and I just really fell in love with her way. So she became a producer of Boogie Nights, along with a few others, I hope it stays that way for her.
omphalos_99: I know you prefer writing your own material, but if you could adapt one piece from another medium, what would you choose?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I already feel like I've adapted songs -- Aimee Mann's music was a major source of inspiration for Magnolia. It could be considered an adaptation of her music. Someday I would like to adapt a book or do one of those TV show movies.
ticker74: In Hard 8 did you let the actors ad lib because the dialogue sounded so real.
Paul Thomas Anderson: In Hard Eight, there was a very minor amount of ad lib. In Boogie Nights, there was a very large amount of ad lib. Magnolia has almost no ad libbing.
major_danby: This isn't a question, more of a request.... if the timing fits - one day will you please, please, please bring something to the Edinburgh Film Festival (in Scotland) and do a masterclass (Spielberg has even done it with the ET launch and this year's was David Mamet)?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Sounds like good company to be in. I love Scottish food. McDonalds is my favorite restaurant.
Timehost: Our time is running out, so if you have any closing thoughts....
Paul Thomas Anderson: Let me say...vote Anderson. And please give me $8.50. Get two movies for the price of one. And one last thing: even if you don't like it, please say that you do.
Timehost: Thank you very much. We appreciate your joining us tonight. And thanks for all your questions. They were great.
Sunday, 12 December 1999
Interview: L.A. Times
Los Angeles Times, Written By Patrick Goldstein
December 12, 1999
The New New Wave
Move over, Mr. Coppola. Take a seat, Mr. Scorsese. It's time for the next generation of film directors to shake things up, in the spirit of the French film rebels of yore.
Not long after his second movie Boogie Nights arrived on a crest of critical accolades, director Paul Thomas Anderson was asked to dinner by Warren Beatty. "I told him I'd love to go," says the brash 29-year-old director, who'd flirted with casting Beatty as Jack Horner, porno king of the San Fernando Valley, a part ultimately played by Burt Reynolds.
"But I told him, 'We're going somewhere public, a really brightly lit place where everyone will see I'm having dinner with Warren Beatty.' "
Beatty took him to Mandarette, one of the star's favorite eateries. While they were having dinner, Francis Ford Coppola stopped by to visit. Coppola offered Anderson a piece of advice. "This is the one moment when you have it, when you can do whatever you want to do," the director told him. "It's the one moment when you have a clean slate, with no stigma attached. And even if your next movie makes $400 million and gets eight Oscars, you'll still have to fight battles that you'll never have to fight right now. So whatever you want to do, do it now."
It was a symbolic passing of the torch: the battle-scarred godfather of 1970s cinema offering Jedi-like advice to the fresh-faced standard-bearer for Hollywood's new generation of hot young film directors. Just as Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut of the French New Wave revolutionized cinema in the early 1960s, Anderson and his peers are shaking up the film world today. They've adopted the Coppola mantra: It's your moment, so just do it.
As the century comes to a close, Hollywood has finally caught up with the explosion of creative energy that had been operating outside the studio mainstream.
Faced with a fast-emerging demographic wave of restless young moviegoers, the major studios have wooed, embraced and perhaps co-opted a fresh generation of film talent. In fact, the moment has arrived for a legion of new directors whom New Line President Mike De Luca calls "all the young dudes."
"Directors are the rock stars of the end of this century," says Jersey Films Co-Chairman Stacey Sher, whose company has nurtured such filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Andrew Niccol. "You can see the burst of new energy everywhere. Kids now think they can pick up a camera and express themselves in the same way that they used to pick up a guitar and start a band."
The "dudes" list starts with Anderson, whose new film, Magnolia, due out Friday, is already being touted as one of the year's most ambitious films. But the new wunderkinder are everywhere. (Click here for LA Times list)
Next year will bring even more kinetic thrills, with ambitious new movies due from Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects), Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet) and Darren Aronofsky (Pi).
The New New Wave directors are hardly kindred spirits. Some are classic storytellers, others are dazzling stylists. Some revel in whimsy or hipster cool, while others have a youthful fondness for brazen, jokey excess. Few learned their trade in film school. Spike Jonze made skateboard videos and ran a teen boys zine called Dirt. David O. Russell was a political organizer who made documentaries about Central American immigrants. Kimberly Peirce studied literature at the University of Chicago and raced motorcycles in Thailand. Except for Peirce, it's a boys' club of largely self-taught writer-directors who aren't as easily identifiable as Goddard and Truffaut of the French New Wave or as chummy as Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were in their heyday.
What they do share is youth, ambition and media savvy. They also have the hip-hop culture's fascination with scavenging and then reinventing old genres, using a rapid-fire, often nonlinear style of storytelling that's influenced by TV ads, music videos, Web surfing and video games.
As a group, the New New Wave directors are cocky and assertive, but without the hubris, pretense and drug-fueled mania of the '70s-era directors as described in Peter Biskind's 1998 book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." They're also pragmatic--they don't have the instinctive hostility toward studio "suits" that marked much of the indie film movement of the early 1990s.
But in Hollywood, regardless of which generation you come from, the biggest hurdle is coping with the seduction of success.
"For a young filmmaker, the enemy isn't the studio or the critics, it's self-importance," says Soderbergh, who was the man of the moment a decade ago after making "sex, lies and videotape." "This is a gifted group of young directors, but what will happen to them is strictly a function of character. It takes a great amount of effort to stay hungry, but it's far preferable than self-importance, which is what has brought down nearly every great filmmaker."
One day, when Paul Thomas Anderson is working on TV commercials for Magnolia, his editor, Dylan Tichenor, receives a call from M. Night Shyamalan, who's getting $10 million for his next film after the success of The Sixth Sense. As soon as Tichenor hangs up the phone, Anderson teases him about the job prospect. "Hey, what'd your new best friend, Mr. Big Time Movie Maker, have to say? I hope he's gonna give you some of those 10 million smackers," he says. "Better yet, do it for no money and get some fucking points. It's about time editors started saying, 'Give me some points too!' "
As with everything else in Hollywood, economics plays a big role in the arrival of this New New Wave. For the past decade, the industry has been dominated by a group of fiftysomething directors--known in industry shorthand as "Ovitz directors" for their ties to former Creative Artists Agency czar Michael Ovitz--who served as magnets for the top star talent. They made hit movies, but at an increasingly hefty price, earning roughly $6 million a film, plus 10% of the studio's first-dollar gross.
It was a double whammy. As the older directors' movies became more expensive, they also became more out of touch with today's youthful moviegoers. The result: The studios were saddled with a series of costly duds from such top names as Sydney Pollack, Rob Reiner, Ivan Reitman, John McTiernan, Harold Becker and Martin Brest.
"We're desperate for new talent," says Disney Films Chairman Joe Roth. "A lot of the older directors have gotten preoccupied with the preview process and selling the picture. The young directors haven't been poisoned by the Hollywood system. When Wes Anderson walks into the room, you just light up. He doesn't feel like a guy who's pitching a softball at 40 mph. He's got energy and fresh ideas--he's always throwing knuckle balls."
The fresh ideas come from all sorts of unlikely sources--almost anywhere but film school. "Film school is a complete con," says Paul Thomas Anderson. "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."
Spike Jonze's visual sensibility is shaped by old TV shows--his music video reel includes spoofy reworkings of Starsky and Hutch and Happy Days episodes. "The Matrix's" 360-degree freeze-frame effect borrows from the Gap's "Khakis Swing" ad. The Blair Witch Project derived much of its impact from the fuzzy, urban-legend ethos of the Internet. Go and Run Lola Run are fueled by the headlong blast of a video game. Magnolia takes much of its storytelling inspiration from a collection of Aimee Mann songs, one of which Anderson's characters sings, music-video-style, in the middle of the movie.
"I really set out to write an adaptation of her songs," Anderson says. "One of the characters in the movie says, 'Now that I met you, would you object to never seeing me again?' I completely stole that from one of Aimee's songs. For me, she's like the way Simon & Garfunkel were to The Graduate or Cat Stevens to Harold and Maude. Her songs become the built-in voice of the movie, tying all the stories together."
These disparate new-media influences are pushing films toward a new generational aesthetic. "The young directors have a fascinating new kind of browser mentality," says Bill Block, president of Artisan Films, which released Blair Witch and Aronofsky's Pi. "They've grown up immersed in MTV and Nintendo and PlayStation, and it's the software that's influencing the sensibility. Most of these films have bypassed the old studio-executive character arc rules. It's just a straight line now, like a bullet."
The New New Wave directors have a new sensibility about career maintenance, too. Anderson can quote from practically any Robert Altman film, but he also has an almost scholarly knowledge of the career arcs of his favorite directors. When he was editing Magnolia, he went to a pair of revered elders, Jonathan Demme and Robert Towne, for advice.
"These guys are very knowledgeable students of film history," says Biskind, author of "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." "They see the shambles that a lot of the '70s guys made of their careers. So they don't seem to have the enormous flamboyant personalities that you saw in the '70s. And they've grown up in a culture that's a lot more sober-minded than the coke culture that sent so many directors into outer space."
The younger generation doesn't have such a self-indulgent lifestyle--Anderson is a habitué of McDonald's, not Mortons. But he's just as insistent about his creative freedom as his '70s predecessors. Even though Boogie Nights was more of a critical success than a financial one--it grossed a modest $24 million in domestic box office--Anderson cajoled New Line into giving him final cut on Magnolia and according to De Luca, New Line gave Anderson a $150,000 budget to create alternative trailers and posters for the film. Anderson also has approval of the film's Web site design.
Warner Bros. production chief Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, who lobbied to bring Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski and David O. Russell into the studio fold, admits that he battled "in a good way" with Russell during the making of Three Kings. A longtime indie filmmaker, Russell insisted on casting director pal Jonze as one of the movie's other lead characters, even though he'd never acted before.
"I told him it was crazy and could screw up the whole movie," recalls Di Bonaventura. "But you can't tell a director to be daring and then get nervous when they really are daring. We tested Spike and he was great, so I told David, 'I still think it's crazy, but if you really want to do it, I'll back you.' When David wanted to use four different film stocks, we had the same debate. But we looked at his test footage and it made the film look so fresh that I said, 'OK, I'm nervous about this too, but I'll back you.'
"You have to look at this as the studio having a partnership with a director, so we try to challenge their vision, but if they really believe in something, we support them."
After the critical raves she got on the low-budget Boys Don't Cry, Peirce is now being wooed by studios too. She's proceeding with trepidation, having read of the struggles that her idols Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles had with studios in the past.
"To me, creative control is everything, so you have to be cautious, because studios are corporations and you're not," she explains. "People are already offering me $50-million movies. And while I'm not saying no, you have to realize that to have creative freedom, you have to accept limitations. So you figure that if you take less money for your budget, you can have more control over the cast or script."
The old indie attitude, which cast studio executives as rulers of an evil empire, has been replaced by a desire to accomplish what Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock did decades ago--make commercial movies with a personal sensibility. "These directors have a healthy ambition in the best sense, that they don't want their films to just play at the Nuart," says UTA agent John Lesher, who represents Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Russell and Peirce. "They're fiercely independent, but they don't want to just be arty, niche filmmakers. And they came along at a good time. Because after Pulp Fiction came out and made $100 million, the studios all woke up and said, 'What's that all about?' "
If anyone is the embodiment of a New New Wave director at full throttle, it's Paul Thomas Anderson, who's still so boyishly unprepossessing that when he's in the men's room at Art's Deli, his favorite haunt, a patron asks if he's the guy who runs valet parking. In Hollywood, though, he's getting the spotlight treatment. When the phone rings, it's Harvey Weinstein or Tom Cruise or his girlfriend, pop star Fiona Apple, whom he asks to buy some new pants for him when she's out shopping. One day he's out hanging with Tarantino, now a close friend, who's writing a new movie (described as "his Dirty Dozen war movie") and doing a cameo role in Adam Sandler's new film. The week of Thanksgiving, Anderson flew to Paris with longtime hero Jonathan Demme, where the two were plotting a possible joint project.
When Anderson stops in for dinner at Art's, the young waitress treats him like a king, mostly because she saw him there on Thanksgiving with Apple, having a hot turkey sandwich. Full of the kind of infectious enthusiasm that's fueled by Diet Cokes and Camel cigarettes, he admits he still doesn't know "if I'm the type of guy who'd want to run the world like Spielberg or retreat to a mansion in London like Kubrick. I haven't got it figured out yet."
His new film, a three-hour opus called Magnolia, has an ensemble cast that includes Cruise and Jason Robards, as well as Boogie Nights holdovers Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It uses the low-slung sprawl of the San Fernando Valley as a backdrop for a saga of intertwined family dramas.
Anderson calls the Valley his "back lot." Driving around in his Mercedes van one night, a milkshake in one hand, he acts as tour guide, pointing out favorite old haunts:
There, on the right, is Van Nuys High, where Roller Girl went to school in Boogie Nights. Here, at Magnolia and Whitsett, is the Foxfire bar, setting for one of Macy's big scenes in Magnolia. Soon we're at the intersection of Reseda and Sherman Way, scene of the opening shot from Boogie Nights. Over on Ventura Boulevard near Laurel Canyon is the Du-par's where Jack Horner teaches Dirk Diggler about the movie business.
Back at Reseda and Sherman Way, Anderson veers into a gas station. "This is our Mobil station," he says. "See that telephone poll, over by the appliance store? That's the pole Bill Macy climbs in Magnolia. . . . Up on the right on Sherman Way is a Miss Donut shop. . . . That's what we used for the Don Cheadle doughnut shop scene in Boogie Nights, Anderson says.
Anderson is such a creature of movies that it's sometimes hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins. When he was a kid, Anderson went to see E.T. and began dressing as Henry Thomas, determined to ride his bike off into the clouds. After he saw Rocky, he started drinking five eggs at breakfast and running every morning.
"I never had a backup plan other than directing films. I remember doing exactly what movies told me to do. Every time I eat mashed potatoes, I still think of Close Encounters."
Growing up in Studio City, Anderson got much of his love for film from his father, the late Ernie Anderson, a late-night horror movie TV host in Cleveland before he moved to L.A. to become a voice-over actor. (Anderson's production company, Ghoulardi Films, takes its name from his father's TV host character.) When Paul was 12, Ernie bought him a video camera. As a high school senior he made The Dirk Diggler Story, a 30-minute Boogie Nights prototype about a boy breaking into the sex film trade.
Anderson never went to college, working instead as a messenger and production assistant for a TV game show, "Quiz Kid Challenge," an experience he incorporated into Magnolia. After writing a few scripts, he made a short film that earned him an invitation to develop a feature at the Sundance Filmmakers Workshop. By the time he was 24, he'd directed his first movie, Hard Eight, which he says was mangled by its distributors, Rysher Entertainment, of whom he says with obvious relish, "those fuckers are out of business now, thank God."
Since then, Anderson has sought as much control as possible over his films. As he puts it: "I learned that 50% of my job is directing the movie. The other 50% is managing the studio." When he delivered the Magnolia script, only a few select New Line executives, including Mike De Luca, were allowed to read it. Anderson's crew had to sign nondisclosure agreements before being hired to work on the film.
Why such jealously guarded control? Anderson says that the bad experience he had on his first film "caused me to be slightly paranoid and obsessively controlling because I don't want to be burned like that again." When he first met with De Luca on Boogie Nights, Anderson went through the script line by line, telling him "when the movie comes out, it's got to look just like that," prompting De Luca to say, "Dude, fucking calm down!"
Anderson says he cut his own trailers as a way of circumventing the widespread studio practice of using a trailer to tell the entire story of a movie. "It spoils something. I think it's a more exciting experience if the movie is still a mystery when you see it. So with my trailer, I tell you about the characters, but I don't tell the story because, frankly, there's nine complicated, intersecting lives and I didn't want people to say, 'Oh, it's like Slackers or Short Cuts."
Like most of his director peers, Anderson is still struggling to find his identity; he's young enough to harbor lofty ambitions, but old enough to worry about the pitfalls of passing through what Beck, one of his favorite musicians, calls "the door of success."
"I want my movies to be appreciated, and I want the attention that any damaged person would want," he says late one night, driving back from the Valley. "But I don't want the whole spotlight--that would be too much of whatever that thing is you want."
He remembers walking down the street one night with Tarantino, astounded that so many people seemed to recognize the young director. "These people would come lurching out of the bushes, yelling, 'Quentin, dude! What's up man! That movie really rocked!' And of course, when they went running away, without noticing me, I was going, hey, you know, I directed Boogie Nights."
Anderson lights up a cigarette, blowing a cloud of smoke out the car window. "Is it possible that when you get older you get a little more clarity on these things?"
December 12, 1999
The New New Wave
Move over, Mr. Coppola. Take a seat, Mr. Scorsese. It's time for the next generation of film directors to shake things up, in the spirit of the French film rebels of yore.
Not long after his second movie Boogie Nights arrived on a crest of critical accolades, director Paul Thomas Anderson was asked to dinner by Warren Beatty. "I told him I'd love to go," says the brash 29-year-old director, who'd flirted with casting Beatty as Jack Horner, porno king of the San Fernando Valley, a part ultimately played by Burt Reynolds.
"But I told him, 'We're going somewhere public, a really brightly lit place where everyone will see I'm having dinner with Warren Beatty.' "
Beatty took him to Mandarette, one of the star's favorite eateries. While they were having dinner, Francis Ford Coppola stopped by to visit. Coppola offered Anderson a piece of advice. "This is the one moment when you have it, when you can do whatever you want to do," the director told him. "It's the one moment when you have a clean slate, with no stigma attached. And even if your next movie makes $400 million and gets eight Oscars, you'll still have to fight battles that you'll never have to fight right now. So whatever you want to do, do it now."
It was a symbolic passing of the torch: the battle-scarred godfather of 1970s cinema offering Jedi-like advice to the fresh-faced standard-bearer for Hollywood's new generation of hot young film directors. Just as Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut of the French New Wave revolutionized cinema in the early 1960s, Anderson and his peers are shaking up the film world today. They've adopted the Coppola mantra: It's your moment, so just do it.
As the century comes to a close, Hollywood has finally caught up with the explosion of creative energy that had been operating outside the studio mainstream.
Faced with a fast-emerging demographic wave of restless young moviegoers, the major studios have wooed, embraced and perhaps co-opted a fresh generation of film talent. In fact, the moment has arrived for a legion of new directors whom New Line President Mike De Luca calls "all the young dudes."
"Directors are the rock stars of the end of this century," says Jersey Films Co-Chairman Stacey Sher, whose company has nurtured such filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Andrew Niccol. "You can see the burst of new energy everywhere. Kids now think they can pick up a camera and express themselves in the same way that they used to pick up a guitar and start a band."
The "dudes" list starts with Anderson, whose new film, Magnolia, due out Friday, is already being touted as one of the year's most ambitious films. But the new wunderkinder are everywhere. (Click here for LA Times list)
Next year will bring even more kinetic thrills, with ambitious new movies due from Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects), Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet) and Darren Aronofsky (Pi).
The New New Wave directors are hardly kindred spirits. Some are classic storytellers, others are dazzling stylists. Some revel in whimsy or hipster cool, while others have a youthful fondness for brazen, jokey excess. Few learned their trade in film school. Spike Jonze made skateboard videos and ran a teen boys zine called Dirt. David O. Russell was a political organizer who made documentaries about Central American immigrants. Kimberly Peirce studied literature at the University of Chicago and raced motorcycles in Thailand. Except for Peirce, it's a boys' club of largely self-taught writer-directors who aren't as easily identifiable as Goddard and Truffaut of the French New Wave or as chummy as Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were in their heyday.
What they do share is youth, ambition and media savvy. They also have the hip-hop culture's fascination with scavenging and then reinventing old genres, using a rapid-fire, often nonlinear style of storytelling that's influenced by TV ads, music videos, Web surfing and video games.
As a group, the New New Wave directors are cocky and assertive, but without the hubris, pretense and drug-fueled mania of the '70s-era directors as described in Peter Biskind's 1998 book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." They're also pragmatic--they don't have the instinctive hostility toward studio "suits" that marked much of the indie film movement of the early 1990s.
But in Hollywood, regardless of which generation you come from, the biggest hurdle is coping with the seduction of success.
"For a young filmmaker, the enemy isn't the studio or the critics, it's self-importance," says Soderbergh, who was the man of the moment a decade ago after making "sex, lies and videotape." "This is a gifted group of young directors, but what will happen to them is strictly a function of character. It takes a great amount of effort to stay hungry, but it's far preferable than self-importance, which is what has brought down nearly every great filmmaker."
One day, when Paul Thomas Anderson is working on TV commercials for Magnolia, his editor, Dylan Tichenor, receives a call from M. Night Shyamalan, who's getting $10 million for his next film after the success of The Sixth Sense. As soon as Tichenor hangs up the phone, Anderson teases him about the job prospect. "Hey, what'd your new best friend, Mr. Big Time Movie Maker, have to say? I hope he's gonna give you some of those 10 million smackers," he says. "Better yet, do it for no money and get some fucking points. It's about time editors started saying, 'Give me some points too!' "
As with everything else in Hollywood, economics plays a big role in the arrival of this New New Wave. For the past decade, the industry has been dominated by a group of fiftysomething directors--known in industry shorthand as "Ovitz directors" for their ties to former Creative Artists Agency czar Michael Ovitz--who served as magnets for the top star talent. They made hit movies, but at an increasingly hefty price, earning roughly $6 million a film, plus 10% of the studio's first-dollar gross.
It was a double whammy. As the older directors' movies became more expensive, they also became more out of touch with today's youthful moviegoers. The result: The studios were saddled with a series of costly duds from such top names as Sydney Pollack, Rob Reiner, Ivan Reitman, John McTiernan, Harold Becker and Martin Brest.
"We're desperate for new talent," says Disney Films Chairman Joe Roth. "A lot of the older directors have gotten preoccupied with the preview process and selling the picture. The young directors haven't been poisoned by the Hollywood system. When Wes Anderson walks into the room, you just light up. He doesn't feel like a guy who's pitching a softball at 40 mph. He's got energy and fresh ideas--he's always throwing knuckle balls."
The fresh ideas come from all sorts of unlikely sources--almost anywhere but film school. "Film school is a complete con," says Paul Thomas Anderson. "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."
Spike Jonze's visual sensibility is shaped by old TV shows--his music video reel includes spoofy reworkings of Starsky and Hutch and Happy Days episodes. "The Matrix's" 360-degree freeze-frame effect borrows from the Gap's "Khakis Swing" ad. The Blair Witch Project derived much of its impact from the fuzzy, urban-legend ethos of the Internet. Go and Run Lola Run are fueled by the headlong blast of a video game. Magnolia takes much of its storytelling inspiration from a collection of Aimee Mann songs, one of which Anderson's characters sings, music-video-style, in the middle of the movie.
"I really set out to write an adaptation of her songs," Anderson says. "One of the characters in the movie says, 'Now that I met you, would you object to never seeing me again?' I completely stole that from one of Aimee's songs. For me, she's like the way Simon & Garfunkel were to The Graduate or Cat Stevens to Harold and Maude. Her songs become the built-in voice of the movie, tying all the stories together."
These disparate new-media influences are pushing films toward a new generational aesthetic. "The young directors have a fascinating new kind of browser mentality," says Bill Block, president of Artisan Films, which released Blair Witch and Aronofsky's Pi. "They've grown up immersed in MTV and Nintendo and PlayStation, and it's the software that's influencing the sensibility. Most of these films have bypassed the old studio-executive character arc rules. It's just a straight line now, like a bullet."
The New New Wave directors have a new sensibility about career maintenance, too. Anderson can quote from practically any Robert Altman film, but he also has an almost scholarly knowledge of the career arcs of his favorite directors. When he was editing Magnolia, he went to a pair of revered elders, Jonathan Demme and Robert Towne, for advice.
"These guys are very knowledgeable students of film history," says Biskind, author of "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." "They see the shambles that a lot of the '70s guys made of their careers. So they don't seem to have the enormous flamboyant personalities that you saw in the '70s. And they've grown up in a culture that's a lot more sober-minded than the coke culture that sent so many directors into outer space."
The younger generation doesn't have such a self-indulgent lifestyle--Anderson is a habitué of McDonald's, not Mortons. But he's just as insistent about his creative freedom as his '70s predecessors. Even though Boogie Nights was more of a critical success than a financial one--it grossed a modest $24 million in domestic box office--Anderson cajoled New Line into giving him final cut on Magnolia and according to De Luca, New Line gave Anderson a $150,000 budget to create alternative trailers and posters for the film. Anderson also has approval of the film's Web site design.
Warner Bros. production chief Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, who lobbied to bring Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski and David O. Russell into the studio fold, admits that he battled "in a good way" with Russell during the making of Three Kings. A longtime indie filmmaker, Russell insisted on casting director pal Jonze as one of the movie's other lead characters, even though he'd never acted before.
"I told him it was crazy and could screw up the whole movie," recalls Di Bonaventura. "But you can't tell a director to be daring and then get nervous when they really are daring. We tested Spike and he was great, so I told David, 'I still think it's crazy, but if you really want to do it, I'll back you.' When David wanted to use four different film stocks, we had the same debate. But we looked at his test footage and it made the film look so fresh that I said, 'OK, I'm nervous about this too, but I'll back you.'
"You have to look at this as the studio having a partnership with a director, so we try to challenge their vision, but if they really believe in something, we support them."
After the critical raves she got on the low-budget Boys Don't Cry, Peirce is now being wooed by studios too. She's proceeding with trepidation, having read of the struggles that her idols Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles had with studios in the past.
"To me, creative control is everything, so you have to be cautious, because studios are corporations and you're not," she explains. "People are already offering me $50-million movies. And while I'm not saying no, you have to realize that to have creative freedom, you have to accept limitations. So you figure that if you take less money for your budget, you can have more control over the cast or script."
The old indie attitude, which cast studio executives as rulers of an evil empire, has been replaced by a desire to accomplish what Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock did decades ago--make commercial movies with a personal sensibility. "These directors have a healthy ambition in the best sense, that they don't want their films to just play at the Nuart," says UTA agent John Lesher, who represents Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Russell and Peirce. "They're fiercely independent, but they don't want to just be arty, niche filmmakers. And they came along at a good time. Because after Pulp Fiction came out and made $100 million, the studios all woke up and said, 'What's that all about?' "
If anyone is the embodiment of a New New Wave director at full throttle, it's Paul Thomas Anderson, who's still so boyishly unprepossessing that when he's in the men's room at Art's Deli, his favorite haunt, a patron asks if he's the guy who runs valet parking. In Hollywood, though, he's getting the spotlight treatment. When the phone rings, it's Harvey Weinstein or Tom Cruise or his girlfriend, pop star Fiona Apple, whom he asks to buy some new pants for him when she's out shopping. One day he's out hanging with Tarantino, now a close friend, who's writing a new movie (described as "his Dirty Dozen war movie") and doing a cameo role in Adam Sandler's new film. The week of Thanksgiving, Anderson flew to Paris with longtime hero Jonathan Demme, where the two were plotting a possible joint project.
When Anderson stops in for dinner at Art's, the young waitress treats him like a king, mostly because she saw him there on Thanksgiving with Apple, having a hot turkey sandwich. Full of the kind of infectious enthusiasm that's fueled by Diet Cokes and Camel cigarettes, he admits he still doesn't know "if I'm the type of guy who'd want to run the world like Spielberg or retreat to a mansion in London like Kubrick. I haven't got it figured out yet."
His new film, a three-hour opus called Magnolia, has an ensemble cast that includes Cruise and Jason Robards, as well as Boogie Nights holdovers Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It uses the low-slung sprawl of the San Fernando Valley as a backdrop for a saga of intertwined family dramas.
Anderson calls the Valley his "back lot." Driving around in his Mercedes van one night, a milkshake in one hand, he acts as tour guide, pointing out favorite old haunts:
There, on the right, is Van Nuys High, where Roller Girl went to school in Boogie Nights. Here, at Magnolia and Whitsett, is the Foxfire bar, setting for one of Macy's big scenes in Magnolia. Soon we're at the intersection of Reseda and Sherman Way, scene of the opening shot from Boogie Nights. Over on Ventura Boulevard near Laurel Canyon is the Du-par's where Jack Horner teaches Dirk Diggler about the movie business.
Back at Reseda and Sherman Way, Anderson veers into a gas station. "This is our Mobil station," he says. "See that telephone poll, over by the appliance store? That's the pole Bill Macy climbs in Magnolia. . . . Up on the right on Sherman Way is a Miss Donut shop. . . . That's what we used for the Don Cheadle doughnut shop scene in Boogie Nights, Anderson says.
Anderson is such a creature of movies that it's sometimes hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins. When he was a kid, Anderson went to see E.T. and began dressing as Henry Thomas, determined to ride his bike off into the clouds. After he saw Rocky, he started drinking five eggs at breakfast and running every morning.
"I never had a backup plan other than directing films. I remember doing exactly what movies told me to do. Every time I eat mashed potatoes, I still think of Close Encounters."
Growing up in Studio City, Anderson got much of his love for film from his father, the late Ernie Anderson, a late-night horror movie TV host in Cleveland before he moved to L.A. to become a voice-over actor. (Anderson's production company, Ghoulardi Films, takes its name from his father's TV host character.) When Paul was 12, Ernie bought him a video camera. As a high school senior he made The Dirk Diggler Story, a 30-minute Boogie Nights prototype about a boy breaking into the sex film trade.
Anderson never went to college, working instead as a messenger and production assistant for a TV game show, "Quiz Kid Challenge," an experience he incorporated into Magnolia. After writing a few scripts, he made a short film that earned him an invitation to develop a feature at the Sundance Filmmakers Workshop. By the time he was 24, he'd directed his first movie, Hard Eight, which he says was mangled by its distributors, Rysher Entertainment, of whom he says with obvious relish, "those fuckers are out of business now, thank God."
Since then, Anderson has sought as much control as possible over his films. As he puts it: "I learned that 50% of my job is directing the movie. The other 50% is managing the studio." When he delivered the Magnolia script, only a few select New Line executives, including Mike De Luca, were allowed to read it. Anderson's crew had to sign nondisclosure agreements before being hired to work on the film.
Why such jealously guarded control? Anderson says that the bad experience he had on his first film "caused me to be slightly paranoid and obsessively controlling because I don't want to be burned like that again." When he first met with De Luca on Boogie Nights, Anderson went through the script line by line, telling him "when the movie comes out, it's got to look just like that," prompting De Luca to say, "Dude, fucking calm down!"
Anderson says he cut his own trailers as a way of circumventing the widespread studio practice of using a trailer to tell the entire story of a movie. "It spoils something. I think it's a more exciting experience if the movie is still a mystery when you see it. So with my trailer, I tell you about the characters, but I don't tell the story because, frankly, there's nine complicated, intersecting lives and I didn't want people to say, 'Oh, it's like Slackers or Short Cuts."
Like most of his director peers, Anderson is still struggling to find his identity; he's young enough to harbor lofty ambitions, but old enough to worry about the pitfalls of passing through what Beck, one of his favorite musicians, calls "the door of success."
"I want my movies to be appreciated, and I want the attention that any damaged person would want," he says late one night, driving back from the Valley. "But I don't want the whole spotlight--that would be too much of whatever that thing is you want."
He remembers walking down the street one night with Tarantino, astounded that so many people seemed to recognize the young director. "These people would come lurching out of the bushes, yelling, 'Quentin, dude! What's up man! That movie really rocked!' And of course, when they went running away, without noticing me, I was going, hey, you know, I directed Boogie Nights."
Anderson lights up a cigarette, blowing a cloud of smoke out the car window. "Is it possible that when you get older you get a little more clarity on these things?"
Interview: L.A. Daily News
L.A. Daily News
December 12, 1999
Anderson Soft on Valley
Filmmaker Boogies Back to Shoot Ambitious, Emotional Epic, Magnolia
“I unashamedly wanted to make the epic, the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie,” Paul Thomas Anderson exuberantly proclaims; then adds with characteristic, mordant honesty, “The competition was not hard, though."
Indeed, the greatest film set in the Valley, for better or for worse, is ``Boogie Nights,'' native-son Anderson's own 1997 study of the porno industry.
Until now, that is.
Anderson's three-hour emotional epic Magnolia is the most artistically ambitious and uncompromising movie of the year. Though hardly as incendiary, subject-wise, as Boogie Nights, this look at a day in the life of a dozen-odd, loosely related Valley residents is already more controversial. Declared everything from a visionary masterpiece to an indulgent endurance test, the film, which opens Friday in L.A. (though not the Valley), has left various viewers exhilarated, devastated, angry, exhausted or scratching their heads or some combination thereof.
With an ensemble cast that ranges from an astonishingly obnoxious Tom Cruise and a semi-comatose Jason Robards to Anderson regulars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore (both of whom just won the National Board of Review's 1999 supporting actor awards, as did the whole cast for ensemble work), John C. Reilly, William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall, the film explores the mistakes and regrets of imperfect lives and the strange circumstances that connect them.
While set and filmed almost entirely in the San Fernando Valley, with a few specific exceptions Magnolia deals with universal human concerns. There's a game-show producer (that's local) who's dying of cancer, and whose much younger trophy wife (happens everywhere, despite what those who think Hollywood is dominated by dirty old men say) and empathetic home health-care giver must come to grips with his inevitable loss. There's a child quiz-show genius and an adult screw-up who used to be one (more-or-less local). We meet a lonely North Hollywood cop (precinct's specific) and the self-destructive young woman he tries to save (since time immemorial ...). And then there's the, um, motivational speaker, a character one might hope doesn't really exist anywhere on the planet.
"It's a street in the Valley and it's a flower," Anderson, 29, concedes, "but I'll tell you what: I always had the title of Magnolia in my head, even before I wrote this. Then a couple of weird things started to happen that verified the title for me. I started to do research on the magnolia tree, and there was a concept that if you eat the tree's bark it can help cure cancer.
"On top of that, there was this this thing that I discovered called the Magonia," he continues. "Of course, there's a recognizable similarity to the word magnolia, and the Magonia is this mythical place above the firmament where stuff just goes and hangs out before it falls from the sky. In other words, when you hear those stories about an anchor suddenly dropping on a farmer's barn, they explain that it came from the Magonia.
"Not to mention that Magnolia is a great street in the Valley and a great place to film."
And a lot comes down, literally and metaphorically, in Magnolia
As you may have gathered by now, Anderson does not think in what you'd call conventional terms. And his movies reflect that. Magnolia unfolds more like a symphony of emotion than a traditional three-act movie plot, with all kinds of smaller, music-based flourishes within it.
At one point, an assortment of characters in different settings sings along to verses of the Aimee Mann song "Wise Up" (singer-songwriter Mann's tunes provided inspiration for much of Magnolia's script, and are heard throughout the film; Anderson says that his girlfriend, Fiona Apple, is not jealous in the least).
An entire 40-minute montage, built around an episode of the astoundingly difficult game show "What Do Kids Know," is held together by Jon Brion's non-stop musical score. And some characters, like Moore's guilt-ridden spouse and Macy's lightning-struck ex-genius, don't so much speak dialogue as recite profane arias of unbearable pain.
"The movie is sort of structured like 'A Day in the Life,' the Beatles' song," Anderson explains. "It kind of builds up, note by note, then drops or recedes, then builds again. A movie that's this long needs something like a propeller, an undercurrent that's always just washing, especially when emotions are going from way over here to way over here. I get frustrated when people say that this is a vignette movie, because it's not, really. It's nine plots, maybe, but it's one story. And I felt like the only way to do that was to connect it all musically. It helped everything make sense in concert with the other pieces."
For Magnolia's actors, Anderson's unusual approach presented outstanding challenges and incalculable rewards.
"All of the scenes were so hard," admits the widely admired Moore, who earned an Oscar nomination for her Boogie Nights performance. "The difficulty I had as an actor in locating this woman's center is the experience that she has as a character: She doesn't know what she's feeling, doesn't know what's going on and is reacting to it in a hysterical kind of fashion.
"But Paul has such an amazing worldview and is such a great writer," she adds. "There is such a wonderful rhythm to his language, and the way his people speak is not artificial at all. And he's a tremendous humanitarian; he's got great compassion for the human condition. You see that again and again in his films; he knows how to take an ordinary life and magnify it so that we can see ourselves in it."
Reilly, a veteran of both previous Anderson features Hard Eight and Boogie,' appreciates the director's ability to link random weirdness with the common life traumas we all face at some time, but can never bring our hearts to comprehend.
"One of the themes of the movie is random ridiculousness," says Reilly, who plays Magnolia's inept but desperately well-meaning LAPD officer. "Why did, all of a sudden, that guy get hit by lightning? But I recently lost one of my family members to cancer, and that is the same feeling that I had. Why? What is this?
"That stuff is just as mysterious, as hard to process in your mind, as getting hit by lightning," Reilly continues. "Strange phenomena, crazy things happen every day, and everyone is trying to find some way to understand it and come to grips with it in their life, whether it's something that we think of as mundane or something we think of as extraordinary."
In Magnolia's scenario, Macy's messed-up former child-genius has been lightning-struck both physically and emotionally: His parents stole his game-show winnings, leaving him unable to trust anyone despite a consuming need for affection.
"I think the line 'I have a lot of love, I just don't know where to put it' sums up the character and, perhaps, sums up the movie," says Macy, a respected member of both Anderson's loose repertory company and that of playwright/filmmaker David Mamet as well. "He's a guy with a lot of smarts, a lot of information in his head, but dumb as a bag of hair. I just know people like that, real smart but have the weirdest automobile accidents, the worst-managed lives."
These and many other needy characters shuffle and wail their ways memorably through Magnolia. But if one performance is going to stand out among the group effort, it's likely to be Tom Cruise's outlandish portrayal of a seduction guru, a piggish manipulator who's made a small media empire out of teaching angry men how to get what they want from women with minimum emotional investment.
It's the wildest thing Cruise has ever done, and certainly the most unflattering role he's ever taken. Anderson says that the superstar approached him after he saw Boogie Nights, and expressed no reservations about the nasty character later written specifically for him.
"Believe me, Tom Cruise is not a prude, I'll tell you that," Anderson says with a laugh. "I guess there was a certain sort of naughtiness that writing for him brought out in me, just wanting to see him do something kind of insane and a little bit different. And I think that he was really anxious to do that because he'd been making Eyes Wide Shut for two years. After playing the repressed character in that movie, to get something this outlandish and bigger-than-life, I think, thrilled him.'"
Anderson knows show-biz personalities intimately. His father, Ernie Anderson, was Ghoulardi, a Cleveland TV horror-movie host who became a voiceover specialist after moving to Studio City. Paul grew up with a deep attachment to the Valley so deep that he still feels guilty about having had to replace a street sign on Sherman Way with a Magnolia/Laurel Canyon corner marker for a shot in the new film, as though he's betrayed some major truth about the place.
And then there's the deepest regret of the artist's young life.
"Here's the thing: I was looking and looking and looking for a house," he sheepishly reveals. ``I finally found this really great house in the Hollywood Hills and I bought it. And I am ... miserable! It's a great house and everything else, but we are now planning to move because Art's Deli is far too far away. Honestly, I'm not kissing back up to the Valley, because I totally abandoned it. I thought it would actually, maybe, be healthy for me to try to live someplace else. But I'm a homebody and I can't."
As for what Magnolia may say about life here, "I hope that it's not entirely specific to the Valley," Anderson says. "The characters are easily found here, but hopefully the themes don't parallel anything that is happening in the Valley. But who knows? There's certainly an interesting sort of grid effect to the Valley that, maybe, structurally, means something to the movie.
"It's funny. Now I'm the Valley filmmaker. I don't want to do a movie about the Valley next only so it doesn't become an obnoxious thing. I want to save it and leave it more precious as a place where I really do want to make movies for the rest of my life. I've just got to make sure that I don't do it every time even though that would be my instinct."
December 12, 1999
Anderson Soft on Valley
Filmmaker Boogies Back to Shoot Ambitious, Emotional Epic, Magnolia
“I unashamedly wanted to make the epic, the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie,” Paul Thomas Anderson exuberantly proclaims; then adds with characteristic, mordant honesty, “The competition was not hard, though."
Indeed, the greatest film set in the Valley, for better or for worse, is ``Boogie Nights,'' native-son Anderson's own 1997 study of the porno industry.
Until now, that is.
Anderson's three-hour emotional epic Magnolia is the most artistically ambitious and uncompromising movie of the year. Though hardly as incendiary, subject-wise, as Boogie Nights, this look at a day in the life of a dozen-odd, loosely related Valley residents is already more controversial. Declared everything from a visionary masterpiece to an indulgent endurance test, the film, which opens Friday in L.A. (though not the Valley), has left various viewers exhilarated, devastated, angry, exhausted or scratching their heads or some combination thereof.
With an ensemble cast that ranges from an astonishingly obnoxious Tom Cruise and a semi-comatose Jason Robards to Anderson regulars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore (both of whom just won the National Board of Review's 1999 supporting actor awards, as did the whole cast for ensemble work), John C. Reilly, William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall, the film explores the mistakes and regrets of imperfect lives and the strange circumstances that connect them.
While set and filmed almost entirely in the San Fernando Valley, with a few specific exceptions Magnolia deals with universal human concerns. There's a game-show producer (that's local) who's dying of cancer, and whose much younger trophy wife (happens everywhere, despite what those who think Hollywood is dominated by dirty old men say) and empathetic home health-care giver must come to grips with his inevitable loss. There's a child quiz-show genius and an adult screw-up who used to be one (more-or-less local). We meet a lonely North Hollywood cop (precinct's specific) and the self-destructive young woman he tries to save (since time immemorial ...). And then there's the, um, motivational speaker, a character one might hope doesn't really exist anywhere on the planet.
"It's a street in the Valley and it's a flower," Anderson, 29, concedes, "but I'll tell you what: I always had the title of Magnolia in my head, even before I wrote this. Then a couple of weird things started to happen that verified the title for me. I started to do research on the magnolia tree, and there was a concept that if you eat the tree's bark it can help cure cancer.
"On top of that, there was this this thing that I discovered called the Magonia," he continues. "Of course, there's a recognizable similarity to the word magnolia, and the Magonia is this mythical place above the firmament where stuff just goes and hangs out before it falls from the sky. In other words, when you hear those stories about an anchor suddenly dropping on a farmer's barn, they explain that it came from the Magonia.
"Not to mention that Magnolia is a great street in the Valley and a great place to film."
And a lot comes down, literally and metaphorically, in Magnolia
As you may have gathered by now, Anderson does not think in what you'd call conventional terms. And his movies reflect that. Magnolia unfolds more like a symphony of emotion than a traditional three-act movie plot, with all kinds of smaller, music-based flourishes within it.
At one point, an assortment of characters in different settings sings along to verses of the Aimee Mann song "Wise Up" (singer-songwriter Mann's tunes provided inspiration for much of Magnolia's script, and are heard throughout the film; Anderson says that his girlfriend, Fiona Apple, is not jealous in the least).
An entire 40-minute montage, built around an episode of the astoundingly difficult game show "What Do Kids Know," is held together by Jon Brion's non-stop musical score. And some characters, like Moore's guilt-ridden spouse and Macy's lightning-struck ex-genius, don't so much speak dialogue as recite profane arias of unbearable pain.
"The movie is sort of structured like 'A Day in the Life,' the Beatles' song," Anderson explains. "It kind of builds up, note by note, then drops or recedes, then builds again. A movie that's this long needs something like a propeller, an undercurrent that's always just washing, especially when emotions are going from way over here to way over here. I get frustrated when people say that this is a vignette movie, because it's not, really. It's nine plots, maybe, but it's one story. And I felt like the only way to do that was to connect it all musically. It helped everything make sense in concert with the other pieces."
For Magnolia's actors, Anderson's unusual approach presented outstanding challenges and incalculable rewards.
"All of the scenes were so hard," admits the widely admired Moore, who earned an Oscar nomination for her Boogie Nights performance. "The difficulty I had as an actor in locating this woman's center is the experience that she has as a character: She doesn't know what she's feeling, doesn't know what's going on and is reacting to it in a hysterical kind of fashion.
"But Paul has such an amazing worldview and is such a great writer," she adds. "There is such a wonderful rhythm to his language, and the way his people speak is not artificial at all. And he's a tremendous humanitarian; he's got great compassion for the human condition. You see that again and again in his films; he knows how to take an ordinary life and magnify it so that we can see ourselves in it."
Reilly, a veteran of both previous Anderson features Hard Eight and Boogie,' appreciates the director's ability to link random weirdness with the common life traumas we all face at some time, but can never bring our hearts to comprehend.
"One of the themes of the movie is random ridiculousness," says Reilly, who plays Magnolia's inept but desperately well-meaning LAPD officer. "Why did, all of a sudden, that guy get hit by lightning? But I recently lost one of my family members to cancer, and that is the same feeling that I had. Why? What is this?
"That stuff is just as mysterious, as hard to process in your mind, as getting hit by lightning," Reilly continues. "Strange phenomena, crazy things happen every day, and everyone is trying to find some way to understand it and come to grips with it in their life, whether it's something that we think of as mundane or something we think of as extraordinary."
In Magnolia's scenario, Macy's messed-up former child-genius has been lightning-struck both physically and emotionally: His parents stole his game-show winnings, leaving him unable to trust anyone despite a consuming need for affection.
"I think the line 'I have a lot of love, I just don't know where to put it' sums up the character and, perhaps, sums up the movie," says Macy, a respected member of both Anderson's loose repertory company and that of playwright/filmmaker David Mamet as well. "He's a guy with a lot of smarts, a lot of information in his head, but dumb as a bag of hair. I just know people like that, real smart but have the weirdest automobile accidents, the worst-managed lives."
These and many other needy characters shuffle and wail their ways memorably through Magnolia. But if one performance is going to stand out among the group effort, it's likely to be Tom Cruise's outlandish portrayal of a seduction guru, a piggish manipulator who's made a small media empire out of teaching angry men how to get what they want from women with minimum emotional investment.
It's the wildest thing Cruise has ever done, and certainly the most unflattering role he's ever taken. Anderson says that the superstar approached him after he saw Boogie Nights, and expressed no reservations about the nasty character later written specifically for him.
"Believe me, Tom Cruise is not a prude, I'll tell you that," Anderson says with a laugh. "I guess there was a certain sort of naughtiness that writing for him brought out in me, just wanting to see him do something kind of insane and a little bit different. And I think that he was really anxious to do that because he'd been making Eyes Wide Shut for two years. After playing the repressed character in that movie, to get something this outlandish and bigger-than-life, I think, thrilled him.'"
Anderson knows show-biz personalities intimately. His father, Ernie Anderson, was Ghoulardi, a Cleveland TV horror-movie host who became a voiceover specialist after moving to Studio City. Paul grew up with a deep attachment to the Valley so deep that he still feels guilty about having had to replace a street sign on Sherman Way with a Magnolia/Laurel Canyon corner marker for a shot in the new film, as though he's betrayed some major truth about the place.
And then there's the deepest regret of the artist's young life.
"Here's the thing: I was looking and looking and looking for a house," he sheepishly reveals. ``I finally found this really great house in the Hollywood Hills and I bought it. And I am ... miserable! It's a great house and everything else, but we are now planning to move because Art's Deli is far too far away. Honestly, I'm not kissing back up to the Valley, because I totally abandoned it. I thought it would actually, maybe, be healthy for me to try to live someplace else. But I'm a homebody and I can't."
As for what Magnolia may say about life here, "I hope that it's not entirely specific to the Valley," Anderson says. "The characters are easily found here, but hopefully the themes don't parallel anything that is happening in the Valley. But who knows? There's certainly an interesting sort of grid effect to the Valley that, maybe, structurally, means something to the movie.
"It's funny. Now I'm the Valley filmmaker. I don't want to do a movie about the Valley next only so it doesn't become an obnoxious thing. I want to save it and leave it more precious as a place where I really do want to make movies for the rest of my life. I've just got to make sure that I don't do it every time even though that would be my instinct."
Interview: "The New New Wave"
LA TImes, Written By Patrick Goldstein
December 12th, 1999
Move over, Mr. Coppola. Take a seat, Mr. Scorsese. It's time for the next generation of film directors to shake things up, in the spirit of the French film rebels of yore.
Not long after his second movie Boogie Nights arrived on a crest of critical accolades, director Paul Thomas Anderson was asked to dinner by Warren Beatty. "I told him I'd love to go," says the brash 29-year-old director, who'd flirted with casting Beatty as Jack Horner, porno king of the San Fernando Valley, a part ultimately played by Burt Reynolds.
"But I told him, 'We're going somewhere public, a really brightly lit place where everyone will see I'm having dinner with Warren Beatty.' "
Beatty took him to Mandarette, one of the star's favorite eateries. While they were having dinner, Francis Ford Coppola stopped by to visit. Coppola offered Anderson a piece of advice. "This is the one moment when you have it, when you can do whatever you want to do," the director told him. "It's the one moment when you have a clean slate, with no stigma attached. And even if your next movie makes $400 million and gets eight Oscars, you'll still have to fight battles that you'll never have to fight right now. So whatever you want to do, do it now."
It was a symbolic passing of the torch: the battle-scarred godfather of 1970s cinema offering Jedi-like advice to the fresh-faced standard-bearer for Hollywood's new generation of hot young film directors. Just as Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut of the French New Wave revolutionized cinema in the early 1960s, Anderson and his peers are shaking up the film world today. They've adopted the Coppola mantra: It's your moment, so just do it.
As the century comes to a close, Hollywood has finally caught up with the explosion of creative energy that had been operating outside the studio mainstream.
Faced with a fast-emerging demographic wave of restless young moviegoers, the major studios have wooed, embraced and perhaps co-opted a fresh generation of film talent. In fact, the moment has arrived for a legion of new directors whom New Line President Mike De Luca calls "all the young dudes."
"Directors are the rock stars of the end of this century," says Jersey Films Co-Chairman Stacey Sher, whose company has nurtured such filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Andrew Niccol. "You can see the burst of new energy everywhere. Kids now think they can pick up a camera and express themselves in the same way that they used to pick up a guitar and start a band."
The "dudes" list starts with Anderson, whose new film, Magnolia, due out Friday, is already being touted as one of the year's most ambitious films. But the new wunderkinder are everywhere. (Click here for LA Times list)
Next year will bring even more kinetic thrills, with ambitious new movies due from Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects), Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet) and Darren Aronofsky (Pi).
The New New Wave directors are hardly kindred spirits. Some are classic storytellers, others are dazzling stylists. Some revel in whimsy or hipster cool, while others have a youthful fondness for brazen, jokey excess. Few learned their trade in film school. Spike Jonze made skateboard videos and ran a teen boys zine called Dirt. David O. Russell was a political organizer who made documentaries about Central American immigrants. Kimberly Peirce studied literature at the University of Chicago and raced motorcycles in Thailand. Except for Peirce, it's a boys' club of largely self-taught writer-directors who aren't as easily identifiable as Goddard and Truffaut of the French New Wave or as chummy as Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were in their heyday.
What they do share is youth, ambition and media savvy. They also have the hip-hop culture's fascination with scavenging and then reinventing old genres, using a rapid-fire, often nonlinear style of storytelling that's influenced by TV ads, music videos, Web surfing and video games.
As a group, the New New Wave directors are cocky and assertive, but without the hubris, pretense and drug-fueled mania of the '70s-era directors as described in Peter Biskind's 1998 book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." They're also pragmatic--they don't have the instinctive hostility toward studio "suits" that marked much of the indie film movement of the early 1990s.
But in Hollywood, regardless of which generation you come from, the biggest hurdle is coping with the seduction of success.
"For a young filmmaker, the enemy isn't the studio or the critics, it's self-importance," says Soderbergh, who was the man of the moment a decade ago after making "sex, lies and videotape." "This is a gifted group of young directors, but what will happen to them is strictly a function of character. It takes a great amount of effort to stay hungry, but it's far preferable than self-importance, which is what has brought down nearly every great filmmaker."
One day, when Paul Thomas Anderson is working on TV commercials for Magnolia, his editor, Dylan Tichenor, receives a call from M. Night Shyamalan, who's getting $10 million for his next film after the success of The Sixth Sense. As soon as Tichenor hangs up the phone, Anderson teases him about the job prospect. "Hey, what'd your new best friend, Mr. Big Time Movie Maker, have to say? I hope he's gonna give you some of those 10 million smackers," he says. "Better yet, do it for no money and get some fucking points. It's about time editors started saying, 'Give me some points too!' "
As with everything else in Hollywood, economics plays a big role in the arrival of this New New Wave. For the past decade, the industry has been dominated by a group of fiftysomething directors--known in industry shorthand as "Ovitz directors" for their ties to former Creative Artists Agency czar Michael Ovitz--who served as magnets for the top star talent. They made hit movies, but at an increasingly hefty price, earning roughly $6 million a film, plus 10% of the studio's first-dollar gross.
It was a double whammy. As the older directors' movies became more expensive, they also became more out of touch with today's youthful moviegoers. The result: The studios were saddled with a series of costly duds from such top names as Sydney Pollack, Rob Reiner, Ivan Reitman, John McTiernan, Harold Becker and Martin Brest.
"We're desperate for new talent," says Disney Films Chairman Joe Roth. "A lot of the older directors have gotten preoccupied with the preview process and selling the picture. The young directors haven't been poisoned by the Hollywood system. When Wes Anderson walks into the room, you just light up. He doesn't feel like a guy who's pitching a softball at 40 mph. He's got energy and fresh ideas--he's always throwing knuckle balls."
The fresh ideas come from all sorts of unlikely sources--almost anywhere but film school. "Film school is a complete con," says Paul Thomas Anderson. "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."
Spike Jonze's visual sensibility is shaped by old TV shows--his music video reel includes spoofy reworkings of Starsky and Hutch and Happy Days episodes. "The Matrix's" 360-degree freeze-frame effect borrows from the Gap's "Khakis Swing" ad. The Blair Witch Project derived much of its impact from the fuzzy, urban-legend ethos of the Internet. Go and Run Lola Run are fueled by the headlong blast of a video game. Magnolia takes much of its storytelling inspiration from a collection of Aimee Mann songs, one of which Anderson's characters sings, music-video-style, in the middle of the movie.
"I really set out to write an adaptation of her songs," Anderson says. "One of the characters in the movie says, 'Now that I met you, would you object to never seeing me again?' I completely stole that from one of Aimee's songs. For me, she's like the way Simon & Garfunkel were to The Graduate or Cat Stevens to Harold and Maude. Her songs become the built-in voice of the movie, tying all the stories together."
These disparate new-media influences are pushing films toward a new generational aesthetic. "The young directors have a fascinating new kind of browser mentality," says Bill Block, president of Artisan Films, which released Blair Witch and Aronofsky's Pi. "They've grown up immersed in MTV and Nintendo and PlayStation, and it's the software that's influencing the sensibility. Most of these films have bypassed the old studio-executive character arc rules. It's just a straight line now, like a bullet."
The New New Wave directors have a new sensibility about career maintenance, too. Anderson can quote from practically any Robert Altman film, but he also has an almost scholarly knowledge of the career arcs of his favorite directors. When he was editing Magnolia, he went to a pair of revered elders, Jonathan Demme and Robert Towne, for advice.
"These guys are very knowledgeable students of film history," says Biskind, author of "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." "They see the shambles that a lot of the '70s guys made of their careers. So they don't seem to have the enormous flamboyant personalities that you saw in the '70s. And they've grown up in a culture that's a lot more sober-minded than the coke culture that sent so many directors into outer space."
The younger generation doesn't have such a self-indulgent lifestyle--Anderson is a habitué of McDonald's, not Mortons. But he's just as insistent about his creative freedom as his '70s predecessors. Even though Boogie Nights was more of a critical success than a financial one--it grossed a modest $24 million in domestic box office--Anderson cajoled New Line into giving him final cut on Magnolia and according to De Luca, New Line gave Anderson a $150,000 budget to create alternative trailers and posters for the film. Anderson also has approval of the film's Web site design.
Warner Bros. production chief Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, who lobbied to bring Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski and David O. Russell into the studio fold, admits that he battled "in a good way" with Russell during the making of Three Kings. A longtime indie filmmaker, Russell insisted on casting director pal Jonze as one of the movie's other lead characters, even though he'd never acted before.
"I told him it was crazy and could screw up the whole movie," recalls Di Bonaventura. "But you can't tell a director to be daring and then get nervous when they really are daring. We tested Spike and he was great, so I told David, 'I still think it's crazy, but if you really want to do it, I'll back you.' When David wanted to use four different film stocks, we had the same debate. But we looked at his test footage and it made the film look so fresh that I said, 'OK, I'm nervous about this too, but I'll back you.'
"You have to look at this as the studio having a partnership with a director, so we try to challenge their vision, but if they really believe in something, we support them."
After the critical raves she got on the low-budget Boys Don't Cry, Peirce is now being wooed by studios too. She's proceeding with trepidation, having read of the struggles that her idols Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles had with studios in the past.
"To me, creative control is everything, so you have to be cautious, because studios are corporations and you're not," she explains. "People are already offering me $50-million movies. And while I'm not saying no, you have to realize that to have creative freedom, you have to accept limitations. So you figure that if you take less money for your budget, you can have more control over the cast or script."
The old indie attitude, which cast studio executives as rulers of an evil empire, has been replaced by a desire to accomplish what Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock did decades ago--make commercial movies with a personal sensibility. "These directors have a healthy ambition in the best sense, that they don't want their films to just play at the Nuart," says UTA agent John Lesher, who represents Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Russell and Peirce. "They're fiercely independent, but they don't want to just be arty, niche filmmakers. And they came along at a good time. Because after Pulp Fiction came out and made $100 million, the studios all woke up and said, 'What's that all about?' "
If anyone is the embodiment of a New New Wave director at full throttle, it's Paul Thomas Anderson, who's still so boyishly unprepossessing that when he's in the men's room at Art's Deli, his favorite haunt, a patron asks if he's the guy who runs valet parking. In Hollywood, though, he's getting the spotlight treatment. When the phone rings, it's Harvey Weinstein or Tom Cruise or his girlfriend, pop star Fiona Apple, whom he asks to buy some new pants for him when she's out shopping. One day he's out hanging with Tarantino, now a close friend, who's writing a new movie (described as "his Dirty Dozen war movie") and doing a cameo role in Adam Sandler's new film. The week of Thanksgiving, Anderson flew to Paris with longtime hero Jonathan Demme, where the two were plotting a possible joint project.
When Anderson stops in for dinner at Art's, the young waitress treats him like a king, mostly because she saw him there on Thanksgiving with Apple, having a hot turkey sandwich. Full of the kind of infectious enthusiasm that's fueled by Diet Cokes and Camel cigarettes, he admits he still doesn't know "if I'm the type of guy who'd want to run the world like Spielberg or retreat to a mansion in London like Kubrick. I haven't got it figured out yet."
His new film, a three-hour opus called Magnolia, has an ensemble cast that includes Cruise and Jason Robards, as well as Boogie Nights holdovers Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It uses the low-slung sprawl of the San Fernando Valley as a backdrop for a saga of intertwined family dramas.
Anderson calls the Valley his "back lot." Driving around in his Mercedes van one night, a milkshake in one hand, he acts as tour guide, pointing out favorite old haunts:
There, on the right, is Van Nuys High, where Roller Girl went to school in Boogie Nights. Here, at Magnolia and Whitsett, is the Foxfire bar, setting for one of Macy's big scenes in Magnolia. Soon we're at the intersection of Reseda and Sherman Way, scene of the opening shot from Boogie Nights. Over on Ventura Boulevard near Laurel Canyon is the Du-par's where Jack Horner teaches Dirk Diggler about the movie business.
Back at Reseda and Sherman Way, Anderson veers into a gas station. "This is our Mobil station," he says. "See that telephone poll, over by the appliance store? That's the pole Bill Macy climbs in Magnolia. . . . Up on the right on Sherman Way is a Miss Donut shop. . . . That's what we used for the Don Cheadle doughnut shop scene in Boogie Nights, Anderson says.
Anderson is such a creature of movies that it's sometimes hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins. When he was a kid, Anderson went to see E.T. and began dressing as Henry Thomas, determined to ride his bike off into the clouds. After he saw Rocky, he started drinking five eggs at breakfast and running every morning.
"I never had a backup plan other than directing films. I remember doing exactly what movies told me to do. Every time I eat mashed potatoes, I still think of Close Encounters."
Growing up in Studio City, Anderson got much of his love for film from his father, the late Ernie Anderson, a late-night horror movie TV host in Cleveland before he moved to L.A. to become a voice-over actor. (Anderson's production company, Ghoulardi Films, takes its name from his father's TV host character.) When Paul was 12, Ernie bought him a video camera. As a high school senior he made The Dirk Diggler Story, a 30-minute Boogie Nights prototype about a boy breaking into the sex film trade.
Anderson never went to college, working instead as a messenger and production assistant for a TV game show, "Quiz Kid Challenge," an experience he incorporated into Magnolia. After writing a few scripts, he made a short film that earned him an invitation to develop a feature at the Sundance Filmmakers Workshop. By the time he was 24, he'd directed his first movie, Hard Eight, which he says was mangled by its distributors, Rysher Entertainment, of whom he says with obvious relish, "those fuckers are out of business now, thank God."
Since then, Anderson has sought as much control as possible over his films. As he puts it: "I learned that 50% of my job is directing the movie. The other 50% is managing the studio." When he delivered the Magnolia script, only a few select New Line executives, including Mike De Luca, were allowed to read it. Anderson's crew had to sign nondisclosure agreements before being hired to work on the film.
Why such jealously guarded control? Anderson says that the bad experience he had on his first film "caused me to be slightly paranoid and obsessively controlling because I don't want to be burned like that again." When he first met with De Luca on Boogie Nights, Anderson went through the script line by line, telling him "when the movie comes out, it's got to look just like that," prompting De Luca to say, "Dude, fucking calm down!"
Anderson says he cut his own trailers as a way of circumventing the widespread studio practice of using a trailer to tell the entire story of a movie. "It spoils something. I think it's a more exciting experience if the movie is still a mystery when you see it. So with my trailer, I tell you about the characters, but I don't tell the story because, frankly, there's nine complicated, intersecting lives and I didn't want people to say, 'Oh, it's like Slacker or Short Cuts."
Like most of his director peers, Anderson is still struggling to find his identity; he's young enough to harbor lofty ambitions, but old enough to worry about the pitfalls of passing through what Beck, one of his favorite musicians, calls "the door of success."
"I want my movies to be appreciated, and I want the attention that any damaged person would want," he says late one night, driving back from the Valley. "But I don't want the whole spotlight--that would be too much of whatever that thing is you want."
He remembers walking down the street one night with Tarantino, astounded that so many people seemed to recognize the young director. "These people would come lurching out of the bushes, yelling, 'Quentin, dude! What's up man! That movie really rocked!' And of course, when they went running away, without noticing me, I was going, hey, you know, I directed Boogie Nights."
Anderson lights up a cigarette, blowing a cloud of smoke out the car window. "Is it possible that when you get older you get a little more clarity on these things?"
December 12th, 1999
Move over, Mr. Coppola. Take a seat, Mr. Scorsese. It's time for the next generation of film directors to shake things up, in the spirit of the French film rebels of yore.
Not long after his second movie Boogie Nights arrived on a crest of critical accolades, director Paul Thomas Anderson was asked to dinner by Warren Beatty. "I told him I'd love to go," says the brash 29-year-old director, who'd flirted with casting Beatty as Jack Horner, porno king of the San Fernando Valley, a part ultimately played by Burt Reynolds.
"But I told him, 'We're going somewhere public, a really brightly lit place where everyone will see I'm having dinner with Warren Beatty.' "
Beatty took him to Mandarette, one of the star's favorite eateries. While they were having dinner, Francis Ford Coppola stopped by to visit. Coppola offered Anderson a piece of advice. "This is the one moment when you have it, when you can do whatever you want to do," the director told him. "It's the one moment when you have a clean slate, with no stigma attached. And even if your next movie makes $400 million and gets eight Oscars, you'll still have to fight battles that you'll never have to fight right now. So whatever you want to do, do it now."
It was a symbolic passing of the torch: the battle-scarred godfather of 1970s cinema offering Jedi-like advice to the fresh-faced standard-bearer for Hollywood's new generation of hot young film directors. Just as Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut of the French New Wave revolutionized cinema in the early 1960s, Anderson and his peers are shaking up the film world today. They've adopted the Coppola mantra: It's your moment, so just do it.
As the century comes to a close, Hollywood has finally caught up with the explosion of creative energy that had been operating outside the studio mainstream.
Faced with a fast-emerging demographic wave of restless young moviegoers, the major studios have wooed, embraced and perhaps co-opted a fresh generation of film talent. In fact, the moment has arrived for a legion of new directors whom New Line President Mike De Luca calls "all the young dudes."
"Directors are the rock stars of the end of this century," says Jersey Films Co-Chairman Stacey Sher, whose company has nurtured such filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Andrew Niccol. "You can see the burst of new energy everywhere. Kids now think they can pick up a camera and express themselves in the same way that they used to pick up a guitar and start a band."
The "dudes" list starts with Anderson, whose new film, Magnolia, due out Friday, is already being touted as one of the year's most ambitious films. But the new wunderkinder are everywhere. (Click here for LA Times list)
Next year will bring even more kinetic thrills, with ambitious new movies due from Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects), Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet) and Darren Aronofsky (Pi).
The New New Wave directors are hardly kindred spirits. Some are classic storytellers, others are dazzling stylists. Some revel in whimsy or hipster cool, while others have a youthful fondness for brazen, jokey excess. Few learned their trade in film school. Spike Jonze made skateboard videos and ran a teen boys zine called Dirt. David O. Russell was a political organizer who made documentaries about Central American immigrants. Kimberly Peirce studied literature at the University of Chicago and raced motorcycles in Thailand. Except for Peirce, it's a boys' club of largely self-taught writer-directors who aren't as easily identifiable as Goddard and Truffaut of the French New Wave or as chummy as Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were in their heyday.
What they do share is youth, ambition and media savvy. They also have the hip-hop culture's fascination with scavenging and then reinventing old genres, using a rapid-fire, often nonlinear style of storytelling that's influenced by TV ads, music videos, Web surfing and video games.
As a group, the New New Wave directors are cocky and assertive, but without the hubris, pretense and drug-fueled mania of the '70s-era directors as described in Peter Biskind's 1998 book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." They're also pragmatic--they don't have the instinctive hostility toward studio "suits" that marked much of the indie film movement of the early 1990s.
But in Hollywood, regardless of which generation you come from, the biggest hurdle is coping with the seduction of success.
"For a young filmmaker, the enemy isn't the studio or the critics, it's self-importance," says Soderbergh, who was the man of the moment a decade ago after making "sex, lies and videotape." "This is a gifted group of young directors, but what will happen to them is strictly a function of character. It takes a great amount of effort to stay hungry, but it's far preferable than self-importance, which is what has brought down nearly every great filmmaker."
One day, when Paul Thomas Anderson is working on TV commercials for Magnolia, his editor, Dylan Tichenor, receives a call from M. Night Shyamalan, who's getting $10 million for his next film after the success of The Sixth Sense. As soon as Tichenor hangs up the phone, Anderson teases him about the job prospect. "Hey, what'd your new best friend, Mr. Big Time Movie Maker, have to say? I hope he's gonna give you some of those 10 million smackers," he says. "Better yet, do it for no money and get some fucking points. It's about time editors started saying, 'Give me some points too!' "
As with everything else in Hollywood, economics plays a big role in the arrival of this New New Wave. For the past decade, the industry has been dominated by a group of fiftysomething directors--known in industry shorthand as "Ovitz directors" for their ties to former Creative Artists Agency czar Michael Ovitz--who served as magnets for the top star talent. They made hit movies, but at an increasingly hefty price, earning roughly $6 million a film, plus 10% of the studio's first-dollar gross.
It was a double whammy. As the older directors' movies became more expensive, they also became more out of touch with today's youthful moviegoers. The result: The studios were saddled with a series of costly duds from such top names as Sydney Pollack, Rob Reiner, Ivan Reitman, John McTiernan, Harold Becker and Martin Brest.
"We're desperate for new talent," says Disney Films Chairman Joe Roth. "A lot of the older directors have gotten preoccupied with the preview process and selling the picture. The young directors haven't been poisoned by the Hollywood system. When Wes Anderson walks into the room, you just light up. He doesn't feel like a guy who's pitching a softball at 40 mph. He's got energy and fresh ideas--he's always throwing knuckle balls."
The fresh ideas come from all sorts of unlikely sources--almost anywhere but film school. "Film school is a complete con," says Paul Thomas Anderson. "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."
Spike Jonze's visual sensibility is shaped by old TV shows--his music video reel includes spoofy reworkings of Starsky and Hutch and Happy Days episodes. "The Matrix's" 360-degree freeze-frame effect borrows from the Gap's "Khakis Swing" ad. The Blair Witch Project derived much of its impact from the fuzzy, urban-legend ethos of the Internet. Go and Run Lola Run are fueled by the headlong blast of a video game. Magnolia takes much of its storytelling inspiration from a collection of Aimee Mann songs, one of which Anderson's characters sings, music-video-style, in the middle of the movie.
"I really set out to write an adaptation of her songs," Anderson says. "One of the characters in the movie says, 'Now that I met you, would you object to never seeing me again?' I completely stole that from one of Aimee's songs. For me, she's like the way Simon & Garfunkel were to The Graduate or Cat Stevens to Harold and Maude. Her songs become the built-in voice of the movie, tying all the stories together."
These disparate new-media influences are pushing films toward a new generational aesthetic. "The young directors have a fascinating new kind of browser mentality," says Bill Block, president of Artisan Films, which released Blair Witch and Aronofsky's Pi. "They've grown up immersed in MTV and Nintendo and PlayStation, and it's the software that's influencing the sensibility. Most of these films have bypassed the old studio-executive character arc rules. It's just a straight line now, like a bullet."
The New New Wave directors have a new sensibility about career maintenance, too. Anderson can quote from practically any Robert Altman film, but he also has an almost scholarly knowledge of the career arcs of his favorite directors. When he was editing Magnolia, he went to a pair of revered elders, Jonathan Demme and Robert Towne, for advice.
"These guys are very knowledgeable students of film history," says Biskind, author of "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." "They see the shambles that a lot of the '70s guys made of their careers. So they don't seem to have the enormous flamboyant personalities that you saw in the '70s. And they've grown up in a culture that's a lot more sober-minded than the coke culture that sent so many directors into outer space."
The younger generation doesn't have such a self-indulgent lifestyle--Anderson is a habitué of McDonald's, not Mortons. But he's just as insistent about his creative freedom as his '70s predecessors. Even though Boogie Nights was more of a critical success than a financial one--it grossed a modest $24 million in domestic box office--Anderson cajoled New Line into giving him final cut on Magnolia and according to De Luca, New Line gave Anderson a $150,000 budget to create alternative trailers and posters for the film. Anderson also has approval of the film's Web site design.
Warner Bros. production chief Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, who lobbied to bring Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski and David O. Russell into the studio fold, admits that he battled "in a good way" with Russell during the making of Three Kings. A longtime indie filmmaker, Russell insisted on casting director pal Jonze as one of the movie's other lead characters, even though he'd never acted before.
"I told him it was crazy and could screw up the whole movie," recalls Di Bonaventura. "But you can't tell a director to be daring and then get nervous when they really are daring. We tested Spike and he was great, so I told David, 'I still think it's crazy, but if you really want to do it, I'll back you.' When David wanted to use four different film stocks, we had the same debate. But we looked at his test footage and it made the film look so fresh that I said, 'OK, I'm nervous about this too, but I'll back you.'
"You have to look at this as the studio having a partnership with a director, so we try to challenge their vision, but if they really believe in something, we support them."
After the critical raves she got on the low-budget Boys Don't Cry, Peirce is now being wooed by studios too. She's proceeding with trepidation, having read of the struggles that her idols Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles had with studios in the past.
"To me, creative control is everything, so you have to be cautious, because studios are corporations and you're not," she explains. "People are already offering me $50-million movies. And while I'm not saying no, you have to realize that to have creative freedom, you have to accept limitations. So you figure that if you take less money for your budget, you can have more control over the cast or script."
The old indie attitude, which cast studio executives as rulers of an evil empire, has been replaced by a desire to accomplish what Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock did decades ago--make commercial movies with a personal sensibility. "These directors have a healthy ambition in the best sense, that they don't want their films to just play at the Nuart," says UTA agent John Lesher, who represents Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Russell and Peirce. "They're fiercely independent, but they don't want to just be arty, niche filmmakers. And they came along at a good time. Because after Pulp Fiction came out and made $100 million, the studios all woke up and said, 'What's that all about?' "
If anyone is the embodiment of a New New Wave director at full throttle, it's Paul Thomas Anderson, who's still so boyishly unprepossessing that when he's in the men's room at Art's Deli, his favorite haunt, a patron asks if he's the guy who runs valet parking. In Hollywood, though, he's getting the spotlight treatment. When the phone rings, it's Harvey Weinstein or Tom Cruise or his girlfriend, pop star Fiona Apple, whom he asks to buy some new pants for him when she's out shopping. One day he's out hanging with Tarantino, now a close friend, who's writing a new movie (described as "his Dirty Dozen war movie") and doing a cameo role in Adam Sandler's new film. The week of Thanksgiving, Anderson flew to Paris with longtime hero Jonathan Demme, where the two were plotting a possible joint project.
When Anderson stops in for dinner at Art's, the young waitress treats him like a king, mostly because she saw him there on Thanksgiving with Apple, having a hot turkey sandwich. Full of the kind of infectious enthusiasm that's fueled by Diet Cokes and Camel cigarettes, he admits he still doesn't know "if I'm the type of guy who'd want to run the world like Spielberg or retreat to a mansion in London like Kubrick. I haven't got it figured out yet."
His new film, a three-hour opus called Magnolia, has an ensemble cast that includes Cruise and Jason Robards, as well as Boogie Nights holdovers Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It uses the low-slung sprawl of the San Fernando Valley as a backdrop for a saga of intertwined family dramas.
Anderson calls the Valley his "back lot." Driving around in his Mercedes van one night, a milkshake in one hand, he acts as tour guide, pointing out favorite old haunts:
There, on the right, is Van Nuys High, where Roller Girl went to school in Boogie Nights. Here, at Magnolia and Whitsett, is the Foxfire bar, setting for one of Macy's big scenes in Magnolia. Soon we're at the intersection of Reseda and Sherman Way, scene of the opening shot from Boogie Nights. Over on Ventura Boulevard near Laurel Canyon is the Du-par's where Jack Horner teaches Dirk Diggler about the movie business.
Back at Reseda and Sherman Way, Anderson veers into a gas station. "This is our Mobil station," he says. "See that telephone poll, over by the appliance store? That's the pole Bill Macy climbs in Magnolia. . . . Up on the right on Sherman Way is a Miss Donut shop. . . . That's what we used for the Don Cheadle doughnut shop scene in Boogie Nights, Anderson says.
Anderson is such a creature of movies that it's sometimes hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins. When he was a kid, Anderson went to see E.T. and began dressing as Henry Thomas, determined to ride his bike off into the clouds. After he saw Rocky, he started drinking five eggs at breakfast and running every morning.
"I never had a backup plan other than directing films. I remember doing exactly what movies told me to do. Every time I eat mashed potatoes, I still think of Close Encounters."
Growing up in Studio City, Anderson got much of his love for film from his father, the late Ernie Anderson, a late-night horror movie TV host in Cleveland before he moved to L.A. to become a voice-over actor. (Anderson's production company, Ghoulardi Films, takes its name from his father's TV host character.) When Paul was 12, Ernie bought him a video camera. As a high school senior he made The Dirk Diggler Story, a 30-minute Boogie Nights prototype about a boy breaking into the sex film trade.
Anderson never went to college, working instead as a messenger and production assistant for a TV game show, "Quiz Kid Challenge," an experience he incorporated into Magnolia. After writing a few scripts, he made a short film that earned him an invitation to develop a feature at the Sundance Filmmakers Workshop. By the time he was 24, he'd directed his first movie, Hard Eight, which he says was mangled by its distributors, Rysher Entertainment, of whom he says with obvious relish, "those fuckers are out of business now, thank God."
Since then, Anderson has sought as much control as possible over his films. As he puts it: "I learned that 50% of my job is directing the movie. The other 50% is managing the studio." When he delivered the Magnolia script, only a few select New Line executives, including Mike De Luca, were allowed to read it. Anderson's crew had to sign nondisclosure agreements before being hired to work on the film.
Why such jealously guarded control? Anderson says that the bad experience he had on his first film "caused me to be slightly paranoid and obsessively controlling because I don't want to be burned like that again." When he first met with De Luca on Boogie Nights, Anderson went through the script line by line, telling him "when the movie comes out, it's got to look just like that," prompting De Luca to say, "Dude, fucking calm down!"
Anderson says he cut his own trailers as a way of circumventing the widespread studio practice of using a trailer to tell the entire story of a movie. "It spoils something. I think it's a more exciting experience if the movie is still a mystery when you see it. So with my trailer, I tell you about the characters, but I don't tell the story because, frankly, there's nine complicated, intersecting lives and I didn't want people to say, 'Oh, it's like Slacker or Short Cuts."
Like most of his director peers, Anderson is still struggling to find his identity; he's young enough to harbor lofty ambitions, but old enough to worry about the pitfalls of passing through what Beck, one of his favorite musicians, calls "the door of success."
"I want my movies to be appreciated, and I want the attention that any damaged person would want," he says late one night, driving back from the Valley. "But I don't want the whole spotlight--that would be too much of whatever that thing is you want."
He remembers walking down the street one night with Tarantino, astounded that so many people seemed to recognize the young director. "These people would come lurching out of the bushes, yelling, 'Quentin, dude! What's up man! That movie really rocked!' And of course, when they went running away, without noticing me, I was going, hey, you know, I directed Boogie Nights."
Anderson lights up a cigarette, blowing a cloud of smoke out the car window. "Is it possible that when you get older you get a little more clarity on these things?"