Interview: "Practical Insanity"

Honolulu Star, Written By Nadine Kam
November 7th, 2002


Paul Thomas Anderson chronicles the heroics of surviving from day to day

I am waiting for Paul Thomas Anderson to call, but in the daylight savings switcheroo, I'm wondering if "his people" got the time right given the time difference from L.A. They say 10:30; I'm thinking 11:30 is more likely. I'm not risking the chance of missing the director's call, so I'm waiting by the phone by 9:30 a.m.

Trouble is, I also need to feed my parking meter before the meter maids start circling my car because I refuse to pay for monthly parking because it's like paying for six feet of nothing when I have more pressing expenses and somehow with streets full of two-hour meters I end up at a one-hour one. After several cups of water I need to head off to the restroom and I have bill payments due yesterday to get into the mail. Do I stay or do I go now?




The waiting is agony and I feel as anxious as Barry Egan, the protagonist of Anderson's latest effort, "Punch-Drunk Love."

In Anderson's universe, where normalcy equals strangeness, that's not a bad thing. I relay all of this information when he calls close to noon and he chuckles softly even as he apologizes for being late. He had errands to run in preparation for his trip to London where he will screen "Punch-Drunk" at the London Film Festival, which started yesterday. Earlier this year at Cannes, the film won him the Best Director prize, an honor he shared with Korean director Im Kwon-taek for "Chihwaseon" .

His films, including "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," are all about pointing out the absurd ways in which people blunder their way through life, but rather than being critical, Anderson seems to find something heroic about the effort to keep forging onward, and that heartfelt empathy comes across in his work.

Take the "Punch-Drunk" character Barry Egan. He was modeled on a real "Pudding Guy," civil engineer David Phillips, who accumulated 1.25 million airline points -- a lifetime of travel -- by spending $3,000 on 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice pudding in a grocery promotion awarding bonus miles for purchases.

"I was intrigued by this kind of weird insanity that is also so practical," Anderson said. "I laughed when I heard about it, but I related to it, where you get so caught up in something that you see it as truth and commit 100 percent to reaching that goal.

"I thought that was really sweet and something really nice at the end of the day, to do something that would get you out of the house, and I can understand that because I like to travel."

Maybe in another life in which he wasn't an acclaimed filmmaker, Anderson might be that pudding guy, but he considers himself "quite normal" -- eating at Tokkuri Tei, Buzz's in Kailua and ramen at Jimbo's (you can almost hear the drool over the phone line as he reminisces about the curry and hot udon with egg and veggies), just like the rest of us when he's in town. Simple pleasures for a simple guy, save for his facile way with complex stories and obsession with filmmaking.

Anderson got his start working as a production assistant on music videos when rap and hip-hop music were beginning to hit the mainstream. "Every week there was a new hip-hop album, and the videos were kind of ... bad. But I wasn't making them. I was getting coffee, setting up cameras and dollies. Being there, I learned; mostly I learned I didn't want to do that other stuff. I wanted to be a director."

That he did, on his own terms, writing his own scripts even after famously dropping out of a New York University screenwriting class after two days, finding their way of thinking too formulaic and stodgy.

He struggled to make the 30-minute short "Coffee and Cigarettes," which screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, and formed the basis for 1996's "Sydney," retitled "Hard Eight" a year later.

Anderson's breakthrough came with the highly praised "Boogie Nights" (1997), starring Mark Wahlberg as an innocent who finds refuge in the porn industry of the '70s and early '80s. But even that amazing ensemble tale could not prepare audiences for Anderson's three-hour masterpiece "Magnolia." The tale of love, loss, loneliness as affecting individuals whose lives intersect was nominated for an Academy Award in 1999 for best screenplay (losing to M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense") and was realized well before the director turned 30.

Tackling such an ambitious project "takes a combination of confidence and arrogance and ego," he said, "But that sounds kind of negative. Really, it takes a kind of will, a persistence of vision, knowing that for me there really is no other option."

At the time "Magnolia" was released, much attention was focused on the soundtrack, with music by his friend Aimee Mann punctuating the story line with texture and lyrics. Songs ranged from the 3-decade-old Three Dog Night tune "One," to her own "Save Me," "Deathly" and "Wise Up," which is sung in the film by cast members, including Tom Cruise, in a contemplative, music-video ready montage.

Music and sound are essential elements in Anderson's films. Who can forget the scene in "Boogie Nights" in which a young man continuously drops firecrackers onto the ground at the home of a drug lord, making the audience feel the same jumpiness as the film's characters in not knowing what's going to happen next, except that it's likely to be bad?

Music that's dissonant and grating is brought to the forefront in "Punch-Drunk Love" to reflect Egan's, played by Adam Sandler, state of mind. After a time, anyone watching will feel driven to grip the edge of their seat or hold their heads, hoping the music will end. And it does. But only after Egan makes it to Hawaii in pursuit of the woman he loves, played by Emily Watson.

That's when the sickly blue-gray of California's San Fernando Valley gives way to a lush, healthy Technicolor glow, and at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Egan's lulled by the sounds of local performers the Ladies K -- Kaila Gouveia and Maggie Kuulei Bilermo -- singing the Andy Cummings tune "Waikiki."

In most films, music seems like an afterthought, with the director handing an edited copy of the film to a sound guy. For Anderson, music is integral to the film and his writing. Composer Jon Brion was brought in early to create music played while the actors did their scenes.

For "Punch-Drunk," Anderson said, "I wanted something abrasive, percussive, mixed with lush, good old-fashioned romantic Hawaiian stuff.

"I think movies are 50 percent seeing and 50 percent hearing, and if you don't have one, you're shortchanging the audience."

Anderson was not even born when Three Dog Night released "One" in 1969, and only 9 when Supertramp released "Breakfast in America," with two songs off that album, "Goodbye Stranger" and "Logical Song," featured in "Magnolia."

"I had older brothers and sisters who listened to any kind of rock music, and my father was into big-band jazz. There's not a lot of music I don't like," he says, confessing to be a frustrated musician who "can't play a lick of any song."

He cast the Ladies K after a visit the Royal Hawaiian to examine life in touristville. "As many times as I've been to Hawaii, I'd never visited this famous place, and I decided to check it out one night."

Head Lady Gouveia recalls, "He was in the audience one evening with his girlfriend Fiona Apple, and he said he liked what we did. They were both so gracious and sweet, and he said he was coming back and would maybe put us in a movie.

"I wasn't going to hold my breath -- I didn't know who he was -- but I said, 'How nice.'"

That was in August 2000. He was back in January 2001, and the Ladies K were on the set for three days in March 2001.

"I heard a lot of horror stories about Hollywood types, so I was very surprised that we had such a nice experience with the whole production," Gouveia said. "People told me to get an attorney, make sure we get a contract. Something told me not to do anything, and I'm so glad I didn't."

Anderson seems to be the last person who would try to take advantage of anyone. He's being viewed as a champion of underdogs for having cast the unproved Mark Wahlberg -- still more widely known then as Marky Mark -- as Dirk Diggler in "Boogie Nights." The trend continued with his casting of animated doofus Sandler, long a punching bag for critics, in "Punch-Drunk."

And though it's expected that the Ladies K will be new to a national audience, they are equally obscure to most locals who never take the time to explore their own back yard.

"I think they're so wonderful, so gifted," Anderson said. "And when things are good and people don't pay enough attention, I get mad. It's like when you spot something great and you want to shout it to the whole world."

With so much to shout about, it's no wonder the writer-director doesn't bother with anyone else's scripts.

"I have enough trouble in my own brain, stories I want to tell from my experience. I think it would be interesting to adapt a book someday, but I just love writing. It's just one of the most exciting things you can do when it's cooking."

He's a frequent visitor to these isles, and holed up for two months in a private home to write "Punch-Drunk."

"It's helpful if you're writing in a place where the wind, mountains, temperature and ocean frees you to go with their rhythm. When I'm in Hawaii, I'm in a better mind-set."

He said he was going crazy while he was in New York after "Magnolia," challenging himself yet again by trying to write for "Saturday Night Live," where he met Sandler.

"I did that for a couple of shows. I wanted to try my hand at it, learn how they did it," he said. "I'm my own boss, but I wanted to see what it's like for writers for hire, and it was very stressful, so my hat's off to anyone who can do that. I think I'll stay to my day job."

And that goes double for his chanteuse girlfriend.

Asked whether he has any Guy Ritchie-Madonna ambitions, he said of their film "Swept Away," "Well, that didn't work out, did it? Not that I don't think (Fiona) wouldn't be great, she would be. But I'd worry about us killing each other."

He doesn't worry about critics, but he enjoys getting feedback from those affected by his film, even if their ideas have no relation to his intent. "It's always a trip when someone says they got something out of it, because after the film's done I feel removed from it. It's out in the world and it's confusing -- you have to wonder, Does it mean anything to anybody? So it's nice when people say it made them think. That's what it's supposed to do."

Interview: "Love Might Do A Number On Paul"

Chicago Tribune, Written By Mark Caro
October 25th, 2002


Paul Thomas Anderson likes to stick actual phone numbers into his movies instead of those phony "555" ones, and if you called the ones mentioned in Magnolia, you heard phone messages related to the movie.

So when Adam Sandler's character recites his phone number in Punch-Drunk Love, you can imagine all of the Anderson cultists taking out their pens.

If you call the number, you hear a male voice saying, "Hi, this is Paul. Please leave a message."

Is that Anderson?

"No, it's not," the filmmaker said. "It's a funny story, actually. That's a phone number that we bought for Magnolia. You're supposed to just kind of own it forever, and it turned out New Line (which released Magnolia) gave up paying this really small bill per month. So I called the number just to check and see if they still had it, and it was some guy named Paul. So I guess he might get a lot of phone calls."

The number, in fact, is the same one that the Philip Seymour Hoffman character dials in Magnolia. A message for "Paul" from this reporter went unreturned.

"I think that Columbia contacted him," Anderson said. "My producer called to try and figure a situation out, so I don't know what the latest is on it."

Interview: "Director Punch-Drunk With Joy"

Seattle PI, Written By Paula Nechak
October 19th, 2002


Paul Thomas Anderson has only made four feature films but he's one of our most original, insightful and invigorating filmmakers.

"Hard Eight," "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia" and now "Punch-Drunk Love" have earned Anderson two Oscar nominations for original screenplay, a spate of awards from film festivals worldwide and the coveted best director's prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival (for "Punch-Drunk Love").

No wonder he's so darn cheerful when I meet him in the lounge of Seattle's Four Seasons Olympic Hotel. Anderson is rumpled and casual, easy to talk to, self-deprecating, unpretentious -- and he smokes like a chimney.




If anything, he's the antithesis of the guy who writes what might be deemed heavy, surreal films, teeming with characters wading through chaos, catastrophe and calamity in search of order and meaning -- you know, the stuff of great literature. It's a comparison that makes the 32-year-old writer and director laugh.

"If I ever set out to do something literary it would be preposterous. People probably only think that because my films are just kind of wordy."

Anderson had jetted into town because he wanted to screen "Punch-Drunk Love" at Paul Allen's Cinerama Theatre. He says it's the best movie theater around, and he was so excited about watching the film with an audience there that he urged his pal and the film's star, Adam Sandler, to fly up and join him in a Q&A after the movie.

"Punch-Drunk Love," which opened yesterday, is a departure for Anderson. It's smaller and goofier than the all-star ensemble productions of "Boogie Nights" or "Magnolia," and its dark screwball comedy and romance found their inception in a source other than Anderson's mind. His inspiration was a Time magazine article about civil engineer David Phillips, who became the "Pudding Guy" to the airline industry after he accumulated 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles by purchasing 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice pudding during a mileage promotion.

Anderson fleshed out the idea, renaming Phillips "Barry Egan," and added a romance with enigmatic Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), a hilariously dysfunctional set of seven sisters from hell for Egan and a subplot about a phone-sex scam. He wrote the script for the film's two stars, Sandler and British actress Watson, who was looking for something contemporary and light after "crying or dying" in films like "Breaking the Waves" and "Hilary and Jackie."

I note these two disparate-seeming talents both have roots in repertory -- one comedic and the other classic, and that they have more in common than people know.

"Right," he says. "They also have a similar work ethic and come from a communal place of doing that work. It's why the three of us got along so well. You always hear that -- 'we got along so well' -- but we did, we had difficulties but we also had a ball.

"Good actors make a film have weight, you know? And now Emily was allowed to have a try at a Hollywood film ("Red Dragon") as a result of doing this movie. If you're a British actress in a movie with Adam, more Hollywood people will know who you are."

Anderson is one director who allows a superstar like Sandler to transcend his screen persona in a film. Think of him casting Tom Cruise, who got away from his hero image to play an angry, swaggering "seduce and destroy" guru in "Magnolia." It earned Cruise a best supporting actor nomination and a Golden Globe award. Similarly, "Punch-Drunk Love" may nudge Sandler out of his lightweight-comedy niche.

Anderson says they are both actors who "control their own destinies. They're both auteurs of the things they do, so it's probably nice when someone comes in and says, 'I can take it from here.' It lifts a burden off of them." That said, Anderson's making of a film that was smaller in scope was still fraught with what he calls his penchant for "making everything as challenging as I possibly can when it could have been so simple." He laughs. "We probably could have been in and out of there in 30 days, but alas.

"The script was always changing. I've never worked this way before and it was pretty addicting. I'm not in a rush to do it again but we were in a great position. We'd already gotten our jobs as director, actor and actress and so it was a little indulgent. So often you make a movie and miss out on the process, you have to make your days, you can't show up and not know what you're doing that day.

"But with a certain kind of movie, a project like this with a small crew, you can have that happen. But you have to be careful and not mess around or behave too stupidly. Do you know how many times you can rewrite something only to find it was right the first time?"

Still, Anderson, for all the attention paid to his scripts, concedes it's the actors "who help make a film have weight. I think I made a big leap in figuring out how to do my job when I realized the only thing the audience is looking at is a person's face."

What about the acclaim as a filmmaker? How does it feel to win the best director prize at Cannes? "Acceptance always feels good," he says. "But I've always got to ruin it in some way, though, so I don't feel comfortable. I mean, I always feel like an imposter anyway so when (it) fades, I'm always consumed by 'what am I doing?' and 'what do I want?' "

"It's a funny thing, because my memory of making this film is that I'm always concerned with the audience. I'm thinking, 'Does this communicate, does this work, is this funny, is this scary?'

"I try to please myself and challenge myself but not be selfish," Anderson says. "I want it to be exciting for the audience."

Interview: "Paul Thomas Anderson Casts Wider Net With Punch-Drunk Love"

Chicago Tribune, Written By Mark Caro
October 16th, 2002


Here's a theory that doesn't particularly apply to "Punch-Drunk Love" director Paul Thomas Anderson, but since we're talking about a filmmaker who approaches everything from odd angles, you'll just have to roll with it:

When rockers such as Talking Heads, R.E.M. and Elvis Costello started out, they occupied their own strange planets, and their fans gravitated toward them to get a handle on Heads front man David Byrne's jittery alienation, R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe's mumbled lyrics or Costello's venom.

But as these performers grew in popularity, they became more aware of their impact on audiences and began to tailor their works accordingly, choreographing their stage moves (particularly Talking Heads and R.E.M.) and making their material more accessible. They were meeting their audiences halfway, sometimes with better artistic results than others.

The 32-year-old Anderson established a loyal cult following with his first three highly personal films, "Hard Eight" (1997), "Boogie Nights" (1997) and "Magnolia" (1999), the last being a three-hours-plus mosaic of troubled father-child relationships that supporters found mesmerizing (this writer included) and detractors deemed interminable. After "Magnolia," Anderson told interviewers that his job is to "communicate" and that he'd love to connect with a broad audience a la Steven Spielberg.

Then he made "Punch-Drunk Love," a 90-minute romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler, the childish, highly marketable star of such popular low-brow comedies as "The Waterboy" and "Big Daddy."




This is where the theory falls flat: "Punch-Drunk Love," which opens Friday, is every bit as idiosyncratic as Anderson's previous films. Sandler fans expecting his typical goofball antics may be surprised to find themselves in an off-kilter world where the actor's nerdiness and repressed anger have a serious edge and most of the humor derives from character and situation rather than broad gags and funny faces.

Anderson is trying to reach a wide audience; he just has a unique way of doing so.

"I don't know. I think everyone's going to like this movie — I hope," Anderson said on the phone from his Los Angeles home, where he was recuperating from a bug that prompted him to cancel his trip last week to the Chicago International Film Festival. ("I've got the most tortured stomach on the planet right now.")

"You always think about an audience when you're making a movie," he added, "like 'Is this funny? Are they going to see this bit of business?'" With "Punch-Drunk Love" the goal was "to try to make a movie that I would want to watch. I'm very proud of 'Magnolia,' but I really don't want to watch it. But I would like to watch this on a Saturday night."

Will the "Waterboy" crowd share his enthusiasm?

"The 'Waterboy' crowd is a very big crowd," he said. "I don't know. I know this movie might not be for everyone. I think that if you like Adam Sandler, you will love this movie because it's really just him as a performer that people love so much, that I love."

Sandler plays Barry Egan, an emotionally constipated entrepreneur (he sells novelty plungers) who's constantly being razzed by his seven older sisters and who sporadically releases his rage by smashing glass doors or restaurant bathrooms. Like Anderson, he says "I don't know" a lot.

Barry has devised a scheme to accumulate frequent-flier miles through pudding purchases (a subplot based on an actual story), and he is transformed by the love of one of his sisters' friends, Lena (Emily Watson), who perhaps has a screw loose herself.

Like "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights," "Punch-Drunk Love" is set in Anderson's native San Fernando Valley, but it takes place in a pixilated reality where characters at any moment may be surprised by violence (a car crash, an attack by vengeful phone-sex henchmen) or wonder (a harmonium deposited in front of Barry's workplace, an unexpected declaration of affection).

Anderson, who did a short stint as a "Saturday Night Live" writer to prepare for "Punch-Drunk Love," said his biggest inspiration was "musicals, really, like the (Fred) Astaire-(Ginger) Rogers movies. I just love watching those. Everybody loves to watch those. They're like chicken soup, you know. That kind of feeling, that kind of length, 90 minutes with music, handsome-looking couple. I know that it's not exactly like that, but (I wanted) that flavor, like a bouncing-ball kind of flavor."

Critical reactions are leaning toward the positive but running the gamut. The New York Times' A.O. Scott raved: "What Mr. Anderson wants to do is recapture, without nostalgia, the giddiness and sweep of old movies, and his mastery of the emotional machinery of the medium is breathtaking."

J. Hoberman of the Village Voice appreciated the movie's "admirable disdain for audience expectations" but concluded: "As elegantly crafted as it often is, Anderson's movie is essentially a one-trick pony that, hampered by an undeveloped script, ultimately pulls up lame."

Passionate debates about his work don't bother Anderson.

"It's great," he said. "Yeah, it's all great."

And he's not preoccupied with making everyone happy.

"You can crawl around your own (insides) for a really long time trying to please people," he said. "That's really a dead-end street."

The funny part is that at least some elements that annoy some viewers are likely to be the same ones that tickle others, such as Sandler's restraint and the movie's unwillingness to let you settle into a comfort zone. Using his trademark layered dialogue and a sometimes-aggressive percussive score from Jon Brion, Anderson makes the viewer share Barry's early frustration to such an extent that you're ready to smash glass doors yourself.

"All good movies make you uncomfortable," Anderson said. "Like 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' is uncomfortable, when it's suspenseful and all the obstacles (are) getting in his way. All great stories are stories of jeopardy, right?"

Anderson also dismisses the often-repeated notion that "Punch-Drunk Love" is a minor work, especially in comparison to "Magnolia" and the 2-1/2-hour-long "Boogie Nights."

"There's no such thing as a minor work if you do this job," Anderson said. "I worked longer on this movie than any of my other movies. And probably harder and more intensely in some ways."

Filmmaker Jonathan Demme ("The Silence of the Lambs," "Something Wild"), who has gone from being a primary Anderson influence to a friend, was unequivocal in his feelings.

"He's an artist, man," Demme said while in town recently. "There's stuff in this movie, endless stuff in this movie that we've never seen before: situations, images, characters. He's just a brilliant, brilliant filmmaker, and he's an absolute original. I wish he'd get the heck out of the Valley now. I want to see Paul branch out. I want the world to be his canvas."

"I want to get out of the Valley too," Anderson said. "I will next time."

Anderson's work on "Punch-Drunk Love" won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, which seems fitting because even his critics acknowledge his intuitive command of mixing images and sound. He said learning new tricks is "the fun part," and on "Punch-Drunk Love" his biggest lesson involved scheduling shooting times to take advantage of sunlight for "beautiful" and "theatrical" effects.

"It's kind of a nice thing when you do that, when you're at the mercy of the biggest light in the world," he said. "It's bigger and more powerful than you, so you have to go to it. It's a lot of fun chasing the sun."

Interview: "Out There"

Boston Globe, Written By Wesley Morris
October 14th, 2002


Paul Thomas Anderson scales back his scope with 'Punch-Drunk Love' but remains committed to stretching your mind.

Paul Thomas Anderson is tall. He might be lanky, too. Today, he's kind of shaggy and fidgety but totally affable - if a little out of sorts. Somehow, he's managed to irritate his tailbone. This is a self-diagnosis: ''I must have sat on it weird."

Were he paler, he'd qualify for gaunt - like a self-styled hipster fronting a band whose records sell in the thousands and inspires talk of being the next great you-name-it.

But Anderson doesn't make garage rock. He makes movies, which is where he does his styling.




He might be the next Robert Altman, mining specific corners of America for irony, tragedy, and human comedy. For now, Anderson's corner is the San Fernando Valley, which is where his last three movies - ''Boogie Nights'' (1997), ''Magnolia (1999), and now ''Punch-Drunk Love,'' opening Friday - have been set.

''Punch-Drunk Love'' is neither a sprawling porn-industry family saga, like ''Boogie Nights,'' nor a three-hour saga that ends with a torrent of frogs, as did ''Magnolia.'' It's an Adam Sandler movie - a deeply felt one that dares to give Happy Gilmore a psyche, a soul, and a girl (Emily Watson) who's as lonely (and odd) as he is.

Sandler plays Barry Egan, a reclusive entrepreneur prone to implosion. He runs around the film in a post-office blue suit that evokes Gene Kelly in ''Singin' in the Rain'' as well as Jack Lemmon in ''Save the Tiger.'' The character is somewhere in between, veering from joy to pathos.

In a mere 90 minutes, the film includes a scam to get frequent-flier miles through proof-of-purchase coupons; an insidious phone-sex operator; and an orphaned harmonium. There are vibrant and undulating painted interludes, and the camera dances, sometimes to songs we don't hear, enough for the film to effectively pass as a musical, too.

Anderson is struggling to unite fringe and mainstream sensibilities. Maybe you're tired of hearing it, but at 32, he and his work are where this country's cinema should have the daring to go.

Has critical success spoiled Paul Thomas Anderson? No. He's an excellent listener - and, apparently, an even better friend. Not long after this conversation, he ran to check out his pal and P. T. Anderson player John C. Reilly, who's in town rehearsing for ''Marty,'' the musical. Then later in the week, he was off to Chicago to hang out with Altman himself.

Q. The high-five to Altman in ''Punch-Drunk Love'' is the Shelley Duvall song you use from ''Popeye.'' How does he feel about that - because he won't even talk about ''Popeye?''?

A. [Completely giddy.] Well, I'll tell you this. I showed it to him. We watched it together. And he's sitting in this chair. And ''He Needs Me'' came up, and he went [makes small conductor's gesture], and he started nodding his head. I said, ''What do you think?'' And he says, ''Great.''

Q. No.

A. [Back then] it was Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks and Bob Altman and Robin Williams in Malta in the late '70s. And you will hear [expletive] that will blow your mind. There was this Maltanese orchestra completely out of tune, bleeding through Shelley Duvall on the headphones, and they're kind of laughing at her. It was all just this disaster area. I asked [Altman] about it, and he was just completely confused: ''Well, those were the dark days.''

Q. How much of each new project for you is a desire to clear your brain out from what you were last working on?

A. I always think of it as wherever you last were, you always want to go left. I've been at this party. You spend so long with something in one mood that you're desperate for another mood or whatever's invaded your life at that moment. It's like a combination of wanting to dictate where you want to go and never really having a choice.

Q. So it sounds like a lot of your process is instinctive.

A. Yeah, I remember when I sat down to write ''Magnolia,'' after ''Boogie Nights. '' I was like, ''I just want to do something small. I just want to do something small.'' And it turned out to be the complete opposite. And in some ways it is, to me, still really small. It's long, but it's still really small.

Q. Here's the difference between those two movies for me: The smallness in ''Magnolia'' is protracted intimacy, and ''Boogie Nights'' is covering an era. ''Magnolia'' feels like a day, but a complete, lived-in day. All the things that can happen in a day happen in this one day.

A. That's how soap operas are! When you watch a soap opera, you're like, ''[expletive] that's a thick day.'' Getting from one side of the hospital to the other in a soap opera can take a week.

Q. How did you get from the scope of ''Magnolia'' to something smaller like ''Punch-Drunk Love?''

A. I have a hard time remembering which came first. I had pieces and chunks, and they're always in search of something. You know that feeling when you've got huge stacks [of ideas]? Well, what's gonna eventually win here? A lot of things needed a trigger or help. And somewhere around the same time, I wanted to do something with Adam Sandler. So he and the coupon thing [an actual case involving a man who got millions of frequent- flier miles from Healthy Choice pudding cups] were real triggers. But in a movie-movie sense I probably wanted to go ''How nice to make a romantic comedy.''

Q. Was that the result of having seen so many and thinking, ''That was bogus''?

A. Not so much. More like, if the movies that I go home and watch are Astaire-Rogers movies, why wouldn't I want to make one of those? Why wouldn't I try to make a movie that I would like to watch on a Saturday night? If I'm gonna get stoned and watch a movie, I'm not gonna watch ''Magnolia,'' you know what I mean? And that's the thing about Adam's movies that really appealed to me, too. I really got into them as I was editing ''Magnolia.'' And I thought [he bangs the table], ''I want some of that. How do I do that?''

Q. So you wrote this with Adam in mind.

A. You know what, as a real exercise I was really trying to figure out how movies that are 90 minutes make so much sense. I think it was about putting some kind of discipline on myself. Honestly, 90 minutes is good for your [expletive]. I was also thinking that I can't do this again when I make a movie, just invest so much emotion. As a result, I wrote it pretty quickly, really quickly - like four months. But then going to make it, we completely ended up taking another tack and shot almost as long as we shot ''Magnolia.''

What I was thinking about, too, was communicating with an audience. That's what I fell in with about Adam: That dude communicates to so many millions of people and does it obviously so very, very well. I was wondering, Isn't that the job? Isn't that the job we've been given, to communicate to people? What could be better than that?

Q. You're always gonna feel like a failure if you can't communicate with everyone.

A. Listen, at the end of Magnolia, I remember feeling like everyone is gonna see this. I think this movie will make $300 million. I think we did it guys. And then, you're like, ''Well, OK. '' You want everyone to see your movie. You want everyone to like your movie - now, because it's about to come out on Friday.

Q. Some people would argue that having a Tom Cruise [in ''Magnolia''] or having Adam Sandler in this film is a way of ensuring that people would see it.

A. [His face gets tight. And he can't find the words to respond. He looks wounded, like he might cry.] That's people that don't pay attention to Adam Sandler.

Q. You've gotten something out of him - or put something into him - that nobody else has.

A. I think it was nice for both of us. We're both really similar. He works with a very tight-knit group of people, and he's the auteur of his movies. And I have the same thing: a small group of people, and we make them together, and we put them out. And I think it was nice for both of us to step outside ourselves a little bit and come to each other. And we both benefited from a kind of like: ''Are you a little scared right now? I'm pretty scared, too. Good - let's try and go to work.'' And I've never had such nice time working with someone. I want to make a lot more movies with him.

Q. We were talking about communication before. And I was thinking about the Jeremy Blake artworks in the film. They add a sensory dimension; millions of Adam Sandler fans will see this and wonder what these interludes are trying to convey, in a way that the frogs posed a similar challenge in ''Magnolia.''

A. I hope it creates another kind of experience. But they come from a cornier place than you might think. Like something should go here. [Big laugh.] There's three of them. One's at the beginning of the movie. There's a second one in the middle of the movie because I had to cut something out. And I thought, ''I got just the thing to put there!'' It was like making music. You know, this could really use a guitar solo. And the third was toward the end when I was trying to figure out how to teleport somebody to another place.

Q. Let's face it, they're also pretty druggy.

A. Yeah, I think this is a good pot-smoking movie. I think that plays into the 90-minute thing.

Q. And ''Magnolia''?

A. Bad. Long. Bad idea. Don't smoke pot and watch ''Magnolia.''

Interview: "Love At First Sight"

Chicago Sun Times, Written By Roger Ebert
October 13th, 2002


So there I am at the Toronto Film Festival, eyeing Adam Sandler across the room. He knows and I know that I have never given him a good review. That time we met backstage at Letterman, he was very decent, considering. He said he hoped that someday he would make something I liked. Now he has.

The movie is "Punch-Drunk Love," by Paul Thomas Anderson. The moment it was announced, I got a lot of e-mails from people asking what in the hell Anderson was thinking of, making an Adam Sandler movie. Such is the power of Sandler's presence that it didn't occur to them it might be a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Now I have seen it, and can report that it is both: an Adam Sandler movie by Paul Thomas Anderson. Imagine a Tom Green movie by Martin Scorsese. No, that's easier.




"Punch-Drunk Love," which opens Friday, stars Sandler as the peculiar, mannered operator of a small business, who meets a strange woman (Emily Watson) and follows her to Hawaii after discovering that buying $3,000 in pudding will win him enough frequent flier miles. Sandler plays a character not unlike the person he usually portrays--Variety didn't call him "the king of moronic farce" for nothing--but the movie looks deeper and finds a pool of anger just below the passive-aggressive surface.

Having admired the movie, I went to the party afterward on the reasonable grounds that I might never again be able to do what I was doing right now. I walked over to Adam Sandler and told him I liked his movie.

"I will have to tell my parents, so they can watch your show again," he said. He talked just the way he talks in the movies: Flat and a little childlike, with an edge. "They had to stop watching your show, because it made them say bad words."

I said I could understand how that might be. A human tide separated us, and washed me up the next afternoon for an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, who after "Boogie Nights" (1997) and "Magnolia" (1999) has emerged as one of the most gifted filmmakers of his generation (he is 32).

The last time I met Anderson, he sat on my back porch in Chicago and promised me that the reproductive equipment of Mark Wahlberg, so memorably on view in "Boogie Nights," was absolutely and in every respect Wahlberg's own. There had been reports it was a special effect, or a stand-in, whatever. Later I learned that the treasures were not, in fact authentic. Did I now accuse Anderson of lying? I didn't even bring it up, mostly because I had forgotten it. So quickly do big issues shrink with the passage of time.

I was in a lather to quiz him on Adam Sandler. Why would a brilliant young auteur throw himself on the altar of the king of moronic farce?

"I wanted to work with Sandler so much," he said, "because, if I've ever been kinda sad or down or whatever, I just wanna pop in an Adam Sandler movie."

"That wouldn't cheer me up," I said.

"I love him," Anderson said, "and he's always made me laugh. l like just about all of his movies and have always felt comfort in watching them. It's Saturday night and if I wanna watch something fun, I'm gonna watch an Adam Sandler movie. Or if I'm sad, I'm popping in an Adam Sandler movie. The last thing I would wanna do is watch 'Magnolia,' you know, or 'Breaking the Waves.' So I'm looking at Sandler and thinking God, I wanna get a piece of that. I wanna learn from that dude. What is it that's so appealing about him to so many people? I think he's this great communicator, you know."

"He doesn't seem to communicate very well with the critics."

"This sort of bashing from critics that he's taken is just defeatist, really. His films are obviously good because they're obviously communicating something to a lot of people and they're making them laugh and that's it, at the end of the day."

"I kept an open mind. I hoped to like one of them."

"You should revisit some of them. 'The Wedding Singer,' and 'Big Daddy,' and especially 'Happy Gilmore.' Those three, in particular, I could watch them over and over and over again just from the pure joy that you can feel them putting into making the movie which, is just as much joy as you can feel Robert Altman putting into making 'Nashville'."

I said there was something about Sandler that intrigued me, because he is obviously someone with a real talent, and it made me mad when he hid inside that goofy persona.

"He is a pretty nice dude," Anderson said, "and maybe you pick up on that. The second night that I met him, we went to have dinner and we're walking down the street and I've never seen anything like it. I've walked down the street with some big movie stars but walking down the street with him made my heart as warm as you can imagine--because of people's response to him and his sort of openness and response to them. This kid just kinda out of the blue came up and said, 'I'm Jewish, I'm Jewish,' with real sense of pride in being Jewish and Adam said, 'Great.' And it was just because of the 'Hanukkah Song,' you know. And it was like, I wanna steal some of that. I wanna be around that kind of life force."

We are sprawled in overstuffed leather chairs in a back room of the Windsor Arms in Toronto. We are back here so he can smoke. Anderson wears a wrinkled white dress shirt, blue shorts and the regulation four-day growth of beard. When he and Sandler decided that Sandler's character would wear a suit and tie throughout "Punch-Drunk Love," you can see how they thought that would be funny.

"Have you made an Adam Sandler movie, or a Paul Thomas Anderson movie?" I asked.

"It's like an art-house Adam Sandler movie," he said.

"It's like you deconstructed the Adam Sandler movies and put them back together again in a new way at a different level."

"That's nice," said Anderson.

"Adam Sandler, who generally generates his own films, could never have made this film. Yet his fans will still be seeing Adam Sandler."

Anderson lit a cigarette. "He just appealed to me, point blank," he said. "He's someone's who's taken such a bashing, but still, he was high on my list. In meeting him it all came clear to me. We have a really similar work ethic. Kind of obsessive and consumed by it. And also, I wanted to learn from him about his attack on stuff. How does he make his movies, what are his concerns? His concerns a lot of times are, what is funny? What will make them laugh? And coming out of making 'Magnolia' and living with that for a while, I went, 'God, I would really like to take a left turn and make myself happy, get rid of all this cancer and crying.' "

I said that when I look at Sandler's movies I think I see an anger just below the surface.

"Absolutely. I saw this 'Best of Adam Sandler' DVD from 'Saturday Night Live,' and an amazing thing happened. There's this moment when he's doing this talk show called 'The Denise Show,' about his ex-girlfriend who's left him, and his father calls up and says, 'What are you doing; you're embarrassing the family.' And Adam goes into this fit of rage, screaming at his father, and honest to God I saw this moment where it appears as if the whites of his eyes turn black and they roll back in his head. It was like, he just lost his mind. I would play it back, over and over again, and you can see him kinda snap back to reality. The audience is laughing and it's almost like he finally started to hear them laughing a few seconds later."

"All comedians are said to be tragic at heart."

"I think it's true. It's probably something to do with feeling like an impostor. You beat yourself up and you make yourself feel like you're kinda worthless. It can turn into a rage."

"Have you previewed this film like in a multiplex on Saturday night, in the Valley or somewhere?"

"No."

"Let's hypothesize two audiences. One audience would be the festivals at Cannes and Toronto and your local art theatre. The other audience would be Adam Sandler fans who heard he has a new movie out. Do you think they will see two different films?"

"If I've screwed up, they might."

Interview: "Director Now Punch-Drunk Over Comedy"

Seattle Times, Written By Moira MacDonald
October 13th, 2002


Paul Thomas Anderson, Oscar-nominated writer-director of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," has developed a trademark style over the past few years, crafting ensemble dramas about lost, confused souls seeking connection and community. And now he's made an Adam Sandler comedy.

Say what?

"It was a really conscious decision to do something else," says Anderson, 32, in town last month for a sneak preview of "Punch-Drunk Love." He was in a happy frame of mind and decided to try something new. "I felt good. It's all where you land."




The soft-spoken Anderson, whose 1997 breakthrough film was the remarkably confident mood piece "Hard Eight," doesn't really do things like anyone else. For one thing, a publicist warns me beforehand, he doesn't like to meet press in a hotel suite, as is standard — it's too artificial. (During our talk, he speaks passionately against the soul-deadening process of assembly-line junket interviews.)

So we meet in an elegantly lit bar at cocktail hour, where he strolls in sans publicists or entourage, and the whole thing feels a bit like a pleasant Internet-arranged date, with one person scribbling notes throughout. We talk about old movies — Anderson loves musicals, from the Astaire/Rogers vehicles to the '50s MGM classics, and says he's "really obsessed" by the film and TV works of the late comedian Ernie Kovacs — and, inevitably, about Sandler.

"I wanted to learn from him," said Anderson. "Audiences just connect with him on a massive level." He recalled an evening at home when his girlfriend (musician Fiona Apple), after a bad day, said, "I just wanna watch Adam Sandler!" Anderson, no stranger to A-list celebrities (he's cast the likes of Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow), describes walking down an L.A. street with Sandler and being "absolutely mobbed" by fans.

For a director whose films receive critical acclaim but limited audience exposure, it's understandable that Anderson might be intrigued by what Sandler could bring. The comedian plays Barry Egan, a low-rent businessman (he sells novelty plungers — "the kind that don't break" — from his office in an anonymous warehouse) with anger-management issues, seven smothering sisters and an unspoken, desperate longing for love.

When blue-eyed Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) strolls into his warehouse, his life changes in ways at first unpredictable, then in the gloriously conventional path of romantic comedy. Along the way, there's some of the strangest pillow talk you'll ever hear, and the naïve charm of Shelley Duvall singing "He Needs Me" (from "Popeye").

"Punch-Drunk Love" is a story both dark and light; and the way Anderson coaxes different shades into Sandler's performance is uncanny. The film made its premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where Anderson was one of two recipients of the best-director award.

While a few members of his unofficial repertory company appear (Luis Guzman, Philip Seymour Hoffman), many of the supporting roles are played by nonprofessionals. "It's a new group of crazy people," said Anderson of the new ensemble, acknowledging that it's hard to find young actors for small parts. "They're all concerned with headshots and cellphones — everything but the job."

Of Barry's seven kvetching sisters, six are played by non-actors (four of whom are related). Recalling their scene, a party at which all seven simultaneously harass their brother, Anderson grins. "I would call 'Cut,' and then 'Did I call cut?' Nothing would happen — they just kept going." Also cast were four blond brothers from Utah, as a group of thugs who pursue Barry. Anderson's casting director found one of them, who mentioned that he had three brothers. "It was perfect," recalled Anderson — "a guy with all these sisters being chased by four brothers."

In addition to finding love, Barry has another quest: He's buying massive amounts of pudding to cash in on a frequent-flyer promotion. This part of the movie is based on a true story, and was the original spark for Anderson's screenplay. David Phillips, a civil engineer at University of California, Davis, purchased 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice pudding two years ago, earning 1.25 million miles, for a total of $3,000.

"He's hysterical," said Anderson, who met with Phillips. "I mean, he bought all that pudding." Anderson optioned the rights to Phillips' story, and thus "Punch-Drunk Love" was born. (Phillips is still using his miles; last time Anderson talked to him, he was off to Sweden to pick out a Volvo for his wife.)

Anderson's brief Seattle visit, with Sandler in tow, was part of a five-city tour to slowly roll out the film. Turns out Anderson loves Seattle's Cinerama Theatre, and wanted to see one of his films play there. "I just wanted to come to Cinerama — to sneak away and show it, to put the movie out into the world. It's nice for the movie, and makes me happy."

Finally, publicists arrive and spirit Anderson away. A few hours later, he's answering post-screening questions to a packed house. He's less forthcoming than he was one-on-one; a question about the meaning of Barry's ever-present blue suit is answered with, "I don't know." (Earlier, he'd said it was a tribute to Technicolor MGM musicals, like "The Band Wagon" and "Singin' in the Rain," where there's always somebody in a bright-blue suit.)

Whether or not he's comfortable in front of a crowd, Anderson is clearly tickled by "Punch-Drunk Love." As for what's next — well, it depends on how he's feeling. This time, said Anderson, "I was just in a romantic-comedy mood."

Interview: Charlie Rose Show Transcript

Charlie Rose Transcript, Written By Jeffrey Zablotny
October 12th, 2002


CHARLIE ROSE: Paul Thomas Anderson is the Oscar nominated behind the critically acclaimed films Boogie Nights and Magnolia, his latest film is Punch-Drunk Love.  He’s earned the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and Sandler stars in what critics call his best performance of his career.  I am pleased to welcome AS and PTA to talk about that movie and many other things.  We were just saying this is the...third, fourth?

PTA: Third time here.

CR: Where did the idea for this come from?




PTA: Well, there’s a story about this guy who collected all this pudding, which is a true story, a guy went and bought thousands and thousands of dollars worth of pudding that equaled a million frequent flyer miles, so that helped, but the main idea was to write something for Adam.  I had a bunch of different chunks of ideas and notions in search of a story kind of thing, but meeting Adam was sort of the trigger to get to work.

CR: Now let me just get on that, because it is the notion, you know he’s box office.  Was it part that, but also something else...something about him...

ADAM SANDLER: Wasn’t it all that?

PTA: No, I’ve been trying to sell out for a while...[laughs]  That’s exactly it...[laughs]

CR: If you want to sell out, sell out big time. [laughs]

PTA: Get some of that Sandler money! [laughs]

PTA: Jonathan Demme, too.  We have competition for Adam Sandler.

CR: You’ve got seven movies coming out?

AS: I have no idea...I have a production company, too.  I mean, I’m here to work, Charlie.

CR: Exactly, that’s the way I see it, that’s what I say, too: Why don’t you do a nightly show?  I’m here to work! [laughs]

AS: Exactly, I’m not gonna be happy until I get a big job.

CR: It’s made me a different man!  It has made me a different man, you know, it will give you more energy, more colour in your face.

AS: Increase that vocabulary.  That’s what I’m looking to do.

CR: I’ve got the doctor for you if you decide to do this in about 50 years, all right.

CR: So you get a call from him.  Or somebody.  You wanna work with him?

AS: Well, here’s what happened.  Paul called, we were shooting ‘Little Nicky’ at the time, and Paul comes over and he hangs out, we meet for about five hours, and he just talked about some of the stuff I’ve done in the past, and he’s a Saturday Night Live fan, so we talked about that stuff, and I just thought that he was a great guy.  And I did also, I loved Boogie Nights, and then a week later, Magnolia came out, and I thought this guy is pretty damned good, isn’t he.  And he said he wanted to work together, do a movie together.  And I was just excited, and we went to work...

CR: For you, knowing that you can make movies, lots of movies, to have the possibility of sort of stretching and working in a different direction with a guy who obviously is a craftsman.

AS: Right...It was exciting, for that reason.  Y’know, getting to do something different, getting to be with a guy that I, y’know, it’s nice to make new friends too in life, and it was nice to meet this guy and like him. And also, when you shoot and movie, you know you’re gonna be together a long time, and I decided to try to accomplish something that I haven’t really done before.

PTA: Well, liking someone is an actor is one thing, but liking them and a person, you’ve got to know, all right, you’re gonna be fun to be with for a couple years, because it will be a couple years at the end of the day and you’ll want to know them, and want to know if they have similar work ethic, and Adam creates all of his own movies, so it was kind of like verifying what I thought about him to be the truth, so it was kind of like I can see that you’re a good guy, are you really?’

CR: Only about hanging out can you figure about that stuff.  Here is what [Paul] said about himself.  He once said, I don’t know if I’m the type of guy who wants to run the world like Spielberg, or retreat to a mansion in London like Kubrick, I just haven’t figured it out.

PTA: That’s a bit arrogant isn’t it!  [laughs] I was just trying to figure out how to be myself!

CR: Tell me what this movie is about.

PTA: It’s about getting in tune.  It is about a love story Between Adam and Emily, about a guy with seven sisters, with four blond crazy brothers coming after him, and getting in tune and finding your music.

CR: What would you add that [Adam]?

AS: Love...Loneliness, becoming happy with yourself and comfortable with ourself and trying to lose some insecurities and growing up.  Getting out of your house.

CR: So who is Barry Egan?

AS: Wow, Barry Egan. Paul sometimes says i a lot of I’m a lot like Barry Egan, I think that I’ve seen myself behave like Barry, I’ve seen my brother be like Barry, I’ve seen my friend Judd act like Barry sometimes.  I stole from a lot of people in my life and just basically trying to be this guy that he created.

CR: Were you instantly ready to do this?  After you met him and liked him?

AS: I was instantly in.  I didn’t know what the movie was going to be, I remember when Paul have me the script, and I read it, and I was just, I’m like, ‘oh, this guy is me.  Am I able to do this?’  I was nervous, but I was in, there was no was I’m going to say I’m not doing this.

CR: Did you want to change after ‘Magnolia’?  Did you say ‘I just did a very heavy film with a lot of heavy talent.  Let me go in a different direction with someone who has a different kind of temperament...

PTA: Completely, and I think I was also in a good mood.  You want to get away from where you were last, your instinct is to always go left, I can’t stand any more cancer, I can’t stand any more sadness...and, it’s funny because at the time, I was finishing up the editing for Magnolia, like the chicken noodle soup was Adam’s movies, and just really being consumed by ‘I want a piece of that and I want to learn how to do that’ because, you always want to keep moving forward.  And I think I was just in a good mood.  Feeling happy.

CR: What did you discover about [Adam] that you didn’t know?

PTA: I think I got even luckier than I thought I might get.  It was like striking gold, just his, most of all, his -- the work ethic.  Like the ability to work hard for a really long period of time, really intensly, and still have an amazing sense of humor, and an amazing sense of humanity.

CR: What is this work ethic about?  Is it just simply that this is what you enjoy doing that you’re on a wave and let’s ride it?

AS: I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been kind of having, since I’m 17, I wanted to be a comedian, I wanted to be good at what I did.  And I wasn’t that great at it for a long time.  I don’t even think that I’ve a master, I’m still trying to grow.  But, it’s consumed my head.  It’s what I woke up thinking is I want to be good, I want to write jokes, I want to become comfortable as an actor, and I think that’s what drives me, is that I’m obsessed with it, and I’ve seen Paul’s other movies, and I thought they were incredible.  I knew he wrote an incredible script, so I said I’d better step it up in my head, and I didn’t want to fail.

CR: And you continue to grow when you feel you grow, when you’re growing and expanding, you’re halfway there, wherever there is.

AS: I know I’m 36 years old, and I have different thoughts than I had when I was 26, and I don’t know what I’ll be thinking when I’m 46.  But I know that I want to continue trying to travel in my career with what I’m thinking about.

PTA: That’s the job.  That’s the job is figuring where you’re at, at that moment, and you do that then, and by the time it’s over with, you usually want to go the other way.

CR: Trusting your instincts.  You’ve also got a phenomenal box office success that you’ve had, there’s something behind that.  There is trusting your instructs but you were delivering something to an audience, there’s some sense of insight, intelligence.

PTA: I’ve walked down the street with movie stars, and I’ve never seen anything like it when Adam walks down the street.

CR: What happens?

PTA: He’s there, he’s present, he’s not somewhere else, and people just respond to that, and that’s what I respond to.

CR: How many films do you have that haven’t been released right now?

AS: I have Paul’s film, I have an animated movie coming out, it’s a holiday movie coming out Thanksgiving.  Shot a movie with the great Jack Nicholson, it’s called Anger Management, he’s unbelievable in it.  And that’ll come out next year.  I’m working a lot --  now I don’t know what I’m doing.

CR: You have nothing to do, now you’re gonna take some time off?

AS: No, no, no, I don’t want to have to think too much about myself.  I need to jump into the work.  I keep hiding.  I don’t want them to get to know me. [laughs]

CR: What about Barry Egan?  Is he pathetic?

AS: He’s pretty...

PTA: An actor is never going to say his character is pathetic in his movie.

AS: And yet he’s pathetic at times.

CR: What’s the phone sex thing about?

AS: I think that’s loneliness.  I don’t think he’s that -- this guy, I don’t think it’s a sexual call as much as he wants to actually talk to somebody, and you know, maybe at the end of it, he’s a man, he gets excited about some of the things the lady is talking about.

CR: You won some awards for this.  But after to first two weeks of filming, you just scrapped it.

PTA: I think we were trying to find our footing and figuring out what the hell we were doing.  I think I tried to figure out a plan on making this movie.  Normally you go and you’ve got a schedule, you’ve got to make that schedule, and you’ve got to do that, but after have done that a few times, you sort of figure out how to spend the money properly.  Not that I have ever wasted before but essentially you can shoot for a lot longer than you might normally think, it’s just about proper money management so it enabled us to really take our time, and the first couple weeks, there’s some stuff that remained, but essentially we were trying to find our footing.  Once once it happened, you sort of look back and go, okay, now we’re getting to work.  So you throw some things out the window, but still stuff remained, so it wasn’t completely a wash.  It was the luxury that came from learning more about how to budget the movie and make it last.

CR: Do you think of yourself as a comedian who acts or do you simply think that you have gone from being a comedian now, to settled into being an actor?

AS: Boy, I don’t know.  I don’t think about what I am too much.  I was obsessed with comedy, and I still am.  But I also, you know, I went to college, I studied acting.  It was on my mind too, to just be an actor so I’m not exactly sure.

CR: What’s the best comedic experience you’ve ever had?  Who taught you the essential sort of skills?

AS: These two guys at SNL, Robert Smigel and Jim Downey, who I became very close with, I think that the writers that I laughed the most at their stuff and I love their taste, and I’m not saying they love my taste, but I’m saying that if they laughed at something I did at Wednesday’s read-through, and if I looked up and saw Downey laughing, I knew that life was good right there.

CR: Are you born with timing or do you learn it?

AS: I think you learn confidence.  That’s what happened with me.  My timing was -- I can tell when I’m not funny, it’s usually when I’m rushing and I’m kind of scared and the audience can see when I’m scared.  If I’m feeling comfortable, it’s usually allright.

CR: It’s true about sports, tennis stroke or a golf stroke, it’s true about this, it is true -- confidence gives you an ease, that makes and allows you to do it better.

AS: If you see a pitcher looking a little nervous to face a batter, you can usually tell he’s not going to pitch too well.

CR: And pitchers who intimidate, like they’ve got your number right, and here it comes.

AS: Right. Like Roger Clemens.

CR: Emily Watson.  Why did you cast her?

PTA: I’ve been a fan since ‘Breaking the Waves’.  You see somebody give a performance like that, it’s the same thing with Adam -- they’ve got balls, I want to be around them.  I want to jump off a cliff with them, someone that daring, and I think that I had in my mind as you’re making a romantic comedy where two people fall in love, they have to be a handsome couple, it’s a pre-requisite, and I thought the two of them together made a handsome couple.

AS: With Emily, it’s like 80/20. [laughs]

CR: Perhaps you don’t even think in terms of this sort of analysis, but is your audience predominantly young teenage guys?

AS: I've heard that.  I mean, I think that’s what written a lot.

CR: I happen to know a lot of babes watch me.

AS: I don’t know about that. [laughs] I just know I have different people who will talk to me about my movies.

CR: Many people watch his movies as we believe that all of them are there.

AS: It’s different age groups, but it doesn’t matter.  I have seen a lot of stuff the way they say Adam Sandler is just for young boys, but I’ve talked to my mother’s friends and they think I’m all right too.  Even the ones that don’t like her, which is a big percentage.

CR: What do you think of these comparisons between you and Jim Carrey?

AS: I think it’s natural for that to happen, I have known since I was a young guy.  I’ve known him since I was like 22, and I love him and we’re both comedians.  When you go to, when I go to a Carrey movie and I watch him, I go, ‘oh wow, I couldn’t do that.  I couldn’t do what he just did.’  So I know he does stuff that I don’t try to do, and I think that I do my own thing.

CR: This is where you take Lance to the grocery store to buy some more pudding.

 [PDL clip]

[everyone laughs]

CR: That’s some good dancing there.  No lessons required, either.

AS: I’m just a natural at a lot of things.  [laughs]

CR: Tell me, do you have any dreams, obsessions, anything that you are desperate to do?

AS: You know what I want to do?  In life, I want to become a little more centered and normal, at home, try to be able to just not to have to work as much as I do.

CR: Are you serious?  You’re not putting me on?

AS: No, I would love to live as a normal person, and I love what I’m getting to do, I’m not complaining, I want to continue to work hard...I want to continue to work hard but I’d like to be able to take my girlfriend/fiancee out there, and spend a full meal without in my head going ‘man, I’ve got to write something’.  You know, I’m a little nuts.

CR: Do you feel a little insecurity?

AS: I don’t think I’m insecure as much as I want to get a lot done.  I was talking to Paul the other night on the phone, if I feel like I’m not trying to accomplish something, I feel like I might be screwing up a little.

CR: This is the reason why he’s so successful.

PTA: It’s a sickness, really.

CR: Did you have to reign him in at all?

PTA: No.

CR: Did you have to direct him at all?

PTA: Yeah.

CR: In what way?

PTA: Keeping an eye on how he was feeling, that’s really just the job, is being an audience, and making sure that you don’t -- that they don’t stray, and watching him.

CR: Or not focus, but what?

PTA: Just being a collaborator, you’ve both after the same thing.  You have your idea of what good is and what quality is, and it can be, after 10 or 15 takes of trying to get it right, it can become really easy to just lose the plot a little bit as an actor.  Or what did you eat?  Have you eaten enough lunch?  Where are we in the day?  That’s the job, and you’re looking out for someone’s well-being.  That’s really what you do.

CR: Actors can feel that, too.  That’s someone’s looking out for them.  That a director is really looking out for my best interest here.

AS: Also, the fact that the movies he’s made already, to me, I love them so much, that helped me trust him taking risks and saying he’s going to do the right thing with my performance.  He ain’t gonna hang me out to dry.

CR: Did you view this as a risk?

AS: After we were doing it, I would hear people to say to me and Paul, you guys are doing a movie together?  That’s weird, that doesn’t make sense.

PTA: It’s not weird when you’re doing your work, and it is weird when someone snaps you out of it.  Adam Sandler?  You guys?  That snaps you back but when you’re in the work, there’s nothing odd at all.

CR: Is writing what comes first for you?

PTA: Writing is great because it’s the alone time for the most part.  The recharging of your batteries.  You get to constantly be working, but you can conduct a bit of a life at the same time, and you can go anywhere in the world and that’s sort of a wonderful thing, and it’s alone time before it becomes a completely social experience for the next two years, when all you’re doing is interacting with people.  It is nice to come to the end of the movie, and be alone for a while.

CR: Do you feel lucky?  I feel happiest when I’m working with people that I care about.  But the idea of working, the joy of working if you are doing things that you enjoy are you are with people that genuinely care about, and there’s a shared passion, there’s nothing better.  Do you agree?

AS: I do agree.  You get to share, I don’t know, when people talk about the movie and walk out of the theatre and like it, and I get to share that with Paul, and Emily, and Philip Hoffman, and Louie and everybody in the movie.  It is cool to have that connection for the rest of your life.

CR: Phil Hoffman’s great.

AS: Yeah, he’s great in the movie, too.  He’s very nice.

PTA: He’s pretty....hot stuff.

CR: He was in Red Dragon, too.

PTA: Yeah.

CR: Do you go to movies a lot?

AS: Yeah, I’ll go and see that.  [laughs] I do, and I go to the movies a lot, me and the girl sit down together.  I enjoy popcorn, and the –

CR: In disguise, though?

AS: No, no, no.

PTA: I’d like to see that.  [laughs]

CR: Is he putting me on? [laughs]

PTA: No no no, I’d like to see him go in disguise, because that’s so far from him.

CR: They’ll leave you alone?

AS: If I go to a movie and it’s very light and crowded in there, people will say hello.  Once the movie starts, unless I’m in it, then it’s pretty weird. You don’t want to have the whole crowd know you’re there.

CR: You don’t want to be seen watching your own movies.

AS: I might affect the audience, they might want to laugh harder...or boo harder.

CR: How many times have you seen [Punch-Drunk Love]?

AS: Well, I saw it with the man himself, alone, a few times.

CR: Take me there as you are watching this.  Is it clinical?  Are you having fun, saying man, weren’t we good?

PTA: [laughs]  I sort of showed him cut scenes, but I thought the best way, the best thing to do was for him and I to go and watch it at my house, and sort of wonder what we’d done, and talk about it some more, it’s sort of a weird thing because it’s kind of over for him at that point and he has to stare himself for an hour and a half, and you want to make sure it’s a comfortable venue.  There you are!  Are you still alive?  Are you breathing? Are you happy?  But, I think we knew, we worked so closely together, it wasn’t like there were going to be any total surprises.  We knew what we were both working towards, and it was kind of nice to share it and I think that we were -- we had some pride.  I think we did have a really nice night that night and felt a lot of, looking back on it, and two years worth of work, that you could help but be happy.

AS: Very proud of it...I’m just excited for people to see it.  It’s like, when we watched it alone, and then we were in Toronto a couple weeks ago and watched it with a big crowd, at 11 at night, and when we watched it alone, I didn’t know how people were going to respond to it when they saw it.  I know that the movies I’ve done before, the full intention is to make an audience laugh, and to get as many laughs as we can get.  All of the sudden, when we were alone, I was like ‘oh wow, I don’t know what the response is gonna be’, and then in Toronto, it was pretty interesting that Barry Egan’s pain was getting a lot of laughs.  His journey.

CR: Thank you for coming, good to see you.  The movie is Punch-Drunk Love.  It opens on October 11th in New York and LA, it opens nationally on October 18th.  I hope you’ll come back.

AS: I would love to.  It was fun.

CR: Thank you for joining us, we’ll see you next time.

Interview: "Punch In The Dark"

The Star, Written By Peter Howell
October 11th, 2002


Punch-Drunk Love director tones down past pretensions

It's a frantic afternoon during the Toronto International Film Festival, and filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson seems to be doing his best impression of Frodo Baggins, the hungry and hairy hobbit from The Lord Of The Rings.

Curled up on a club chair in a darkened corner of a Windsor Arms Hotel bar, he's barefoot, unshaven and plowing through a huge plate of French fries, scarfing them by the fistful. The 32-year-old Californian looks as if he's barely survived a mythic quest of some sort — which, when you're talking about the birth of a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, isn't far from the truth.

"You want some of these?" he says, proffering the platter of fries. The snack is declined, but wine makes a more enticing offer. Soon glasses are clinking in toast to Punch-Drunk Love, the off-kilter romance starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson that shows how weird obsessions, extortion and death threats can lead to love.




The film won Anderson, whose earlier work includes the critical sensations Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia, the best-director prize at Cannes last spring. (Punch-Drunk Love received its North American premiere at the Toronto festival and opens in theatres today.)

Anderson's rec-room casualness seems at odds with the elaborate dance required to sit for a spell with him. His high-profile L.A. publicist Bumble Ward, the main player in a recent New Yorker article on Hollywood spin-control tactics, has let it be known that "PTA" prefers to have his interviews written up in brisk Q&A format, maintaining a just-the-facts distance while allowing maximum space for his rambling views. The deal almost falters on The Star's refusal to commit to such a format, which is apparently all the rage stateside among time-pressed scribes and image-conscious celebrities.

The control-freak aspect of the interview also seems out of sync with writer-director Anderson's anything-goes approach to making Punch-Drunk Love, which he calls "jumping off a cliff." With just three previous features to his name — but enough critical acclaim to last a lifetime — he was already starting to feel stale.

"You know that feeling where you're just f--king fed up with how you've done it before?" Anderson asks rhetorically.

"So I was just thinking, I don't know where we're going to start, but I don't want it to start here ... It was just kind of being frustrated a little bit with making movies, and just going, `How do we f--k ourselves up a little bit, how do we scare ourselves?'"

The answer was to write a movie specifically for comedian Adam Sandler, until now the least likely person to star in a Paul Thomas Anderson picture.

Casting the king of the dorks as a serious romantic lead seems at first a move less inspired than wilfully obtuse for Anderson, who has shown taste and perception in his previous casting choices of such fine character actors as Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who is also in Punch-Drunk Love). But remember that one of Martin Scorsese's best movies, The King Of Comedy, starred Jerry Lewis, the spiritual forefather of Sandler. Maybe the idea of using Sandler isn't so crazy after all, and Anderson insists he really is a huge fan: He loves Sander's films Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy and The Wedding Singer, but what really turned him on to the crewcut cut-up was watching him in an ancient skit called The Denise Show on TV's Saturday Night Live, where Sandler rose to fame in the early '90s.

The Denise Show is a spoof of low-budget cable TV call-in programs. Sandler plays the recently dumped ex-boyfriend of a woman named Denise, and he's trying to get his viewers to assist him in winning Denise back. At one point, the father of Sandler's character calls the show and tells his son to stop embarrassing his family, a demand that enrages the son.

"I saw at this moment where Adam lost it," Anderson says, breaking into a laugh as he tells the story. "You see — omigod! — that the whites of his eyes have gone away. It was this incredible rage, one of those moments where an actor loses it, he doesn't know what he's doing, but he's out there under the lights, going cuckoo.

"I saw it happen, and I played it over and over again, and I thought, this guy is fucking amazing. He has the ability to lose his mind in a great way. He can go from goofy stuff, stuff about getting stoned, to like really crazy complicated stuff. It's spooky. It's amazing."

Sandler, as it turned out, was also a fan of Anderson's. He loved Boogie Nights, the 1997 collision of '70s disco and '80s porn that made a movie star out of Mark Wahlberg. It also helped that Sandler and Anderson are both workaholics.

"We're both into working, and kind of obsessive and dedicated to it," Anderson says. "We're consumed by it, really into it."

Anderson was equally motivated to get British actress Emily Watson as the Brooklyn-born Sandler's love interest in Punch-Drunk Love, even though, once again, it's not exactly a match that comes readily to mind. But Watson was game for a comedy, having had her fill recently of "crying and dying" roles.

"I've seen just about everything of hers, particularly Breaking The Waves, of course," says Anderson, who cites Waves director Lars von Trier as one of his personal heroes.

"That was her first movie, and the first one I saw her in. Who wouldn't want to work with her?"

Perhaps Anderson's biggest risk was his insistence on casting Sandler and Watson alongside many non-actors.

Sandler plays the introverted Barry Egan, the sole brother in a family of seven domineering sisters. Egan is pursued by a phone-sex extortion gang muscled by four Mormon brothers from Utah. Most of the sisters actually are related; the four Mormons actually are brothers.

"I like using unknown actors," Anderson says. "I like working with real people. They can make your life a lot easier and more comfortable sometimes. They can be more fun to be around sometimes, and actually better at being whatever they are.

"Seeing an actor trying to physically pretend that he's a garbage man can be kind of excruciating sometimes, if they don't really know how to operate the machine. Why don't you just get a f--king garbage man who knows how to push the button and he can cut through a lot of that crap?"

It's hard to say which fans, Anderson's or Sandler's, will be most puzzled by Punch-Drunk Love. Anderson aficionados, familiar with his interweaving plot turns, three-hour running times and bold use of music, might find something wanting in a quirky love story that barely reaches the 90-minute mark of a no-brainer date movie. The plot is alarmingly like that of most Adam Sandler movies: Sandler gets abused, gets mad and then gets the girl.

Sandler supporters, meanwhile, may have trouble with their hero's sad-sack demeanour and his lack of one-liners.

They might also scratch their head over Anderson's use of a beat-up harmonium, a piano-like instrument that literally drops into Barry Egan's life, as a recurring symbol more typical of films by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buñuel.

Anderson is the same director, remember, who suddenly introduced a Biblical shower of frogs into Magnolia during the film's climax.

Anderson is hoping that everyone in the audience gets Punch-Drunk Love. He insists that he doesn't enjoy confusing people — he's really, truly sorry if those frogs baffled you — and that he seriously wants to have a blockbuster mainstream hit, not just another critical favourite.

"I'm trying to hit a home run every time," Anderson says, reaching for another fistful of fries.

"I keep thinking they're all $100-million hits. And then they've just let me down. I have a preoccupation with being an entertainer. With showing people a good time, even if it's just being good at communicating.

"So if somebody gets frustrated by the frogs, it makes me feel badly, because I thought it was great and funny. But maybe there was too much pretension there."

Interview: "Pleased As Punch"

Toronto Sun, Written By Bruce Kirkland
October 8th, 2002


Director of Punch-Drunk Love Delights in Dark Side of 'Goofy' Sandler

Maverick Hollywood filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson sips a fine white wine and gobbles down a plate of greasy french fries smothered in ketchup. He swears like a sailor on shore leave and is as sweet and good-natured as Bambi.

We're sitting in a back room of the bar at the swank Toronto hotel The Windsor Arms and Anderson, with his tousled hair and vaguely sleepy look, is dressed casually in battered jeans and a rumpled white shirt.

Looks are deceiving. This is the genius who, in the past seven years, has made some of America's most daring, innovative, intellectually risky and visually dynamic films: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and now Punch-Drunk Love. The new film opens Friday in limited release after appearing to much acclaim (but some minor nay-saying) at the Toronto film festival. Punch-Drunk Love is dark and brooding, at odds with its supposed positioning as a romantic comedy. It is prickly and eccentric. It is provocative and hypnotic. It is everything that cinephiles admire and Hollywood marketing teams hate: A film which cannot be neatly packaged, labelled and sold as a product tie-in with burgers and candy.




Yet Anderson cast gross-out funnyman Adam Sandler in the leading role, opposite the sublime English siren Emily Watson. But, instead of indulging the superstar comic with scenes awash in his usual juvenile jokes, he plumbed the depths of Sandler's psyche to explore the anger, the angst and the ache for love that only he saw hiding there in the train wreck of his comedy sketches.

"I just got such joy from his stuff," Anderson tells the Sun about his unbridled admiration for Sandler, particularly for his Saturday Night Live routines and three of his most popular movies: Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer and Big Daddy.

"It can be so fucking goofy," Anderson says, salting the phrase with one of his favourite words.

"But then it can be so filled with rage. It goes right from when he's the goofball -- and you can't help yourself, you giggle at how fucking stupid and silly it is and just funny for no reason -- to when he's really intense and really angry and really scary and still fucking funny. I thought, 'Oh my, this guy, there's a lot going on here!"

So Anderson was seized with the idea of Sandler, the idea of putting him into a flashy blue suit, the idea of making his character an obsessive compulsive who could not function in love or in the real world. He seized upon the idea of channelling Sandler's energy into collecting thousands of containers of junk food to capitalize on the frequent flyer miles they would generate (that notion came from a Time magazine article about a California civil engineer who scored 1.25 million miles by buying 12,150 cups of pudding for about $3,000, an air-travel bargain that made a mockery out of the true-life promotion).

BIZARRELY ROUTINE

The fictional character's bizarrely routine existence is thrown out of whack when he meets a sexy, if eccentric, woman played by Emily Watson. He is also thrown into chaos when he has to go home and interact with his gaggle of overbearing sisters, who bring out his inner demons.

Anderson figured Sandler could do all that and still maintain the creative impulses that make him so popular with mainstream audiences. So he went and met Sandler on the set of Little Nicky. They went to dinner together and Anderson was in awe of Sandler's persona in public, his ability to interact with his legion of fans.

"This is only validating what I thought was the truth when I was on the couch thinking it," Anderson says. Equally important was teaming him with Watson.

"The best," Anderson says of Watson. "God, she is the queen. I wish she could be here (at the Toronto film fest) but she's doing a play in London, which is such a drag because she's the engine behind this whole product. She is the key, the warmth and the class, without any pretension. You want to be great when Emily Watson's around. You want to do it right."

Anderson's fans already think he always does it right. Magnolia is a masterpiece, even if it did mystify many people with its rain of frogs, an inspiration from the Biblical plague that makes sense if you look up Old Testament passages that are sign-posted on screen.

Anderson also has a common, trashy side, such as the interest in pornography that led to Boogie Nights and inspired the phone sex that drives Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love (routines Anderson says were from personal research).

DROPPED OUT

The Hollywood-born, 32-year-old Anderson has always gone his own way. He dropped out of film school at New York University and used his tuition money to fund a short debut film, Cigarettes and Coffee, in 1993. His first feature, Hard Eight, was released in 1996.

Ask him why he makes movies and he answers, with a wry smile, "To get attention."

Pressed further he says, "It's ego -- I've got something to say. The impulse is probably equal parts being really angry about things and being absolutely in love with a lot of things. I have so much interest in things and so much to say and, having a big mouth, you know, I ..."

His "big mouth" is expressed on screen, in his movies. But, right this moment, it's being stuffed with fries, which will be washed down with a delicate, refined white wine.

Interview: "A Poet Of Love And Chaos In The Valley"

New York Times, Written By Dave Kehr
October 6th, 2002


PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON, 32, is the unofficial poet laureate of the San Fernando Valley.

"I was born in Studio City," Mr. Anderson said by telephone from his home, "and I'm here now, looking out over the expansive West."

The West he refers to includes Sherman Oaks, Reseda, Encino and many other valley settlements, large and small. They are all new cities in the American mode, composed of strip malls, franchises of every description and vast middle-class housing developments. A significant portion of the movie business has also migrated there, slipping over the San Vicente Mountains from Hollywood.

Three of Mr. Anderson's four films have been set in what Angelenos call simply the Valley, and with them he has emerged as one of the most original voices of his generation, a filmmaker who combines extreme formal experimentation with close observation. His work is at once sociologically accurate and poetically abstract.




For all of the itching realism of "Boogie Nights," the panoramic history of the Valley's vast pornography industry that put Mr. Anderson on the map in 1997, the film retained a buoyant, lyrical side, conveyed through graceful long takes and gliding Steadicam shots.

His 1999 film, "Magnolia," a sweeping vision of a dozen lives linked by chance and compassion, took its title from one of the Valley's principal thoroughfares, Magnolia Boulevard, along which much of the movie is set. Mr. Anderson places some of the most penetrating, naturalistic dialogue this side of David Mamet in the context of what might be described as a Cubist narrative, offering a multitude of perspectives through characters whose situations eerily reflect one another's.

Now there is "Punch-Drunk Love," a romantic comedy opening Friday about a businessman, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), who wholesales novelty toilet plungers out of a Valley warehouse. Barry's life looks more than routine: he's become obsessed with clipping coupons for frequent flier miles from pudding containers. But one morning his world is transformed by three inexplicable events: A car overturns, causing a sickening accident on the street in front of Barry's building. A taxi pulls up to the curb, and a slightly battered harmonium is gently unloaded on the sidewalk. And a lovely, sweet-tempered Englishwoman, Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), appears out of nowhere and falls in love with him.

With its small cast, limited locations and a running time of only 89 minutes (as opposed to the 188 minutes of "Magnolia"), "Punch-Drunk Love" is clearly a reaction against the sweep and scale of Mr. Anderson's last two films. The new picture feels like a rest stop, a time to recharge the batteries, but is no less dazzling and original for it. (It was shown as part of this year's New York Film Festival.)

"I just remember thinking that I would like to do something simple, to try to do a romance movie and to work with Adam and to work with Emily," Mr. Anderson said of the film's origins. "I think you usually just start off where you left off. And I had just finished 'Magnolia,' a movie that was really big and long and sad. Your first instinct is you just want to go the other way."

One inspiration was Jacques Tati, the French comic and filmmaker whose acutely observed comedies include "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" (1953) and "Playtime" (1967). "I was just in a real love affair with Jacques Tati's movies," Mr. Anderson said.

Not everyone, of course, would cast the aggressively outgoing Mr. Sandler as a modern-day version of Tati's Hulot, a shy and gentle eccentric with a tendency to disappear within his own movies. Why did Mr. Anderson consider Mr. Sandler, the creator of "Happy Gilmore" and "The Waterboy," for a role like this?

"At the end of the day, it's really just how funny he is to me," Mr. Anderson said of Mr. Sandler. "Everything he does is very funny and very human. And I like what a mystery he is, really, how we don't know much about his personal life, which was really nice. And I just love it when he gets angry."

Always a significant element of his screen personality, Mr. Sandler's temper plays an especially large part in "Punch-Drunk Love." In his own movies, he has often portrayed the put-upon loser who finally gets fed up and explodes, exacting a hideous vengeance on his tormentors. Mr. Sandler's outbursts have a frighteningly realistic edge in "Punch-Drunk Love" that lifts them out of their usual farcical context. In the film, his eruptions of rage, which include the trashing of a restaurant washroom and a confrontation with a phone-sex pimp (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, so far the only actor to appear in all of Mr. Anderson's films), take on an Old Testament fury. They are both mad and majestic, a crippling limitation and a strange, powerful gift.

As Lena, Ms. Watson plays one of the many guardian angel figures who populate Mr. Anderson's films: those caregivers who seem to appear out of nowhere and offer protection and redemption. One is the veteran gambler (Philip Baker Hall) who adopts the down-and-out character played by John C. Reilly in "Hard Eight" (1996). Another is Burt Reynolds as the paternalistic pornographer who takes the stunningly endowed actor played by Mark Wahlberg under his wing in "Boogie Nights." And there is Mr. Reilly again, as a selfless Los Angeles patrolman who comes to the rescue of a deeply troubled young woman (Melora Walters) in "Magnolia."

Analyzing his work makes Mr. Anderson uncomfortable. All he will say about these recurring figures is: "Well, it's always nice to have someone smack you on the head and tell you to shape up a little bit. You count on that." Of Mr. Reilly's character in "Magnolia," all he will say is, "That's really what Reilly is like, more than anything."

In the director's commentary recorded for the DVD release of "Hard Eight" (a film Mr. Anderson prefers to call by its original title, "Sydney"), he links Sydney, Mr. Hall's wise older man, to his own father, Ernie Anderson, a professional voice-over artist and onetime host of a Friday night horror movie showcase in Cleveland. (Mr. Anderson's production company, Ghoulardi, is named after his father's character.) Asked to characterize his relationship with his father, who died in 1997, Mr. Anderson volunteers only: "It was great. It was great."

If Mr. Anderson's work abounds with positive parent-child relationships, both literal and metaphorical, there are also many poisonous ones. In the elaborate game of mirrors that is "Magnolia," Mr. Hall returns as a father, a celebrated game show host, who has destroyed his daughter's life; and Jason Robards (in what was to be his final film role) is a dying television producer who is unexpectedly reunited with the son he had abandoned as a child (Tom Cruise as a woman-hating self-help guru).

The parent-child relationship — as played out as well by Mr. Sandler and Ms. Watson in "Punch-Drunk" — is a paradigm of responsibility, perhaps the most important moral quality in Mr. Anderson's work. Given the absurdity of a universe ruled by chance, in which harmoniums suddenly appear on sidewalks and frogs rain from the sky (as happens at a key moment in "Magnolia") responsibility may be a tenuous concept, but it is what holds Mr. Anderson's couples and communities together. His work occupies a tumultuous space somewhere between chaos and control, between an abandonment to chance and a determination to put things right.

"Hard Eight" is the only one of Mr. Anderson's films to have a conventional, three-act narrative structure, following the evolution of the father-son relationship between a raw young gambler (Mr. Reilly) and a shrewd veteran (Mr. Hall). (Set in Nevada, it's also his only film not rooted in the San Fernando Valley.) Since then, he has experimented with a variety of forms. "Boogie Nights" is constructed like a Zola novel, built around group scenes that offer panoramic portraits of specific social and professional classes. The effect is enhanced by the use of long, uninterrupted Steadicam takes that suggest the interconnectedness of the characters.

"Magnolia" is a magic carpet ride through the Valley, gracefully gliding among a number of different stories, all involving lonely, isolated people and building to a mystical climax that unites the characters in a shared, preposterous experience.

"Punch-Drunk Love" is Mr. Anderson's most radical experiment to date. Its staccato rhythms and jagged editing seem a direct reaction to the softness and smoothness of "Magnolia." This is a film of lulling interludes punctuated by sudden loud noises, explosions of anger or acts of physical destruction. (Huge trucks keep appearing out of nowhere.) Between the film's agitated first and last movements, there is a lovely entr'acte in which the action is suddenly propelled to Hawaii, and the jangling soundtrack is replaced by the impossibly sweet sound of Shelley Duvall singing Harry Nilsson's wistful ballad "He Needs Me," from the movie "Popeye."

With his precise control of rhythm and tone — he speaks often of the momentum of his films — Mr. Anderson has a very musical sense of the cinema. He has had no musical training, he said (although his companion is the singer Fiona Apple), but he does call in his regular composer, Jon Brion, during the planning stages. "You try to attack it early on, just so you know a little bit of what might be happening when you shoot," Mr. Anderson said. "When you're in a jam on the set and trying to remember what is going on, just keep your mind on the music that will be there. It always helps guide you back toward shore."

There's another, subtler musical element in "Punch-Drunk Love." Throughout the film, Mr. Sandler's Barry Egan wears a suit made of the most amazing deep blue material. "It's from, well, I always loved `The Bandwagon,' the Vincente Minnelli musical," Mr. Anderson said. "And if you watch `Singin' in the Rain,' too, it's sort of indicative of these movies that there's a fantastic rich blue suit in just about every one of them. Look next time and you ll see them.

"So it's a little bit like a musical thing," Mr. Anderson said. "It's an MGM suit."

Interview: New York Film Festival Q&A

New York Film Festival Q&A, Transcribed By Shaun Sages & Todd Parker
October 5th, 2002


This is a loose transcription of the New York Film Festival Q & A.

>> Since "Punch-Drunk Love" doesn't feature your regular material, such as the "Clementine Loop", or actors like Phillip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly, do you consider it to break the tradition of your previous three films?

PTA: It breaks from the tradition only in that they're not in it. But just because there was really no parts for them in the story…Um…Phil Hoffman is in it, and so is Luis Guzman. There's just nowhere to put the others really.

>> Why did you choose to shoot the film in scope?

PTA: Well, that decision happened a long time ago, when I was a youngster. I thought to myself, if its a movie, why should it look like television? And there's really nothing better than when that curtain opens ALL THE WAY UP.

>> Why is there a car crash in the beginning?

That's just something you write to get going, like, you need something to START. Joel Silver, a guy that, y’know, makes “those kind of movies”, I once heard him say that every movie should start with a BANG, and that just made sense to me.

>> The pudding story is a true thing that happened...is there anything else in the movie that's based on real events?

Um...no, the pudding story is the touchstone of truth in this movie. (audience laughs)

>> Can you talk about the colors in the film. What they're derived from?

PTA: From an acid experience that I've had in 1967. (Laughs) They're just art by Jeremy Blake. I've seen his work…I had just kind of a…like a bad idea of some color. But it was really bad and I didn't know what to do. But then I saw this Jeremy Blake art, he does these installations I saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Classy stuff. I thought that was really phenomenal stuff.

>> When did the blue suit come in?

PTA: Uh. We kinda had a little obsession for different Technicolor musicals. And if you've watched many of them, there always seems to be a standard blue suit. There's a great blue suit in "Bandwagon", and I can remember seeing that and saying 'I want that color blue.'

>> How convinced were you that Adam had what was it takes to do this certain type of role?

PTA: Yeah. I was never convinced that it would be anything but wonderful working with him, because I think that's when…you respond to someone as an actor but you wanna make sure that you like being around them, cause you're gonna be around them a lot. You're going to be, y'know, you're gonna be in love with each other for two years or however long it's gonna take. I think Adam and I work in similar ways with alotta the same people and a close group. Adam is kind of in charge of his movies, and I'm sort of in charge with my movies. So you know you're coming from a similar place. A similar works ethic. And that's critical when you're jumping to do it. Does that answer your question?

>> I wanted to know when you were convinced…

PTA: Oh, when I was…Yeah. Yeah. From the beginning. Absolutely.

>> Let's talk about the score. Did you know what the sound was gonna be like while you were shooting?

PTA: Yeah. I worked with Jon Brion when I was writing the movie as well to talk about ideas and notions, what might sound right or good for the movie. And he would do 8-minute chunks of stuff, and it was really nice to have in going to shoot the movie because…if you don't know what the fuck you're doing you're just gonna turn to the music and kinda let it guide you a little bit. And it really helped Adam and Emily, I think, to know…if you kinda know what music is gonna happen there an actor can know how little they have to get away with. Y'know. Like, 'Okay, so that's gonna happen there.' So it's just kinda like attacking it a little bit like you're making a musical, y'know, even though it's not really a musical…just kinda pretend that it is. It becomes helpful. I know Adam is really a musical person, too. So it helped. And then some of the stock sound is just amazing where we shot. We shot in that warehouse, it's kind of an amazing place deep in the Valley. There's a railroad nearby. There's a mountain nearby. Some of the sounds are just natural sounds of the environment…it's just putting the microphone in the right place.

>> Why does Adam wear the blue suit for the whole movie?

(long pause, laughter) Um, you just need the brightest colors you can in a love story like this, I guess.

>> Luis, can you compare working with Paul to working with Brian De Palma? What's different?

LUIS: Um...Brian De Palma directs the movie. Paul directs and writes the movie. He creates the movie, the whole thing, everything comes from him. And he's so amazing to work with because he’s got everything down, and he’s become like a master at this, already. Paul, give me twenty dollars.

>> How did this character sort of develop, or come into shape…come into being. What did you start with? Was there a story or an incident that kinda came in? What was the process of developing the character.

PTA: Uh. Well. Well. I'm trying to remember. I don't remember maybe what might have started it, maybe some loose ideas or notions, but the real trigger was Adam. And then writing it while talking to Adam on the telephone…I went to Hawaii to write the movie and I was there writing it while Adam was working. And, uh, just the - - I don't know - - that's just the way it goes. Y'know. You're just farting around in things that make you laugh, or things that entertain you, or seem interesting and seemed interesting to him and back and forth and then…just collaborating with someone and then once I finished the script then we really started to kinda collaborate and figure out what the hell we were doing.

Adam: I think what happened was, Paul talked to me about the idea, but didn't really tell me much. While he was writing it, he let me hear...on occasion I would speak to him on the phone and he would say 'I wrote a good scene today.' And I'd say, 'Oh yeah? Well, what happens.' He'd go, 'Well I don't wanna tell ya'. And I'd say, 'Well, can you gimme a line?' And he'd say, 'Alright. Page 41, you say 'Sure, why not?'' Ok. I know I like to say 'Sure, why not? 'But now I don't want to. (Laughs) And then, uh, Paul actually came up to my house and he said 'I finished.' I went into my living room, he went away, I just read it and every page I kept going 'Man, what is gonna happen?' I kept asking 'Do I die in it? Do I kill somebody?' I was baffled, though, but it was nice. Paul and I became good friends, even before he showed me the script…talking about it, talking about it…getting to know each others lives. And we just had long conversations about Barry Egan. I learned a lot from Paul, and then I just tried to have fun with it.

>> Im a little confused, exactly why does Emily Watson fall for Adam. What's the reasoning behind her choosing him?

PTA: I think he just called you unattractive.

ADAM: Hey buddy, who are you to call me unattractive?

(audience laughs, the guy stammers trying to rephrase his question)

PTA: The real question is, who wouldn't fall in love with this guy?

>> This film is much shorter than your last two...what was the reason for switching editors?

I worked with an editor named Dylan Tichenor, and now Im working with Leslie Jones and you want to know if that's why the movie’s shorter? This movie was five hours long before Leslie Jones got a hold of it. There she is, in the balcony. She's a totally cool, beautiful woman.

(gives her applause, the audience joins in)

Come on, she deserves more than that!

(audience applauds harder)

>> How long did this film take to shoot?

Pretty long actually. We were doing it right at the time of the supposed actors strike. “The actors are gonna strike! We've gotta make movies!!!” So we shot some stuff, but then Adam had to go do Deeds, and Emily had to go do Gosford Park, but it was kind of an advantage, because  I got to look over all of the footage and kind of handle it the way Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick did. And then they came back and we shot the second part.

>> When you look at the film now, can you really tell the difference between the footage you shot first and the second part of the footage?

No...I really don't. Because, its all one experience, y’know?

>> (holding up a script) I have a script!

Um, give it to Joe Roth. Joe? Oh, yeah, he's sitting about three rows down from you. Just give it to him. Yeah.