BBC, Written By Joseph Laurent
January 28th, 2003
It's hardly surprising that after two epic, ensemble-led movies ("Boogie Nights" "Magnolia"), LA-born director Paul Thomas Anderson felt like something frothier.
Hence "Punch-Drunk Love", a 90-minute romantic comedy (of sorts) which stars Adam Sandler as a lonely, pudding-collecting salesman who suddenly finds himself falling in love...
At what point did Adam Sandler's name come into your mind while you were writing the script? His character, Barry Egan, is similar to a lot of his previous roles, being a goofy character prone to bursts of aggression...
Well, I loved it when he did that in his movies, and I wanted him to do that in mine. So I wasn't writing the script and then thought of Adam. I actually wanted to write a movie for Adam. Something I thought he would have fun doing.
"Punch-Drunk Love" reveals that Sandler really can act. How did you notice he had that potential when few others did?
I think I was just paying attention. It's weird, because part of me wants to be mad that there are those kind of questions, but I can see that other people refer to his movies a different way than I do. I really love them, and they shouldn't be so easily dismissed.
Did you always have Emily Watson in mind to play the love interest, Lena?
Yeah, I did. I put her picture up together with Adam's, and I thought they looked so handsome together. She was nervous to meet him, though, and he was nervous to meet her. But when they met each other, it was all fine.
After "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia", you've been praised on both sides of the Atlantic as a wunderkind. Does that put pressure on you, especially when making an undeniably lighter movie like this?
That's all just silliness, you can't pay too much attention to it. It's not that you disrespect it or anything, but if somebody writes something about you in the paper, they say this, they say that, and if it affects the work, that's no good. You just gotta keep doing your job, and you just gotta keep your head down. Otherwise it'll head**** you so fast, you won't know where you are.
"Punch-Drunk Love" opens in UK cinemas on Friday 7th February 2003.
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Tuesday, 28 January 2003
Monday, 27 January 2003
Interview: "I Can Be A Real Arrogant Brat"
Guardian, Written By Xan Brooks
January 27th, 2003
Will filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson ever cool down?
Standing in his hotel kitchenette, Paul Thomas Anderson veers between the conciliatory and the combative. On the one hand, he's truly sorry to have cancelled our meeting yesterday, and then to have kept me waiting around today. And on the other he's really not, "because, y'know, these interviews make me feel like a fucking asshole. They can't be good for my soul. The whole thing just isn't natural, is it?" He fixes me with a bug-eyed stare. "You want coffee? I don't want coffee, I'm too wired to drink coffee. Wine? I could do with some wine." And he stoops to fish a bottle from the fridge.
Two minutes in, I understand why Anderson claims that the hero of his latest film, Punch-Drunk Love, is largely autobiographical. As played by Adam Sandler, lowly Barry Egan is a clown with anger management issues. Henpecked by his seven sisters, he responds by kicking out a picture window. Flustered during a dinner date, he excuses himself in order to smash up the bathroom. Anderson - slender, cerebral, a boyish 33 - says he's a lot like that himself, prone to temper tantrums and hailing from a large family (three siblings, four half-siblings) where he had to scrap for his space. He reckons such behaviour has served him well during a vibrant Hollywood career. "You have to be a brat in order to carve out your parameters, and you have to be a monster to anyone who gets in your way. But sometimes it's difficult to know when that's necessary and when you're just being a baby, throwing your rattle from the cage. So I can be a real arrogant, bratty prick at times. But maybe not so much now," he says. "Really."
Anderson's two previous films - Boogie Nights and Magnolia - were works of huge ambition for one so young: teeming, multi-layered ensemble pieces. But Punch-Drunk Love is something else again. It's short (90 minutes), sharp and altogether unstable; a nail-bomb in the guise of a romantic comedy. The director has described it as "an art-house Adam Sandler movie", which only begins to pin down its unique pedigree. Sandler, of course, is best known as the gurning putz from such mainstream outings as Big Daddy and The Wedding Singer. But Anderson has somehow flushed out a darker, more dysfunctional side to the clown's persona. With Punch Drunk Love, he's isolated a subtext and expanded it into a movie.
So on the one hand Anderson's film is brilliant: wired with jittery emotions and threatening to break off in any direction. And on the other it's possibly just too abrasive for comfort. "Yeah, but I guess that's what I like in films myself," he explains between slugs of wine. "I really subscribe to that old adage that you should never let the audience get ahead of you for a second. So if the film's abrasive and wrongfoots people then, y'know, that's great. But I hope it involves an audience. If not, that's my fuck-up."
I suspect, however, that he doesn't believe this for a moment. For a start, Anderson does not strike you as the type to doubt his own abilities. Then there is the fact that the pared-down Punch-Drunk Love is actually just as thought-through and refined as his (lush, abundant) Magnolia. The film already sounded fully conceived three years ago, when Anderson presumptuously told interviewers that his next project would star Adam Sandler and clock in at 90 minutes. The director lights up when I remind him of this. "I did pretty good, huh?"
But today he's being more wary with his predictions. "Well I'd really love to work with Robert De Niro," he says vaguely, "because he's still the most talented actor out there. Maybe he makes some bad choices, which can be frustrating. On the one hand, you want to say, 'What the fuck's going on?' On the other, you can't get mad at him for wanting to work, because most actors would be murderers if they weren't working." He drains his glass and eyes the depleted bottle. "But I don't know what film I'm going to make next. I don't have much of a roadmap right now."
Then again, Anderson has never steered the conventional route. A rowdy kid, he was kicked out of junior high and later despaired of ever making movies. After graduation, he rattled from community college to Boston University to New York film school before bailing out to raise funds for his first movie. The result was Hard Eight, a modern-day noir starring Philip Baker Hall, John C Reilly and a pre-stardom Gwyneth Paltrow.
But hanging over this eccentric career path is the shadow of Anderson's father, who died in 1997. Ernie Anderson was, variously, a links man at American TV network ABC and "the ghost host Ghoulardi", a costumed presenter who introduced horror films on a local station in Cleveland. The trouble was that Ernie really wanted to be an actor, and never quite got the breaks. Or as Anderson puts it: "He was a bad actor, so he never really made it." Surely that's a little harsh. "No, he was bad," the director insists. "When we used to make home movies, he'd be in them and he was bad. We'd be like: 'You fucker. No wonder you couldn't get any jobs'."
You can't help wondering if Anderson's career isn't driven, in part, by his dad's failed ambitions. Certainly it would explain the preponderance of flawed father figures in his films, be it hangdog Baker Hall, Burt Reynolds's porn producer in Boogie Nights or Jason Robards's dying patriarch in Magnolia. Off-screen, too, Anderson appears to have sought out a surrogate dad in Robert Altman, the white-bearded maverick of US movies.
Most hotshot young directors go to great lengths to conceal their influences. Anderson makes no such effort. His Magnolia is nakedly Altmanesque in style, while the one song featured in Punch-Drunk Love (Shelley Duvall's sugary rendition of He Needs Me) is lifted straight from his idol's most notorious folly. "Oh yeah, Magnolia is obviously influenced by Nashville, and He Needs Me comes from Popeye. And that's fine. If people want to call me Little Bobbie Altman, then I have no problem with that at all. He's always been a big influence. Almost him as a man more than his movies. Just his fucking spark, y'know. And I've had the privilege to hang around with him a lot, and it's good to see him still angry. Still throwing punches."
It transpires that Anderson was in close contact with Altman during last year's controversy, when Altman lashed out at Bush's policies only to find himself demonised as an anti-American and harried by the right-wing press. "I think that bugged him out," Anderson says. "And I think it hurt him too. Because he's a curmudgeon, but he's also very sensitive. The whole thing was crazy. There were death threats, and that's a bit scary. But then they were also sending him pizzas." For a moment I think I must have misheard. Pizzas? Anderson nods vigorously. "Oh yeah. Oliver North gave out his address and phone number and said, 'Call up Bob Altman and give him a piece of your mind.' But their big act of aggression was to send him pizzas that he had to pay for. So all these pro-Americans were sending pizzas." By now Anderson is spluttering with laughter. "Like, are we in high school or what? I mean, what else were they doing? Making crank calls? Ringing up and asking: 'Is Mike Hunt there?' Lighting a bag of dog-shit on his porch? The fucking morons."
The director collects himself and eyes me, somewhat blearily, over his wine glass. "But that's funny, huh?" he says. "Isn't it funny?" And, a little bleary myself, I assure him that yes, it is indeed funny. Actually, I'm torn. On the one hand the notion of American patriots waging a pizza war on Robert Altman is highly amusing. And on the other there's something faintly disturbing about it. Rather like Punch-Drunk Love, in fact. Rather like the man who made it, too.
Punch-Drunk Love is released on February 7.
January 27th, 2003
Will filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson ever cool down?
Standing in his hotel kitchenette, Paul Thomas Anderson veers between the conciliatory and the combative. On the one hand, he's truly sorry to have cancelled our meeting yesterday, and then to have kept me waiting around today. And on the other he's really not, "because, y'know, these interviews make me feel like a fucking asshole. They can't be good for my soul. The whole thing just isn't natural, is it?" He fixes me with a bug-eyed stare. "You want coffee? I don't want coffee, I'm too wired to drink coffee. Wine? I could do with some wine." And he stoops to fish a bottle from the fridge.
Two minutes in, I understand why Anderson claims that the hero of his latest film, Punch-Drunk Love, is largely autobiographical. As played by Adam Sandler, lowly Barry Egan is a clown with anger management issues. Henpecked by his seven sisters, he responds by kicking out a picture window. Flustered during a dinner date, he excuses himself in order to smash up the bathroom. Anderson - slender, cerebral, a boyish 33 - says he's a lot like that himself, prone to temper tantrums and hailing from a large family (three siblings, four half-siblings) where he had to scrap for his space. He reckons such behaviour has served him well during a vibrant Hollywood career. "You have to be a brat in order to carve out your parameters, and you have to be a monster to anyone who gets in your way. But sometimes it's difficult to know when that's necessary and when you're just being a baby, throwing your rattle from the cage. So I can be a real arrogant, bratty prick at times. But maybe not so much now," he says. "Really."
Anderson's two previous films - Boogie Nights and Magnolia - were works of huge ambition for one so young: teeming, multi-layered ensemble pieces. But Punch-Drunk Love is something else again. It's short (90 minutes), sharp and altogether unstable; a nail-bomb in the guise of a romantic comedy. The director has described it as "an art-house Adam Sandler movie", which only begins to pin down its unique pedigree. Sandler, of course, is best known as the gurning putz from such mainstream outings as Big Daddy and The Wedding Singer. But Anderson has somehow flushed out a darker, more dysfunctional side to the clown's persona. With Punch Drunk Love, he's isolated a subtext and expanded it into a movie.
So on the one hand Anderson's film is brilliant: wired with jittery emotions and threatening to break off in any direction. And on the other it's possibly just too abrasive for comfort. "Yeah, but I guess that's what I like in films myself," he explains between slugs of wine. "I really subscribe to that old adage that you should never let the audience get ahead of you for a second. So if the film's abrasive and wrongfoots people then, y'know, that's great. But I hope it involves an audience. If not, that's my fuck-up."
I suspect, however, that he doesn't believe this for a moment. For a start, Anderson does not strike you as the type to doubt his own abilities. Then there is the fact that the pared-down Punch-Drunk Love is actually just as thought-through and refined as his (lush, abundant) Magnolia. The film already sounded fully conceived three years ago, when Anderson presumptuously told interviewers that his next project would star Adam Sandler and clock in at 90 minutes. The director lights up when I remind him of this. "I did pretty good, huh?"
But today he's being more wary with his predictions. "Well I'd really love to work with Robert De Niro," he says vaguely, "because he's still the most talented actor out there. Maybe he makes some bad choices, which can be frustrating. On the one hand, you want to say, 'What the fuck's going on?' On the other, you can't get mad at him for wanting to work, because most actors would be murderers if they weren't working." He drains his glass and eyes the depleted bottle. "But I don't know what film I'm going to make next. I don't have much of a roadmap right now."
Then again, Anderson has never steered the conventional route. A rowdy kid, he was kicked out of junior high and later despaired of ever making movies. After graduation, he rattled from community college to Boston University to New York film school before bailing out to raise funds for his first movie. The result was Hard Eight, a modern-day noir starring Philip Baker Hall, John C Reilly and a pre-stardom Gwyneth Paltrow.
But hanging over this eccentric career path is the shadow of Anderson's father, who died in 1997. Ernie Anderson was, variously, a links man at American TV network ABC and "the ghost host Ghoulardi", a costumed presenter who introduced horror films on a local station in Cleveland. The trouble was that Ernie really wanted to be an actor, and never quite got the breaks. Or as Anderson puts it: "He was a bad actor, so he never really made it." Surely that's a little harsh. "No, he was bad," the director insists. "When we used to make home movies, he'd be in them and he was bad. We'd be like: 'You fucker. No wonder you couldn't get any jobs'."
You can't help wondering if Anderson's career isn't driven, in part, by his dad's failed ambitions. Certainly it would explain the preponderance of flawed father figures in his films, be it hangdog Baker Hall, Burt Reynolds's porn producer in Boogie Nights or Jason Robards's dying patriarch in Magnolia. Off-screen, too, Anderson appears to have sought out a surrogate dad in Robert Altman, the white-bearded maverick of US movies.
Most hotshot young directors go to great lengths to conceal their influences. Anderson makes no such effort. His Magnolia is nakedly Altmanesque in style, while the one song featured in Punch-Drunk Love (Shelley Duvall's sugary rendition of He Needs Me) is lifted straight from his idol's most notorious folly. "Oh yeah, Magnolia is obviously influenced by Nashville, and He Needs Me comes from Popeye. And that's fine. If people want to call me Little Bobbie Altman, then I have no problem with that at all. He's always been a big influence. Almost him as a man more than his movies. Just his fucking spark, y'know. And I've had the privilege to hang around with him a lot, and it's good to see him still angry. Still throwing punches."
It transpires that Anderson was in close contact with Altman during last year's controversy, when Altman lashed out at Bush's policies only to find himself demonised as an anti-American and harried by the right-wing press. "I think that bugged him out," Anderson says. "And I think it hurt him too. Because he's a curmudgeon, but he's also very sensitive. The whole thing was crazy. There were death threats, and that's a bit scary. But then they were also sending him pizzas." For a moment I think I must have misheard. Pizzas? Anderson nods vigorously. "Oh yeah. Oliver North gave out his address and phone number and said, 'Call up Bob Altman and give him a piece of your mind.' But their big act of aggression was to send him pizzas that he had to pay for. So all these pro-Americans were sending pizzas." By now Anderson is spluttering with laughter. "Like, are we in high school or what? I mean, what else were they doing? Making crank calls? Ringing up and asking: 'Is Mike Hunt there?' Lighting a bag of dog-shit on his porch? The fucking morons."
The director collects himself and eyes me, somewhat blearily, over his wine glass. "But that's funny, huh?" he says. "Isn't it funny?" And, a little bleary myself, I assure him that yes, it is indeed funny. Actually, I'm torn. On the one hand the notion of American patriots waging a pizza war on Robert Altman is highly amusing. And on the other there's something faintly disturbing about it. Rather like Punch-Drunk Love, in fact. Rather like the man who made it, too.
Punch-Drunk Love is released on February 7.
Friday, 24 January 2003
Interview: "Paul Thomas Anderson - Young And Breathless"
Independent UK, Writer Credit Unknown
January 24th, 2003
Paul Thomas Anderson is as idiosyncratic as his movies (Boogie Nights, Magnolia and now Punch-Drunk Love). He tells Charlotte O'Sullivan about the woman of his dreams – and why he fell out with Burt Reynolds
When actresses talk about a director they've just worked with, they tend to say things like, "It was an honour. I feel so lucky..." When I call Emily Watson to ask about Paul Thomas Anderson, the word she reaches for is "bonkers". She's used to odd men, having worked with Lars von Trier on Breaking The Waves. "Lars was more crazy," she concedes. But don't let that fool you. The 33-year-old San Fernando Valley auteur is "quite screwed up".
Watching Anderson's movies – Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and now Punch-Drunk Love – you do feel you've entered a sort of Technicolor bedlam. Dense with mordant detail, punctuated by sing-songs that grow ever more hysterical, these films offer emotional roller-coaster rides that seem doomed to crash off the rails. Eye boggling and gut wrenching, they can also be contrived and exhausting. The first time I saw Punch-Drunk Love – a romance that teams Watson with the normally smackable comedian Adam Sandler – I emerged angry and disappointed; the second time, elated. Art house crowds like to work for their pleasure (the film won Anderson a best director award at Cannes); mainstream audiences are less keen. Boogie Nights was a surprise hit, Magnolia did less well. Very few people in America went to see Punch-Drunk Love.
Anderson, apparently, doesn't care. He's been doing interviews all day at the Dorchester, but still manages to come to the door with a grin. Skinny, pale and freckled, his hair sticks up like Alfalfa's in The Little Rascals; his voice, too, could belong to a seven-year-old. It metaphorically tugs at its grubby sleeves and looks up bashfully through the longest of eyelashes.
Anderson's main characters talk in just the same way – Boogie Nights' porn star Dirk Diggler; Magnolia's earnest LAPD cop, Jim Kurring; Punch-Drunk Love's Barry Egan, a sex-line-ringing, occasionally violent entrepreneur. These men might seem slow at first glance – even gormless – but all prove remarkable: superheroes whose special power is innocence. The difference is that while Dirk remains in his own, sealed world, protected and oppressed by his porn "family", Jim and Barry break free from their prisons to find love with a wonderful woman – in Barry's case, Watson's Lena. Some crucial part of their development may be arrested, but Anderson's child-men definitely have a future.
The director, in fact, says that Barry and Lena are going to be happy for ever and ever. I say I give them five years and he looks stricken. "No way, Barry's never going to have any problems, any more, for the rest of his life; everything's perfect now, for both of them. I wouldn't wanna see it not work out. I don't like it when it doesn't work out in the movies. I hate that."
I feel the need to remonstrate. What about a film like Chinatown? "Well that works out" he counters, blinking. But Faye Dunaway dies. "She seems like she wanted to die," he says cautiously. But her abusive father gets to keep the daughter! "OK," a cheery smile, "Chinatown is maybe the exception."
Just as you're getting used to the sweet talk, however, Anderson turns sharp. After telling me, for example, that he always gets along with his actors, he adds, "except for Burt Reynolds". Reynolds, Oscar nominated for his electric turn as a porn director in Boogie Nights, famously had doubts about the film's worth. Initially unwilling to publicise the project, he was cajoled into doing radio press with Anderson, only to become incensed because he felt Anderson was doing all the talking.
So why did things get so dicey with Burt? "Huh!", snorts Anderson, "let me count the ways..." He chuckles away to himself, becoming positively wheezy, then asks sternly: "Do you think you'd get along with Burt Reynolds, if you were directing a movie?" I say I've always had a soft spot for him, because he went out with Tammy Wynette. Anderson considers this. "How long did it last?" I shrug. "Do you think they really went out?" Good grief, so he thinks it was all just PR? "Uhuh," he nods, "uhuh," then lets out a mournful sigh.
But really, why didn't he like Reynolds? "Well, it could have been the pills [plagued by old injuries, Reynolds has a love/hate relationship with painkillers], could have been that whole attitude..." So he doesn't feel they were both to blame? "Nah, I don't think it was me. I think it was Burt."
At this point, Bumble Ward, Anderson's British agent, enters the room. "I'm talking about Burt Reynolds," says Anderson. "Oh God!" says Bumble. "Do you think it was me?" he asks waggishly, to which she replies, sensible as Mary Poppins, "Least said soonest mended, I'd say."
Back on track, Anderson returns to the friendly subject of actors he does like. He explains that he fell in love with Watson while watching her in Breaking The Waves. He adored Björk in Dancer in the Dark. He also talks about a long-term crush on the girl in an obscure, 1996 French film, called When The Cat's Away. I've seen it, and agree that Garance Clavel, with her long, straggly hair, saucer eyes, and air of frailty, is lovely. These child-women are the perfect counterparts to Anderson's child-men. They also bear an uncanny resemblance to Anderson's real-life girlfriend, confessional pop singer Fiona Apple.
What surprises me, I say, is that Punch-Drunk Love's Lena is such a different type. Anderson sits up in his seat. Lena's so mature, I continue, so sturdy, so trouble-free. "Keep talkin'," says Anderson grinning, "keep talkin'."
Well, I say, are these two types of women equally attractive to him or has he a preference? Anderson gulps. "Well, you can have a crush on more than one girl," he pouts, then bites his lip. "God, good question. I think I'm still figuring this one out". He bounces up and down. "You know what you make me wanna do?" he says, "Watch When The Cat's Away again! I know that I've changed a lot since I watched it first, but I'm sure when I watch it again I'll still have a crush on her. But you have no idea... how excellent..."
He leans forward with a squeak, fingers all of a jumble. "I'm gonna have to have a cigarette. I mean my mind is racing. I never think of things like that so much, or maybe I do..." He starts again. "I write this part for Emily [Watson], kind of like a dream girl, for Barry, which connects it to me... but if I don't know, if you're a boy, sometimes there's... but no, that's also a problem..." A long silence, while I muse over the fact that he still thinks of himself as a "boy". And wonder what sort of state his and Apple's relationship is in.
"I'm sorry," he says with a gasp. "I feel like I'm spinning out. There's so much going on in my mind right now."
He seems genuinely unravelled. Feeling slightly guilty, I note that trying to analyse yourself in an anonymous hotel room must be disconcerting. "Yeah," he agrees, brightening. "You have to go inside your own mind – you're forced to go inside – just to be distracted from how ugly the furniture is and how disgusting the lighting is."
"You know what," he says, leaping up, "there's a very easy solution to this. It's the lighting really." He crosses the room, turns off the main light, then heads off to the window and whips opens the net curtains. "The one day of sunshine that you have in London..." he mutters. "That's much better. Overhead lighting is not good – it's bad in the movies, it's bad in real life. But you get in an environment that you know you're a foreigner to and so you accept it. I mean these fucking hotel rooms. There's a James Bond junket down the way. Another for 8 Mile. You think, 'OK, this is what we do – here we go – we all go to work...' "
I don't think he likes to sound jaundiced. He quickly changes the subject to James Bond movies. But somehow, via Jane Seymour (he refuses to believe she was in Live and Let Die), we get back to When The Cat's Away. The heroine seemed so lonely, I say.
"I know, I know," he groans, instantly crestfallen. "It's so terrible. That scene where she..." his voice – to my astonishment – trembles, "Oh! when she makes out with the guy, and then the phone rings and he brushes her off and obviously it's his girlfriend calling." His breath catches again. "Oh god, that's heartbreaking."
Anderson looks beaten up; then the door opens and Bumble appears. He turns towards her, cow-eyed, and says "When The Cat's Away, Bumble..." She flashes an all-purpose smile, and tells me I've got time for one last question.
Flustered, I ask if he's really going to do a Boogie Nights 2? Anderson claps his hands. "Julianne Moore stripping again. All right!" Then, with perfect timing, "No. I would never want to do that." Does he have any firm ideas about future projects? A slow shake of the head. And that's fine, is it? A shrug. "No one will mind if I don't do anything." And the room goes quiet.
"Can I have a hug?" asks Anderson . He drags himself up from the sofa and moves like a zombie towards Bumble. "Are you OK?" she murmurs, before giving him a squeeze. "Yeah," he mumbles back, then says loudly: "I'm hungry."
Asked for an incident that sums up Anderson, Emily Watson (currently working on stage in New York) says that last week she returned home at midnight to find a package of Magnolia cupcakes on her doorstep. "He was always going on about these cakes... He'd remembered it was my birthday, and got a friend to hand-deliver them." She says Anderson is one of those people who doesn't need drugs. "He's on a permanent life high. He came to dinner with me and my husband once. Basically, if you give him sugar, he's on the ceiling."
She also says, right at the end, that she wants to work with Anderson again and that she finds him a "beautiful person". This is the kind of thing actresses say about directors. For once, I actually find it touching.
January 24th, 2003
Paul Thomas Anderson is as idiosyncratic as his movies (Boogie Nights, Magnolia and now Punch-Drunk Love). He tells Charlotte O'Sullivan about the woman of his dreams – and why he fell out with Burt Reynolds
When actresses talk about a director they've just worked with, they tend to say things like, "It was an honour. I feel so lucky..." When I call Emily Watson to ask about Paul Thomas Anderson, the word she reaches for is "bonkers". She's used to odd men, having worked with Lars von Trier on Breaking The Waves. "Lars was more crazy," she concedes. But don't let that fool you. The 33-year-old San Fernando Valley auteur is "quite screwed up".
Watching Anderson's movies – Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and now Punch-Drunk Love – you do feel you've entered a sort of Technicolor bedlam. Dense with mordant detail, punctuated by sing-songs that grow ever more hysterical, these films offer emotional roller-coaster rides that seem doomed to crash off the rails. Eye boggling and gut wrenching, they can also be contrived and exhausting. The first time I saw Punch-Drunk Love – a romance that teams Watson with the normally smackable comedian Adam Sandler – I emerged angry and disappointed; the second time, elated. Art house crowds like to work for their pleasure (the film won Anderson a best director award at Cannes); mainstream audiences are less keen. Boogie Nights was a surprise hit, Magnolia did less well. Very few people in America went to see Punch-Drunk Love.
Anderson, apparently, doesn't care. He's been doing interviews all day at the Dorchester, but still manages to come to the door with a grin. Skinny, pale and freckled, his hair sticks up like Alfalfa's in The Little Rascals; his voice, too, could belong to a seven-year-old. It metaphorically tugs at its grubby sleeves and looks up bashfully through the longest of eyelashes.
Anderson's main characters talk in just the same way – Boogie Nights' porn star Dirk Diggler; Magnolia's earnest LAPD cop, Jim Kurring; Punch-Drunk Love's Barry Egan, a sex-line-ringing, occasionally violent entrepreneur. These men might seem slow at first glance – even gormless – but all prove remarkable: superheroes whose special power is innocence. The difference is that while Dirk remains in his own, sealed world, protected and oppressed by his porn "family", Jim and Barry break free from their prisons to find love with a wonderful woman – in Barry's case, Watson's Lena. Some crucial part of their development may be arrested, but Anderson's child-men definitely have a future.
The director, in fact, says that Barry and Lena are going to be happy for ever and ever. I say I give them five years and he looks stricken. "No way, Barry's never going to have any problems, any more, for the rest of his life; everything's perfect now, for both of them. I wouldn't wanna see it not work out. I don't like it when it doesn't work out in the movies. I hate that."
I feel the need to remonstrate. What about a film like Chinatown? "Well that works out" he counters, blinking. But Faye Dunaway dies. "She seems like she wanted to die," he says cautiously. But her abusive father gets to keep the daughter! "OK," a cheery smile, "Chinatown is maybe the exception."
Just as you're getting used to the sweet talk, however, Anderson turns sharp. After telling me, for example, that he always gets along with his actors, he adds, "except for Burt Reynolds". Reynolds, Oscar nominated for his electric turn as a porn director in Boogie Nights, famously had doubts about the film's worth. Initially unwilling to publicise the project, he was cajoled into doing radio press with Anderson, only to become incensed because he felt Anderson was doing all the talking.
So why did things get so dicey with Burt? "Huh!", snorts Anderson, "let me count the ways..." He chuckles away to himself, becoming positively wheezy, then asks sternly: "Do you think you'd get along with Burt Reynolds, if you were directing a movie?" I say I've always had a soft spot for him, because he went out with Tammy Wynette. Anderson considers this. "How long did it last?" I shrug. "Do you think they really went out?" Good grief, so he thinks it was all just PR? "Uhuh," he nods, "uhuh," then lets out a mournful sigh.
But really, why didn't he like Reynolds? "Well, it could have been the pills [plagued by old injuries, Reynolds has a love/hate relationship with painkillers], could have been that whole attitude..." So he doesn't feel they were both to blame? "Nah, I don't think it was me. I think it was Burt."
At this point, Bumble Ward, Anderson's British agent, enters the room. "I'm talking about Burt Reynolds," says Anderson. "Oh God!" says Bumble. "Do you think it was me?" he asks waggishly, to which she replies, sensible as Mary Poppins, "Least said soonest mended, I'd say."
Back on track, Anderson returns to the friendly subject of actors he does like. He explains that he fell in love with Watson while watching her in Breaking The Waves. He adored Björk in Dancer in the Dark. He also talks about a long-term crush on the girl in an obscure, 1996 French film, called When The Cat's Away. I've seen it, and agree that Garance Clavel, with her long, straggly hair, saucer eyes, and air of frailty, is lovely. These child-women are the perfect counterparts to Anderson's child-men. They also bear an uncanny resemblance to Anderson's real-life girlfriend, confessional pop singer Fiona Apple.
What surprises me, I say, is that Punch-Drunk Love's Lena is such a different type. Anderson sits up in his seat. Lena's so mature, I continue, so sturdy, so trouble-free. "Keep talkin'," says Anderson grinning, "keep talkin'."
Well, I say, are these two types of women equally attractive to him or has he a preference? Anderson gulps. "Well, you can have a crush on more than one girl," he pouts, then bites his lip. "God, good question. I think I'm still figuring this one out". He bounces up and down. "You know what you make me wanna do?" he says, "Watch When The Cat's Away again! I know that I've changed a lot since I watched it first, but I'm sure when I watch it again I'll still have a crush on her. But you have no idea... how excellent..."
He leans forward with a squeak, fingers all of a jumble. "I'm gonna have to have a cigarette. I mean my mind is racing. I never think of things like that so much, or maybe I do..." He starts again. "I write this part for Emily [Watson], kind of like a dream girl, for Barry, which connects it to me... but if I don't know, if you're a boy, sometimes there's... but no, that's also a problem..." A long silence, while I muse over the fact that he still thinks of himself as a "boy". And wonder what sort of state his and Apple's relationship is in.
"I'm sorry," he says with a gasp. "I feel like I'm spinning out. There's so much going on in my mind right now."
He seems genuinely unravelled. Feeling slightly guilty, I note that trying to analyse yourself in an anonymous hotel room must be disconcerting. "Yeah," he agrees, brightening. "You have to go inside your own mind – you're forced to go inside – just to be distracted from how ugly the furniture is and how disgusting the lighting is."
"You know what," he says, leaping up, "there's a very easy solution to this. It's the lighting really." He crosses the room, turns off the main light, then heads off to the window and whips opens the net curtains. "The one day of sunshine that you have in London..." he mutters. "That's much better. Overhead lighting is not good – it's bad in the movies, it's bad in real life. But you get in an environment that you know you're a foreigner to and so you accept it. I mean these fucking hotel rooms. There's a James Bond junket down the way. Another for 8 Mile. You think, 'OK, this is what we do – here we go – we all go to work...' "
I don't think he likes to sound jaundiced. He quickly changes the subject to James Bond movies. But somehow, via Jane Seymour (he refuses to believe she was in Live and Let Die), we get back to When The Cat's Away. The heroine seemed so lonely, I say.
"I know, I know," he groans, instantly crestfallen. "It's so terrible. That scene where she..." his voice – to my astonishment – trembles, "Oh! when she makes out with the guy, and then the phone rings and he brushes her off and obviously it's his girlfriend calling." His breath catches again. "Oh god, that's heartbreaking."
Anderson looks beaten up; then the door opens and Bumble appears. He turns towards her, cow-eyed, and says "When The Cat's Away, Bumble..." She flashes an all-purpose smile, and tells me I've got time for one last question.
Flustered, I ask if he's really going to do a Boogie Nights 2? Anderson claps his hands. "Julianne Moore stripping again. All right!" Then, with perfect timing, "No. I would never want to do that." Does he have any firm ideas about future projects? A slow shake of the head. And that's fine, is it? A shrug. "No one will mind if I don't do anything." And the room goes quiet.
"Can I have a hug?" asks Anderson . He drags himself up from the sofa and moves like a zombie towards Bumble. "Are you OK?" she murmurs, before giving him a squeeze. "Yeah," he mumbles back, then says loudly: "I'm hungry."
Asked for an incident that sums up Anderson, Emily Watson (currently working on stage in New York) says that last week she returned home at midnight to find a package of Magnolia cupcakes on her doorstep. "He was always going on about these cakes... He'd remembered it was my birthday, and got a friend to hand-deliver them." She says Anderson is one of those people who doesn't need drugs. "He's on a permanent life high. He came to dinner with me and my husband once. Basically, if you give him sugar, he's on the ceiling."
She also says, right at the end, that she wants to work with Anderson again and that she finds him a "beautiful person". This is the kind of thing actresses say about directors. For once, I actually find it touching.