Awards season is rolling on and "The Master" continues to pick up accolades from various critics groups around the country. This past weekend the LA Film Critics awarded the film Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix), Best Supporting Actress (Amy Adams) and Best Production Design (Jack Fisk & David Crank). They also named the film as Runner-Up (meaning 2nd place) for Best Film, Best Cinematography and Best Music Score. Four wins and three runner's up = not too shabby. Boston Film Critics picked up the slack by awarding the film for Best Cinematography (Mihai Malaimare Jr.) and PTA as the Runner-Up for Best Director. Well deserved. Shoutout to Awards Daily for all their great coverage. You can check out all the film's awards & nominations (so far) on this page.
Update: Washington DC Film Critics gave Philip Seymour Hoffman their Best Supporting Actor Award and Jonny Greenwood for Best Score.
In other news, PTA was mentioned yet again on Elvis Mitchell's great podcast The Treatment, this time by "Skyfall" director Sam Mendes.
"We were talking off mic a little earlier about one of the greats, Paul Thomas Anderson, who is a true auteur - and there are very few of those who I would classify as geniuses - who can write their own material and have a particular vision and take that vision from their lonely room where they're writing with their pen onto their typewriter and take it right the way through to the point where they can make the finished article. I am not one of those people and most directors are not and so you are waiting for material to arrive that speaks to you in some unconscious way and you're not always sure why you're led in one particular direction or another. And it's your duty to be open to everything to some degree and to not try and repeat yourself."
It's December already which means that awards season is upon us. Kicking things off is Sight & Sound who have just named "The Master" as the best film of 2012. (We agree.) Very good news for the film and hopefully the first of many accolades to come. (via The Playlist) Additionally, a few video interviews with key department heads/collaborators on the film have also come to light which you can check out below for a deeper insight into how "The Master" was made. (via xixax)
Below The Line (with editor editor Leslie Jones, production designers David Crank & Jack Fisk, costume designer Mark Bridges):
Last night Christopher Nolan stopped by Filmlinc in NYC to discuss his "Dark Knight" trilogy on the eve of the film's Blu/DVD release and to boost the film's Awards season hopes. During the 90 minute conversation, Nolan and moderator Scott Foundas spoke extensively about his unique take on the iconic character, his influences and how Nolan is essentially one of the last filmmakers still working on film (and one of the first to shoot on 70mm IMAX). During the chat Nolan mentioned that he had seen "The Master" and it looked the way he thought a film should look. Filmlinc also has a print interview with the filmmaker which you can read an excerpt of below:
There’s a strong analog quality to your films in general and the Dark Knight films in particular. You talked about wanting to have a very tactile world, and seeing The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX 70mm you can’t escape the feeling that you’re seeing a film made on film, albeit with hundreds of CGI shots, but integrated in a way that you don’t feel that digital quality in the way you do with most movies that make heavy use of digital technology.
I recently saw a 70mm print of The Master and I realized that, other than my own films, it’s the first photochemically finished film I’ve seen in many years, and it looks the way a movie should look. To me, it’s just a superior form. In The Dark Knight Rises, we have about 430 effects shots out of 3,000, so the idea that the tail wags the dog and then you finish the film in the digital realm is illogical. We make the 430 shots fit in with the remaining 2,500 that we timed photochemically. For that reason, I’ve never done a film with more than 500 effects shots. These films have about a third or a quarter the number of CG shots of any other film on that scale. That allows me to keep working photochemically and to make the digital effects guys print out their negatives so we actually cut the effect with its background plate on film, and we can see whether it matches.
For me, it’s simply the best way to make a film, and why more people haven’t done it I could not tell you. The novelty of digital is part of it. For some filmmakers, there’s a fear of being left behind, which to me is irrational because as a director you’re not responsible for loading a camera. You can hire whoever you need to and shoot how you want to shoot, but I think, very simply, industrial economics favor change, and there’s more money in change, whether or not it’s better. But I talk to a lot of young filmmakers who want to shoot on film and see the value in it. I’ve gone out of my way to screen film prints of The Dark KnightRises for other filmmakers, because no one prints dailies anymore—they’re not seeing the potential of film—whereas I’ve been seeing it every day I’ve been working for the past 10 years.
During the conversation he called it "Paul Thomas Anderson's 'The Master'" which was cute. Wonder if he knows PTA is a mutual admirer?
Hope everybody had a good holiday, we have a few random odds & ends for you this morning. First up is this analysis of all of PTA's Tracking Shots by Sight & Sound. It's an excellent video which shows the evolution of the camera movement throughout his filmography and definitely worth a viewing if you haven't already seen it. Secondly, we have a quote from SNL MVP Bill Hader who was on Elvis Mitchell's excellent podcast The Treatment back in September (but we just got around to listening).
"You're into what you're into. And people can be into a lot of different things. It's funny too - when you meet people like Maya Rudolph is with Paul Thomas Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson hangs out at SNL a lot. And I'm a huge, huge fan of his movies. But when we talk about movies we talk about like, 'Chud.' You know? Or we talk about how we both saw a double-feature of 'Darkman' and 'My Blue Heaven.' And he's goes, 'I saw that double-feature!' And I was like, 'Yeah, I went into 'Darkman' and then snuck into 'My Blue Heaven'.' He goes, 'They came out the same week and.. [trails off]' You know what I mean? Those are the things you're kinda into."
"My Blue Heaven" and "Darkman" are both available from Netflix if you'd like to recreate your own double-feature. Comedian Patton Oswalt spoke to Onion AV Club about his Random Roles and gave the following hilarious anecdote about appearing in "Magnolia."
Magnolia (1999)—“Delmer Darion” PO: Delmer Darion. God. I was doing a show one night, and I went back in the kitchen and was hanging out, and Paul Thomas Anderson was there. We were just talking, and he was like, “I’m doing this movie if you want a part in it.” I said, “Yeah, sure.” So they called me the next day and said I needed to come in to be fitted for a wetsuit. I said, “Can I see the screenplay first?” And they were like, “Nope.” So I went in and got this custom wetsuit made, and they gave me two pages of the script and flew me to Reno. We shot this scene and then hung out all night drinking. And a week later, we were shooting and I was in the wetsuit. It was so hot to the point where I wasn’t even sweating anymore. And Paul was dumping bottles of water on my head to keep me from passing out and I was like, “Paul, what are we doing?” He said, “I can’t say right now, but I’ll just say that you are the first frog that falls out of the sky.” And I went, “Okay.” So that’s what working with PTA is like.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone (in the U.S. anyway). A recent post on another site prompted us to dig into the archives and revisit all of the Paul Thomas Anderson interviews with Charlie Rose. If you've never seen them, they're mandatory viewing, especially fascinating viewed in quick succession from one film to the next. Even if you have seen them, it's probably been a while so we thought we'd re-share them with you. Shout-out to DonRMB for uploading most of these. Enjoy.
BOOGIE NIGHTS
MAGNOLIA
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (with Adam Sandler)
THERE WILL BE BLOOD (with Daniel Day Lewis)
THE MASTER
Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates.
MK: That was a clip from The Master and we're very happy to be joined from Los Angeles by Paul Thomas Anderson. Paul, Welcome to the show.
PTA: Thanks, Mark.
MK: Now the film has opened in London in the 70MM print, it's about to open nationwide. For those who haven't seen it, can you just give us an idea of the story of the film?
PTA: Oh boy, uh...well we're low on story. We're high on character and low on story. We've got um...the basic premise is that Joaquin Phoenix plays a guy named Freddie Quell who comes back from WWII a bit damaged and a bit aimless, and stows away on a boat. And it just happens to be the boat that belongs to Lancaster Dodd, AKA The Master, who convinces Freddie that he...they become fast friends and he convinces him, he sort of says to him, you know if you've got any pain that you've dropped along the way here that's made you unhappy, I can find a way to go back and fix it for you.
MK: And what can you tell us of the origin of Lancaster Dodd's character? I mean obviously he appears to some extent to be inspired by the real life character of L. Ron Hubbard.
PTA: Yeah, a lot so. L Ron Hubbard was a big influence on creating the character, there's a lot of similarities between the two. There's a lot of differences too. The basic idea is that he starts a kind of um...a system of managing your past traumas and accessing memories that are embedded in your mind that perhaps you've forgotten---that perhaps are from this life, perhaps from another life----but if you navigate toward them and you hold hands with them, it will help you be happier in the skin and the life that you're in right now. So yeah, that's the similarities. But you know, in creating the character Phil kinda had to broaden it out, because otherwise you're just doing an impression of that person, and that's not what we wanted to do. You know, um, there was a Charles Laughton movie on this morning and I was just as influenced by him as a performer and a man as I was Hubbard, you know um...a kind of larger than life person who's light on their feet, who has an enormous appetite for life.
MK: Obviously Hubbard is known as the founder of Scientology, I read an interview with you in which you said, "Just because the film refers to Scientology or is in any way about Scientology, why does that mean that it has to be critical of Scientology?" How do you feel about the character that Philip Seymour Hoffman plays? Because actually, in the early stages of the drama, he does appear to be helping and aiding Joaquin Phoenix's character through some very deep-seated traumas.
PTA: Well I like him. I mean I wrote him, I came up with him, so I consider him a friend. I think the character that Phil plays in the film is dealing with something that gets a little bit bigger than he might---maybe he imagined or maybe he did want it to get that big---but I think the difficulty becomes if you're helping people, if you created a system of whatever exercises---mental exercises, physical exercises and things that people are latching onto, that is helping them. Sooner or later, if something you're doing like that grows, perhaps it kind of turns into an industry or something bigger than just a kind of hands on approach to helping people. And for the guy that we have in our film, his wrestle with that and his navigation of that perhaps isn't as graceful as it should be. But that's what he's dealing with, is how to kind of navigate this kind of home-grown self-help thing into something bigger. Which obviously everybody has ambition, everybody wants to succeed with what they're doing---our character wants to help people. But what happens when that translates into a sea of people looking at you, hoping that you will not just ask them good questions, but provide them with answers? That's when things start to get a little bit sticky.
MK: Can you tell me something about Joaquin Phoenix, he gives this extraordinary, twisted performance. He is physically contorted throughout the whole thing, he looks like somebody who has been literally bent out of shape. Again, I read an interview in which you said, you sighted the fact that some people find him quite scary to work with and you like that idea, that there's kind of a mercurial quality to him. Where did that twisted, bent performance come from?
PTA: I have to say, um, I wrote a couple nice ideas for this character down, and maybe I kind of got the ball rolling. But, in terms of percentages, it falls to him. The way that, the kind of distance between some stuff you write down on a page and what he ended up doing is like vast. I had no idea what my original ideas were, even for this character, but I know he just kind of showed up and started slowly contorting into this person who clearly was so damaged. You know, for instance, we had kind of a bad idea that we might show some war um...stuff from the war, like traumatic war experiences and things like that. I remember the first day of shooting, taking one look at his face and thinking: You don't need to shoot anything. Like what are you gonna do, like bombs going off and stuff like that? It woulda been horse shit. And this was like, just what he can do, one look in his face, you think: I don't know what he's seen, but it doesn't look good.
MK: Well we have a couple of questions from listeners. This is from Will Chadwick: "The music in The Master is extraordinary. What compelled you to use Jonny Greenwood as your composer for both The Master and There Will Be Blood, and what is it about his style of music that fits the stories you're trying to tell?" Of course I gave Jonny Greenwood an award for There Will Be Blood after he was outrageously disqualified by The Academy in surely one of the most grotesque miscarriages of justice of recent years, of many that they have made. But tell us a little bit about working with Jonny Greenwood.
PTA: Well, what can I tell you about working with Jonny Greenwood? He only looks like he doesn't know what he's doing, um, is what I would say. (Laughs) He um...well it's a pleasure, it's a thrill honestly, because no matter what I might vaguely hear in my head---I'm not very musical at all, but no matter what I kind of can feel in my bones, what he comes up with never fits it...and that's a good thing. You know, it never...usually he'll kind of come up with things that I first hear, and I just think they're so beyond me. It takes me a little while to catch up with what he's thinking and what he's doing, and that's fun. It's fun to show him the film without much music in it, and have his response to it...and either stuff that he's kind of had lying around, that he's just sort trying to develop more...or stuff he'll come up with that's original for the film. You know, just digging around and working with him is a real pleasure. Him and Graeme Stewart, his producer, they do everything together and it's a fun part of the process. It goes on for about a year and, yeah, I always miss him when we're not working together.
MK: This is a question from Matthew Crow. "You said after Magnolia that it would be the best film you'd ever make. Do you still believe that?"
PTA: Well, you're supposed to say that whenever you're promoting your new film, right? But I probably assume at that age and that time, what I probably meant was that, you know, you have a certain moment to write something and let it come out of you...and it's fleeting. It always is, no matter where you are in your life, you can't go back. And that film was something that came out of me that...I couldn't do that again. I just couldn't. So, that's probably what I was meaning.
MK: And what can you tell us about Inherent Vice, the Thomas Pynchon...?
PTA: Not much at the moment. Just sorta messing around with it and trying to make it make sense in my mind. Um, you know, do you know the book?
MK: No, I mean I know it, but I haven't read it.
PTA: It's great, I mean it's really fun...
MK: Can you give me a plot synopsis?
PTA: Oh my god, no. (Laughs) I couldn't even...are you kidding me? No way. I've been working on it for 3 years, I still can't figure out the plot. Um, and that's okay, that doesn't really matter. That's not the point of it. Um, it's basically a detective...it's a hippie movie. It's a detective hippie movie. We'll see how it goes.
MK: Well thank you very much. I think The Master is a masterpiece, and thanks for coming on the show.
Interviewer: Okay, let me ask you about a particular scene, let me talk to you about the jail scene. You kind of know what you’ve written, I suspect. It’s relatively close to what you’re gonna end up shooting. But I suspect on a day like, I don’t know, how many days did you shoot the jail scene?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Just one.
I: One day. You come expecting a certain thing. Do you get it? Do you, I mean, does Joaquin surprise you? And that scene is so riveting. I’m just curious what it was like as a filmmaker to make it? And what your experience was like just shooting that particular scene.
PTA: Well I’ll give you, okay, I’ll give you my honest memory of doing that. It was, I’d written lots of different versions of what might happen. I think we went into the scene and none of us exactly knew what we would do, but, because there’s no staging to it, because it’s a contained cell, and you can light it very simply and you can put the camera - we had two cameras - you can put one here, and you can put one there. (takes deep breath) In some ways, in that way, it’s very simple.
(another clip of The Master plays)
PTA: The first take that we did is the take that’s in the movie, and I can remember seeing it thinking “I think this is okay, I think that’s good.” But that kind of panic strickens you because it’s not what you expected, you know, and sometimes as a director you can have the confidence to say that’s not what I expected and its fucking great and let’s go to lunch or let’s go home or let’s do another scene. On your worst days as a director, you can say that was amazing. Let’s do it again, you know…and then you say, why don’t we do it again? And you keep doing it again because you’re sort of, you are unsure, you’re all unsure, maybe collectively all three of us knew we were after something. Or desperately you think well we’ve got the location for the day, why don’t we do some more, you know? Um, and inevitably, it all kind of goes by the wayside. You might be exhausted by the end of the day or you might think, or somebody might think, why are we continuing to do this? But, you laugh about it now and you look back at it and go yeah, it was the first one.
I: This is, obviously, an incredibly ambitious movie you made. Was there a best day you had making it?
PTA: We had a day, the last day. We shot up to Northern California, and we needed to get out of there. It was like, we had been there too long and we needed to get out of there. The first scene of the day that we shot was Joaquin swimming in San Francisco Bay. We cut that out of the film. He got hypothermia. He was with a stuntman, they both got hypothermia. They were throwing up, they almost passed out. Fine, great, but we still need to keep shooting. (interviewer laughs)
Ran down to Woodside and shot a shot of Joaquin walking through a forest. We used that. But um, went home…my girlfriend was 9 months pregnant at the time and after staying up for 24 hours, came home, saw her, got in bed. She said, “I think its time to go to the hospital.” Went to the hospital and had our third child, Jack.
I: WOW!
I: Did this movie, I mean, this is coming off There Will Be Blood which was probably, I mean, I don’t want to rank it, it was a successful film. Did this movie come together more easily because of that film or is everything just a grind and is it just you’re starting at zero every time?
PTA: It feels that way, definitely feels like you’re in the freshman class every single time you start. It just feels um…but that’s okay, that’s cool, you know. I would hate to actually think that you make a film that people like and does well and suddenly they’re going to go, “Okay, now you can do whatever you want.” You need something to push back against I think, I suppose, or I do at least and it’s a horrible habit in me but, its nice to feel that you have something to prove.
I: Joaquin and Phillip have a very distinct physicality that they bring to the roles. Joaquin almost looks like he’s, you know, assembled from a bunch of broken pieces. Phillip is large but he seemed to have a kind of levity to him in terms of how he walks about the set. I’m curious if that’s something the actors brought, if that’s something you discussed, that you felt it was important to have such dramatic physical differences between the two leads.
PTA: That’s them, I mean, some of that might have been there just in the basics. They obviously took their cue from the script and kind of created something bigger and better than I ever could have written out, you know. I mean, imagine if I was, you know, if I’d written Freddie puts his hands like that (impersonates Freddie’s body language) I mean, I would be a great writer, and I’m not, you know.
(clip from The Master plays)
I: Do you end up making the movie that you think you’re going to make, and if you look back at The Master, was that the movie you thought you were going to make? Is it, if it’s different, how would it be different?
PTA: I certainly never thought I’d look at Joaquin standing like that. That, that like I said before, that was never in my mind’s eye, and, that’s such a predominant part of the film, you know. I wrote…the first scene of the movie was written as like Exterior Beach, Guam, you know, Freddie Quell is on the beach after VJ Day. That’s all I wrote, because we just wanted to go to a beach and start doing things.
I: So, explain the coconuts, the humping in the sand castle, all that…
PTA: All that, we just came up with that. Yeah we just did that on the day we were doing it.
(clip of The Master plays)
I: So you have this drifter and at what point does he have this encounter, in your own writing, where there’s a catalyst, or there’s a character of change that he is going to run into somebody, and is that kind of more energy for his story or something you want to push him up against?
PTA: No, well, both! It’s both of those things. It’s energy for his story because you’re forcing somebody who…would probably be happy just to continue to be on his own. Not happy at all, no, I mean, he would probably be miserable being on his own as he was. But, throw him in a situation with somebody who has a huge appetite for life and is asking him questions, questions that he probably is not asking himself. And you, I suppose, I guess that’s the basics of a story. It should be a little bit like any, you know, some relationships you’ve seen maybe. Somebody comes over to your house and there’s a couple and you think “What do they see in each other?” And yet they are, they are in love; they are so deeply in love. And maybe they’re an odd couple, but they just feel something. They have a connection like that…in addition to, they like to drink together. In addition to, there is something each can get from the other. You know, Master feels, here’s my soulmate, who runs wild just as I wish I could.
I: Do you end up making the movie that you think you’re going to make, and if you look back at The Master, was that the movie you thought you were going to make? Is it, if it’s different, how would it be different?
PTA: That’s a great question. I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know, I don’t remember. I don’t remember what I thought it might be. I think it is pretty damn close to what I thought. But, that said, there’s so many things that I didn’t imagine about it that came together, that rose to the top. But the beginning was always the beginning, the middle was the middle and the end was always the end. All these details in between are definitely different and there’s all kinds of nuances and things that I nevercould’ve imagined and never wanted to imagine. I wanted to set up situations to find those things. All in all, I mean, it’s what we wanted to do…
Between the hurricane in NYC and a trip overseas we knew there would be little time to update Cigs & Vines beyond our Twitter and Facebook pages but little did we realize just how much we'd be missing. With "The Master" opening in Australia and the U.K. and Awards Season starting to heat up here, PTA has been hitting the promotional circuit with new interviews popping up on Time Out London, Francine Film (BBC Radio), Moviehole, Sunday Night Safran (Australian Radio), Popcorn Taxi, Sight & Sound, WGA, The Skinny and the LACMA where An Evening With Paul Thomas Anderson revealed a surprise for the audience.
After a screening of a pair of John Huston documentaries that helped inspire the film -- "Let There Be Light" and "Battle Of San Pietro" -- PTA unveiled a twenty minute collage of deleted scenes from "The Master" that he'd edited for inclusion on the DVD/Blu (similar to the "Blossoms & Blood" short of unused material on the "Punch-Drunk Love" disc). SlashFilm has a rundown of what was shown which lines up nicely with our own Guide To "The Master" Deleted Scenes and includes some completely unseen footage. Major spoilers follow.
We see Freddie in full battle gear lighting up a cigarette. He smiles and now we’re on the boat from the first act of the film in a gorgeous long take with Freddie talking to Dodd. The ocean is moving along in the background and he asks him if he believes they’ve met before. Freddie says yes, they talk about hurt and walk away. It seems like this was the prelude to the pair’s heated interrogation.
Half of Freddie’s body is in the beach between the legs of the sand lady. The soundtrack is Dodd talking about something philosophical and it cuts to a shot of Freddie in a bathroom, a man on the toilet left frame and Freddie concocting a drink in the right of frame. As he does this, Dodd’s voice fades out and Freddie’s fades up, he seems more sexual things in the Rorschach test. But the footage is still the bathroom. The drink is strong. Now the footage picks up with the dialogue and it’s a few extra Rorschach tests.
Freddie talking to Peggy at breakfast on the ship, which is in the movie but this is longer and Freddie asks her what time holes are, to which she gives a long answer. A jazzy song starts fading up on the soundtrack and we see the shot of two men jumping off the side of the boat from the trailer. Cut to Freddie, dressed up in his Navy whites at a party. It looks like Fleet Week. He grabs a beer walks around, cut to him in the back seat of a car with a gorgeous brunette. He said he just felt he had to jump and she laughs. Freddie says he loves her, asks what time it is, and falls asleep on her breast.
A long take at sunrise. Freddie running down a pier, obviously the next morning. The camera follows as he runs probably 50 yards and sees two men. “I lost my ship,” he says. “Nice going,” they reply and Freddie starts running back the other way. As he keeps running, we’re still in the same shot and we hear Laura Dern’s voiceover about those time holes and stuff. She continues to talk over more of Freddie on the beach with the sand woman, and then we see him on a bench outside of this huge rock structure with Doris. He asks her if she likes taking walks with him, to which she says yes. It’s tense.
The Dern voice over comes back up and now we see Freddie on a coach being analyzed by her. This interaction gets intercut with Dodd and Freddie wrestling. Finally Freddie tells Dern’s character that he can small her pussy and it’s driving him crazy. That smash cuts to a shot of Dodd’s older daughter shooting in the desert. Freddie and Dodd clap, then walk away off. This is obviously the set up to the desert scene where they dig up his book.
Them walking in the desert is cut with Clark in a car with Freddie, telling him that once Dodd died in a hospital for seven minutes. It was then that he was inspired to write his book. Clark says people who read the book died and that “There’s a truth about life on this planet.” Freddie asks him, “How much is something like that worth?” A line that gets referenced later.
In fact, we cut to the dinner scene were Clark brings up that line in the actual movie. Instead though we see him ask Dodd if books can kill people. Dodd looks confused and says that the pen is mightier than the sword, so yes. We’re now in the building where they hold their convention and Freddie and Dodd walk into a back room with the box they dug up. Dodd tells Freddie he’s the “guardian of good” and asks him to stay in the room all night and guard the book. As the camera is placed outside the room looking in, this feels like a test as a result of Clark’s accusations. Freddie agrees to say. Cut to him sitting down bored flicking a light on and off.
We see Melora Walters as the singer at the convention. She’s at the piano and Dodd is dancing. As we keep hearing her song, we see Freddie wield the gun from the trailer. He’s playing around in the room guarding the book. Melora’s song continues, including a little line for the Master and then we see Freddie give in to temptation and open the box with the book in it. As he does, a fire pops out of it. Was the book in there at all? Was this a trap? Freddie is as confused as we are as he closes it.
Freddie’s point of view from the movie theater, watching Casper the Friendly Ghost. Freddie laying down flat on a bench. Back to the convention and Peggy asks if Freddie will come up to the stage. He’s just beaten up the man outside so he’s not there. We see him walking back as she jokes around on the stage that he’s missing but when he walks in everyone applauds and he walks up on stage. The give him a brand new jacket and make him the First Lieutenant of The Cause. He and Dodd exchange smiles.
Now the soundtrack fades up “On a Slow Boat to China,” which Dodd sings in the movie but this is the real version. We get a few quick scenes of him and Dodd goofing off while taking photos and dancing, then we see Freddie in a hallway writing something on a bulletin board. The camera slowly dollies in toward him as he finishes and walks away. Finally, after he’s gone, we see what he was writing “Gone to China, Freddie Quell.” We see him on the side of the boat with the ocean below him.
Finally, it’s the shot of Dodd and Freddie smoking. “I like Kools. The minty flavor” Dodd says and the both crack up and break character. This is an outtake and Anderson lets them try it three times but they can’t stop laughing. The End.
Thanks again to SlashFilm for the detailed recap. We can't wait to take a look at them ourselves. "Never Let Me Go" filmmaker Mark Romanek tweeted, "went to the pt anderson/elvis mitchell q&a @lacma tonight. paul's editing room scraps are better than most others' whole films." Indeed. Another bold filmmaker also had some high praise for PTA. Darren Aronofsky took some time off from filming his biblical epic "Noah" to tweet, "the master is masterful. beautiful statement on human change. have I ever seen a performance like joaquin's work? #scenestealer"
What else do we have for you? An "Inherent Vice" update? Sure. PTA told Popcorn Taxi, "It’s coming along pretty good. It’s hard but it’s fun. Do you know his work at all? You should check it out. Just to work so intimately with somebody else’s writing makes you feel like, it’s like a writing lesson. Like going back to school. Just watching somebody’s skill with words and moving them around. How they can do it? It’s like a masterclass for sure. It’s really humbling. It’s less like writing something, feeling more like ushering something or an editor. So it’s a different thing entirely. It’s great to mix it up and not be creating something from scratch. So we’ll see how it goes. Not quite sure if anything will come of it. Hopefully."
While its good to know he's still working on his next, the bit of news that seemed to make headlines around the world is the somewhat silly tidbit that PTA is a fan of "Ted" (something we told you a few weeks back.) He also said (totally off the cuff) to Moviehole that he'd like to make a "full-blown comedy" someday. "I’d like to make a film like Airplane. That never gets old. Or Ted. It was a big hit. Why? Because It’s great. Movies that are that big a hit are never f*cking bad. I mean, there’s no such… You know, people aren’t that stupid, that movie’s a hit because it’s hilarious. I hope [Seth MacFarlane] makes another film."
And finally, Adam Sandler showed up as the surprise guest moderator for a special screening of "Magnolia" at the Aero Theatre in LA. The two discussed "Magnolia," "Punch-Drunk Love," what books Paul has been reading lately and his favorite film of all time. We should have a full transcription up soon but for now check out a few videos from the evening courtesy of Hollywood Elsewhere.
A huge thank you to all of our readers for sending along these updates while we were away. Wish we could remember our sources on each of these links to ensure proper credit but for now just believe that we really appreciate all of it. As a thank you, we've embedded the two John Huston docs that Paul screened at the LACMA in their entirety below (the same way PTA saw them) on YouTube. Enjoy. (via The Playlist)
Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates.
Crest of a Wave: Paul Thomas Anderson on The Master Feature by Jamie Dunn. Published 30 October 2012 Source: The Skinny
According to David Thomson, cinema’s great dissident critic, the putrid stench of death hangs in the air at your local multiplex, commingling with the more familiar funk of nacho cheeze and acne-faced adolescents. “Film is not dead,” Thomson writes in a recent issue of The New Republic, “it is just dying. This morbidity is familiar to us all.” Paul Thomas Anderson, director of The Master, this festival season’s most thrilling spectacle, clearly hasn’t received the memo.
“There’s always going to be a way, right? There’s got to be,” the 42-year-old filmmaker tells me from his office in Los Angeles when I ask about Thomson and other critics’ recent premature obituaries for the medium. “But, as Neil Young says, maybe that’s a hippie dream.”
Anderson’s sixth feature looked like it too was going to be a dream after Universal Pictures balked at its script and budget. The project was eventually nurtured and independently bankrolled to the sum of $35m by Megan Ellison, the 26-year-old daughter of Silicon Valley giant Larry Ellison, who’s recently been ploughing her future inheritance into smart and daring projects from some of the world's finest auteurs, including the upcoming films of Wong Kar-wai and Kathryn Bigelow.
Perhaps one reason Universal was reluctant to get behind Anderson’s film is its subject matter. It concerns Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), an alcoholic, sex-obsessed marine who, after he's spat out of the Navy at the close of WWII, stumbles through a series of peripatetic misadventures. A stint as a department store photographer is cut short when he inexplicably beats up one of his customers and a job as a farmhand harvesting cabbages ends with Freddie being chased across a furrowed field by pitchfork-wielding migrant workers after his potent homemade booze poisons a co-worker. It’s while on the lam for this crime that Freddie stumbles into the life of avuncular charmer Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), aka the Master, Svengali of a self-help religion that looks remarkably like an early incarnation of Scientology.
“Nowadays, if people get a whiff of what you are doing they kind of have impressions about what it should or shouldn’t be,” explains Anderson when we get on to the furore that was the lead up to The Master’s release. “When it comes to Scientology, I think the expectation is that you should somehow attack it. That was never what we were doing, it was never what we were talking about doing or thinking about doing, we just had other things on our mind.”
What Anderson did have in mind was a love story. “I was always thinking of it as just two people that meet, seemingly in the middle of their lives, they look at each other and they have this intense attraction, as friends, as drinking partners, as master and servant. And having that work both ways, not just that the Master is the master and Freddie the servant, but Freddie is kind of the dog that’s leading on the leash.” It’s this bromance that lends The Master its beautiful melancholic streak: these crazy kids just can’t work it out. “The Master can’t be exclusive to Freddie because he’s got to take care of so many different people," Anderson explains "and it’s not as if it’s in Freddie’s nature to commit to anyone because his history says if I commit to you you’re just going to leave or someone’s going to get hurt.” So, basically, it’s kind of a homoerotic remake of When Harry Met Sally.
We’ve been here with Anderson before. Fiery relationships between older and younger men drive the narratives of almost all his films. There’s the bitter creative differences between a porn director and his well hung leading man in Boogie Nights; There Will Be Blood sees a cold-hearted oil tycoon waging war against a slimy evangelical preacher with dollar signs in his eyes; while Magnolia, Anderson's epic collage of overlapping soap operas, is scattershot with a seemingly endless supply of father-son conflicts. Does PT have daddy issues?
“I just keep coming back to it, really not intentionally at all, it’s just gravity – an accidentally on purpose type of thing,” the director confesses. “Whatever it is in my life or in me or in the way I came out – my relationship to my old man was very strong and very important to me – it just seems to come back when I write these things; I can’t get away from it. Sometimes you’ve got to just accept the things you can’t do anything about. That sounds like a postcard but it’s just that you start writing and these things start to come out of you and you have to listen to them.”
What’s interesting is that as Anderson has got older his alliances with his protagonists has shifted. While Boogie Nights was told primarily from the younger man’s point-of-view, The Master is more even handed. Does he see himself identifying with his older characters more as time marches on? “I’m a father myself,” he laughs. “I’ve got three kids, so I’m getting pretty far past my prodigal son phase.”
Another explanation for Anderson’s sympathetic rendering of the Master character might be that a megalomaniac with hordes of people hanging on his/her every word isn’t too far removed from his own profession. “Oh sure, trying to convince somebody to follow you and dress up and march around the room?” he deadpans in his soft San Fernando Valley drawl. “There are a lot of similarities to being a movie director. You’re working with all these people and some days you’re just making it up as you go along hoping no-one will notice.”
Characters like the Master, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-man in There Will Be Blood), Barry Egan (Adam Sandler’s combustible salesman from Punch-Drunk Love), and Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds’ porn director in Boogie Nights who refuses to switch to video tape when the bottom falls out of his industry) are all driven to be the best they can be in their chosen fields. It’s easy to guess why Anderson is drawn to these fiercely independent self-made men: they are kindred spirits.
“My girlfriend [former SNL regular and Bridesmaids star Maya Rudolph] would agree. She would definitely call me a strong individual,” he says with a knowing laugh. “I’m proud of the path that we’ve taken, for sure (and when I say we I mean all the people I’ve worked with since the beginning, we’ve all worked together.)”
And this path has become increasingly idiosyncratic. The criticism of Anderson's early films was that they were too indebted to other filmmakers. Hard Eight’s script riffed on David Mamet; Boogie Nights' dizzying Steadicam shots were lifted from Goodfellas; and Magnolia’s sprawling narrative was laced with the DNA of Robert Altman. Post Punch-Drunk Love this criticism stopped; with that surreal, violent, and often hilarious romantic comedy he’d found a visual grammar and a filmmaking voice all his own. “I hope we’re not doing the same thing as when we started out, we’re kind of getting more confidence and swagger and strength to do the things we want to do. You can be independent but everything is always a compromise as well, just by the nature of making a film. But hopefully you can just add up the compromises and you can live with them, and you get enough of what you were after that you can feel good.”
If there’s a major flaw to Paul Thomas Anderson’s oeuvre, it's a gender imbalance. While rewatching Magnolia and Boogie Nights recently all the damaged, substance-abusing wives, mothers and daughters seemed to blend into one pathetic whole. Female actors would be better off looking for juicy parts in a Michael Mann movie than in one of Anderson’s. The brilliance of Amy Adams’ sly turn as Peggy Dodd, the Master’s heavily pregnant wife and the steely linchpin of his operation, just might absolve these previous sins. “She’s dynamite,” says Anderson when I mention Adams’ mesmerizing performance. “I love her work and wanted to work with her for a long time, she can do it all. And I mean do it all: singing and dancing. She's more like an old time actress when they could do everything, they could sing and dance and do both dramatic or comedic parts. They don’t make them like that so much any more.”
2012 is looking to be a particularly good year for the subtle, subversive group of filmmakers that burst on to the scene during the mid-90s alongside Anderson. David O. Russell, who released his first film, Spanking the Monkey, in 1994, two years before Anderson’s debut, Hard Eight, is likely to be fighting it out with Anderson for Best Director at the upcoming awards pantomime with romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook (released 21 Nov). Anderson’s more fastidious namesake, Wes, whose debut feature, Bottle Rocket, was released within weeks of Hard Eight, also had a great year, with critics and audiences falling for the undeniable charms of Moonrise Kingdom, the director's paean to first love and outdoorsmanship. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s next project, meanwhile, is being financed by the same angel who put up the cash for The Master. “I don’t know those guys personally,” says Anderson. “I’m not friends with them, but I know of them and I’ve met them and I definitely feel a part of them in a generational sense that we’re all working and creating on a similar wavelength. And we grew up watching the same movies so there’s definitely something to that. There’s so much good stuff going on, it’s crazy. Anybody who’s going to complain about movies not being good is not watching enough movies right now.”
Videos courtesy of Hollywood Elsewhere. Transcription courtesy of Megan Leddy.
ANNOUNCER: Right now it’s my pleasure to welcome back Paul Thomas Anderson and tonight’s moderator Adam Sandler ladies and gentlemen.
ADAM SANDLER: Thank you – he just roped me into this. I thought he wanted to go get dinner and then I showed up and said, “We’re eating at the Aero?”
PTA: He’s gonna do stand up for twenty minutes.
ADAM SANDLER: You ever notice in a relationship? [Laughter] So what happens? We’re seeing Magnolia tonight – that’s the first one I saw of yours. I saw that before I saw Boogie Nights.
PTA: And you called – cause I wanted to do with you – and you said “We’re not going to do that, are we?”
ADAM SANDLER: Really? I loved it though. I remember Paul was writing Punch Drunk and he told me about it and I really didn’t know Paul’s work, I didn’t know Boogie Nights I was that stupid – after I saw that – by the way, that was fantastic. Did I ever tell you I like Boogie Nights? But anyways, Magnolia, I went to see it and it was sold out, it was just like this and I was in the front row and I was doing this thing the whole time. I didn’t know it was going to be seven hours – how long was it? [Laughter] Three hours though, right?
PTA: Yeah, that’s, it’s 3:07. We should really get out of here.
ADAM SANDLER: Sure – we’ve got to hit it. But I do remember going “Oh my God, this guy is incredible” and I was a fan – you guys might see some frogs later.
PTA: Has anybody not seen this movie?
ADAM SANDLER: Alright – you’re gonna like it.
PTA: That’s so cool.
ADAM SANDLER: Fantastic!
PTA: You’ve never seen this?
ADAM SANDLER: Oh the kid – the kid’s gonna like it! Right on. [Laughter] Wreck it Ralph is down the street young man. Be careful.
PTA: Oh no! [Laughter]
ADAM SANDLER: He’s gonna like it. He’s gonna like it. He’s gonna like that [unintelligible] So you want to ask Paul any questions out there? You want to do it like that? Anybody? Anybody? He’ll answer you – go ahead.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was just wondering – I saw this really fascinating documentary Side by Side about the diminishment of celluloid, and how digital is going to be basically… in a couple of years, are you going to shoot your next film on celluloid or give in to digital – what’s your plan as far as what is happening?
PTA: If anyone couldn’t hear he was just asking about my future plans of digital versus film and this kind of stuff. I don’t have any plans for what I would do yet cause I don’t really know exactly what the film is. I think it would all depend on whatever the story is, whatever the film is. I don’t discriminate – I like everything. I’ve said before the only thing that bothers me is when things get thrown away – like there’s a projection booth up there and there is more than enough room for to have a digital projector and keep the old projectors. It’s just a drag when things get shoved to the side – that’s the thing that bothers me. And Aero – God bless ‘em – just keeps them around. I just get bummed out when things get excluded for something else. Other than that I’d be a fool if I said anything bad about some digital photography that I’ve seen – it’s just amazing, stunning what they can do. But yeah, that’s how I feel about it.
Your jacket is like The Prisoner. You know that? Stand up so we can see that jacket. Turn around so everyone can see it. Look at that - that is cool. The Prisoner is a Patrick McGoohan show old 60s and they had jackets with white piping just like that – so cool man.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m rather curious as far as, because you are a director and a writer, do you write in order? And when you direct do you direct your scenes in order or out of order?
PTA: Well that’s a great question. Well, I remember when we did our film together I had this big plan that we were going to shoot it all in order. Maybe on the second day we were 100% behind schedule and that goes out the window. You try to as much as you can but it’s kind of impossible to pull off.
ADAM SANDLER: You saw a lot – when we did Punch Drunk Love – you did see a lot in your head, like you had a score going on when we were shooting scenes. I remember that. We would do a playback – I mean he would be at the monitors, I had no idea what the hell was going on half the time, I would come to the monitors and see Paul with his headphones on and he would be kind of doing drums, and I was like “This guy is fucking crazy.” Sorry, sorry kid – forgot about you. But anyways, I do remember he has a lot going on in his brain going in there. I think while you’re writing you kind of see what you want to shoot.
PTA: Yeah mostly, for sure you know – when you sit down and write, sometimes it’s great fun to write from the beginning, it feels fresh it feels like that feeling when a curtain opens up. You can kind of auto-hypnotize yourself into thinking “Oh the screen’s opening up.” You start writing – it’s really exciting for about an hour and then there’s nothing on the screen. You just sit with it. Sometimes I’ve written scenes and they end up in the middle of the movie. You kind of just keep at it until you figure it out.
This movie had lots of different pieces that I had forever and ever lying around and just needed to come together and be a film. But these were the days when I wouldn’t cut anything. I thought every word I wrote was… good. Ugh – I wish I could cut fifteen minutes out of this movie for you guys tonight. I do, I do.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You have one hour.
PTA: Oh, no. That’s too much work. It’s fine how it is. [Laughter]
ADAM SANDLER: Go ahead buddy.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: First of, I want to say, growing up Jewish like everything you did was awesome for me, it made me explain my culture to everyone I grew up with, so it’s awesome you’re here. I’m here because I love this movie and I think this was the first movie I ever saw that was really more serious filmmaking, and it made me want to be a filmmaker. So I was wondering what was something in this film that you think people don’t always pick up on?
PTA: What’s something that I did in this film that isn’t talked about? Honestly I’ve been trying to remember this movie all day cause I knew I was coming down here. I don’t mean it – it’s not that bad! But you know you do have to kinda – and not that much has been coming to me. Honestly this a movie I wrote after my dad died and that was the biggest thing. I don’t think about this film – I don’t think about scenes really, I just think about what my life was like at the time. There will be shots in here I do not remember doing – I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. It’s not like when you’re working on a film you know what’s going on with it – the memory of it becomes something else – it becomes a memory of your life. Not of the film. That was the biggest thing.
ADAM SANDLER: I do remember seeing it in Jason Robard’s stuff – it was devastating. And watching Cruise, too, Cruise kills you in this movie. This movie blew me away when I saw it. You know what he did, that so many actors, he just gives so much room for an actor to just do stuff that they’ll walk away and go “I can’t believe I did that in a movie.” And he lets you, this movie in particular, there are so many story lines, so much depth, so much sadness and sickness that its – as an actor you’re just like “Man I want to be in that movie.” That’s what this movie does as an actor. I’m sure as a filmmaker, there’s a lot filmmakers out there like “Shit I better start writing some good shit. That stuff’s unbelievable.”
Go ahead guys.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can I please be a PA on the next one?
PTA: Sure! I mean it could be like five years before… [Laughter] You’ll probably be, you know, directing films by then. Take somebody from the back Adam.
ADAM SANDLER: Okay – sorry. This nice kid’s looking at me right in the eyes and I gotta go over there. Alright.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was just wondering since we have both of you here tonight can you talk about kind of working together on Punch Drunk?
ADAM SANDLER: Sure. The blue suit. The blue suit was… everything in that movie was, any time someone stops me on the street and I gotta say there are people who go “Hey – fucking Happy Gilmore!” and stuff like that I’m very happy about. But the Punch Drunk – when I get stopped on the street and someone goes [whispers] “Punch Drunk Love” – they talk about Punch Drunk I take it as a compliment. But I just did everything this guy told me to do. I just came to the set and knew my lines and he kinda told me what my guy would be feeling and what he’s going through at this moment and he just masterminded the whole thing. I just gave myself to Paul as an actor and I trusted everything he had to tell me. And he’s funny as hell. I remember it was kinda a comedy. It was kind of – Barry Egen was just a guy who was massively overwhelmed, and he had a lot of sisters. And I remember you casting the girls and Paul said something like “I stopped by a Temple today and I met these girls that I think are gonna be your sisters.” [Laughter] Right? It was something like that. And I said “You got any actresses?” “Nope.” I don’t think any of them were, right?
PTA: No – none of them were. And they brought – I think there were three or four sisters – and they brought cousins and normally when you – people who know the film – there’s a scene when Adam comes to a birthday party for one of the sisters and it’s just populated not just with sisters but with husbands and kids and stuff like that – all these women brought their kids. Normally when you shoot a film there’s like teachers standing on the set, they say “You know you can’t - you can only shoot for three or four hours” and these sisters were pretty much like the sisters in the movie they were looking at these teachers going “No fucking way – don’t tell me what to do with my kid!” So we, you know, abused the privilege and shot with this family – great family – and they were just dynamite ladies, and overbearing and great and loud and fun to be around.
ADAM SANDLER: And one last thing I do remember in particular and I had kind of forgotten about, but there was a scene at the dining room table that when I read it I was like “Oh God I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to do that scene.” It was when Barry Egen had a big breakdown and was bawling crying and screaming – just devastated – and was full-on tears, full-on upset with his family. And I kept dreading that scene cause I’m a comedian and I wasn’t very excited to do that. And I do remember just going “Alright, it’s that day” doing it all, going full tilt, bawling, crying, doing everything I’ve got snot running out of my head. And I did the scene and everyone’s like “Oh man - good job Adam that was fantastic” blah blah blah – and I remember I called him like four months later “Hey, how did that scene cut together?” And he goes “Oh, I cut it.” [Laughter] Alright – let’s go to the back. Sorry guys, sorry we’ll get to everybody I hope. Go ahead young man.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah – who is your favorite actor and why? [Laughter]
ADAM SANDLER: No, but he’s worked with – I mean, Joaquin in The Master, holy shit. Fantastic. Hoffman – fantastic. Daniel Day – that’s hard to mess with. Daniel Day! That’s hard to mess with man. When he says he’s doing a movie and I’m like “Oh yeah, what are you writing - who’s in it?” and he’s like “Daniel Day Lewis” and I’m like “Well, okay. I’ll sit out on this one.”
PTA: I’ve been so lucky – I mean just everybody he just listed – also too people that pop into my mind that are bizarre – small parts – like there’s this girl at the end of The Master who plays the girl Freddie is in bed with, and she’s just this girl named Jen Page. She came in for one day, had to strip all her clothes off do this really intimate scene and it just tickles me whenever she is onscreen, I think she’s so great, and I think you get moments like that where you just – yes of course I expect Adam to be great I expect Joaquin and Daniel to be great – you expect it. That’s why they’re great. When somebody will come on for a day and do something fantastic is like as thrilling as anything. Sometimes even more thrilling when you see somebody who is just starting out and they come and do something – that’s the coolest when that happens.
ADAM SANDLER: Magnolia’s got a bunch of that too.
PTA: There’s a ton of it in Magnolia – I just spit all over the place – there’s a ton of it. This cast - in particular God she just popped into my mind – April Grace who interviews Tom Cruise is dynamite. She’s an actress that I auditioned for Boogie Nights and she didn’t get that part it wasn’t right but she always stuck in my mind. So I wrote the part for her…
ADAM SANDLER: What’s the girl’s name who was dating John C. Reilly in this movie?
PTA: Melora Walters.
ADAM SANDLER: Unbelievable. She’s amazing in this.
PTA: Henry Gibson, the great late Henry Gibson, is in it. Yeah – on and on the list is long. You know, Michael Bowan is great and Felicity Huffman – it’s a long thing task. Yeah – for this film there’ss so many parts and that’s what was great to do everyday. Luis Guzman… I just wanted to say real fast there’s someone here tonight, I hope, Jim Plannette – raise your hand. There he is. Jim Plannette was the gaffer on this film – I learned more about how to a light movie set from him than anybody else I’d say - One of the best. Young Frankenstein for God’s sakes. This is one of the great, great… [applause] he did ET for God’s sakes. So yeah…
ADAM SANDLER: Go ahead, this next girl here.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What would you say as a writer influenced you to go from sort of multi-character fantastical kind of films to something very single protagonist, hyper-realism sort of thing.
PTA: Like the one we did together?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: From like Magnolia to The Master.
PTA: She’s asking how you go from doing a multi-character fantasmic creations – that’s a great word, if that was your word – to something more focused and probably it’s because you feel like “We did this – don’t want to do that again.” I remember when we did our film it was after this and I just remember feeling like I don’t – I want to do something completely different. In some ways I sort of stopped myself and said maybe it’s harder to sort of focus on one story. There’s nowhere to cut to – you just sort of deal with one thing. It was an exercise maybe at the beginning but to do something light with Adam, to me that film that we made was the first time I felt, I don’t know, there was just like a confidence – we struggled – but there was a confidence I kind of got to through a lot of the struggle. And it just felt like it was one of the first real film’s I made that really was mine in some weird way. Hard to describe, but that just kind of gives you confidence to keep moving forward, keep trying new things.
ADAM SANDLER: Go ahead buddy.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you decide with themes, I guess it’s kind of a similar question, but like in Punch Drunk and in Magnolia there’s a lot of downward [can’t tell] and time – are these things you want to try and like attack, or they just kind of come?
PTA: He’s talking about themes. I guess it’s kind of – I have to say I’ve never really started anything with any big ideas about what it is – just more bits and pieces that hopefully accumulate into something that feels good. It’s kind of like Will Farrell in Old School when he stands up to the debate thing and he’s such a stoner, such a partier suddenly this thing just spills out of his mouth. He feels light-headed afterwards – you know what I’m talking about? That’s what it feels like when you write a script – suddenly you stand back and you’re light-headed – you can’t believe it came out of you. You wonder who crept in in the middle of the night and wrote it.
ADAM SANDLER: Way in the back man. [Unintelligible] Alright, who’s next?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What’s your premise when dealing with comedic actors such as Adam as opposed to Daniel or Joaquin, and Adam vice versa, what’s it like working with a dramatic role like Punch Drunk?
PTA: I don’t think it’s any different at all. You’d be surprised at how quickly when a serious dramatic actor or somebody who’s won awards or funny actor, how quickly it all disintegrates into just like “What the fuck are we gonna do and how are we going to make this work?” It just very quickly - all that stuff just goes away and you’re just standing there trying to do something right and good. It just doesn’t… I think that’s it.
ADAM SANDLER: It’s funny – you would – when we did it together you kind of, if I was insecure about something before going in Paul wasn’t like a guy who was like “Well…” trying to make me feel better about it. He kinda gave me a look like “Well, that’s your shit. You getter get that right.” I and I was like “Alright, I’m on my own.” I better figure this out. But he was supportive, but like “Listen, we’re here to accomplish something and as an actor you knew what we were getting into, so do your job.” And I think every actor, every movie that you see that you love, I think the actor goes in with, of course actors make choices that are bizarre and the director will say “No, no, no let me lead you down the right path.” And he did that with me a lot and ultimately it’s up to the actor to just get what he has to get out of himself.
PTA: Let me just talk about actors – one thing I’ve noticed like – the worst thing in the world can be sometimes when if an actor doesn’t know what the plan is for the day – you know like how many set-ups are we going to be doing? Because you want to know how to pace yourself and what to do and where to put yourself cause you expend a lot of energy – so coming up with a good plan, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this, it’s going to be five shots. It just helps to have that kind of thing on a movie set in general but it’s really helpful for the actors, cause if somebody thinks it’s going to be a one, and they spend all of their energy and you say “That was on the back of your head.” You wouldn’t see any of that. So it’s just management of a situation in a real simple way. Shouldn’t we start the movie? You guys, it’s a school night.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It’s Veteran’s Day.
ADAM SANDLER: Oh Veteran’s Day – yes.
PTA: Ohhh!
ADAM SANDLER: Ok go ahead – right back there in the hat.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You have so many original stories and then your adaptation, how did that writing process compare? And why? What compelled you to do an adaptation of There Will Be Blood?
PTA: Well, what compelled me to do an adaptation of There Will Be Blood she said – well my memory of it is that I had lots of things that I was writing but nothing was floating my boat or good enough or I couldn’t kinda get it going and I came across a book that had enough sort of vague similarities but had this real drive and momentum. So it was kind of born out of writers block almost and just transcribing that book onto script form was just a way to keep practicing and exercising and writing and seeing if it would go somewhere. I never really thought it was an adaption – I thought it was just practicing. And lo and behold it just kept giving and was great and at a certain point that book was like that thick – it seemed impossible to kind of do this whole thing. And it inspired enough to sort of moved off into a different direction so thank God it came a long when it did. It’s a terrific book. But I didn’t know how to adapt it properly I just sort of knew how to commandeer what was useful to me and move a different direction. And as a credit – give credit to it as a main source of inspiration.
ADAM SANDLER: You what was great also? I’m friends with Paul so I watched the process. He decides what he’s going to do – what movie he’s going to do – and when he sets off he writes it there’s just a quiet confidence. Whenever I call him up “How’s that movie coming along?” He says “Pretty good.” “And how’s the shoot going?” “Yeah, I think we’re onto something.” And the funniest is, I think I’ve seen since Punch Drunk every movie of Paul’s alone with him in the editing room. And we watch it together and Paul’s you know asking some of my thoughts is anything was confusing, but I watch these movies that are unbelievable, I can’t believe what I’m watching, and he’s right next to me and I just get to go “Whoa – whoa.” I feel like saying “Hey Paul, how the fuck did you think of that part?” But then I say “Keep going, keep going.” It’s bananas – there’s a confidence to Paul I’ve never seen. Not flashy, not showy, not in your face. Just like “I think I’m…” He’s an amazing guy.
PTA: I have to say in reverse Adam has given me two notes on both those films he’s talking about that I did, that were great . One in particular on There Will Be Blood the whole section where the movie leaps forward in time, Adam says “What about this? It’s a bit of a mess.” And Adam said something: “Why don’t you just get rid of it?” And it took me six months to realize what he was talking about – that you could just get rid of it. I wrestled with this whole thing in my head, and it ran around in my head, why don’t we just get rid of it? And I finally realized at the last minute we can just get rid of it.
ADAM SANDLER: And I said “What about a bowling pin being a weapon?”
PTA: Remember? I never give you credit for that.
ADAM SANDLER: Alright, come on – I think Paul wants to get out of here so let’s do one more question – whoever it is say it. Ask it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How much of your screenplays and your writing do feel is influenced by your personal worldviews? Do you kind of try to stay out of it not wanting to judge your characters? How do you – what’s that process like?
PTA: Well – I suppose no matter how much you want to stay out of it hopefully that’s kind of impossible. But, no God I don’t know. I mean a film should be an exciting film, it shouldn’t be homework or it shouldn’t be me telling you what to think or anything like that. I don’t think. I think you try… that’s a drag, you know? That would not be my business. Hopefully you get to a place where you’re like – I think I said before this great writer said “Writing should be like auto-hypnosis.” Where at its best you’re not really doing it – you’ve got characters behaving how they’d behave. Your powerless against the fact that you’re gonna see through, but hopefully you try to remove yourself from the equation. You know that foggy moment right after you wake up and it’s just this thin little sliver after you wake. You don’t think about who you are or what’s going on – trying to get to that kind of sliver when you’re writing is the sweet spot hopefully. And it’s not too much like I don’t know pouring medicine down somebody’s throat – otherwise I’d do this for a living which is come here and talk, lecture…
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What book are you reading right now?
PTA: What book am I reading right now? Well, I’m spending a lot of time reading Inherent Vice… and I just finished reading, and I’m going to read it again, Waging Heavy Peace which Neil Young’s book which is so great. Yeah – high recommendation. Go get it – it’s great. And it’s this thick but it’s so easy to read. I read it so fast.
ADAM SANDLER: just saw him the other night. I saw him like two weeks ago.
PTA: At the Hollywood Bowl?
ADAM SANDLER: Yeah, yeah. That’s crazy. It was unbelievable, yeah. By the way I’m reading Purplicious.
PTA: You learned how to read?
ADAM SANDLER: That happened after Punch Drunk.
PTA: My all time favorite movie? Right now my all time favorite movie would be, oh God I don’t want to – you go first.
ADAM SANDLER: Yeah, no I don’t really have a favorite I have one’s that rocked me as a kid that I thought about the most. You know what blew me away as a kid? Oliver. That killed me.
PTA: The Black Stallion just popped into my head, a movie I loved when I was a kid.
ADAM SANDLER: Yes, yes. That was a great one. Diamonds are Forever was a good one too.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Unintelligible] reunion?
ADAM SANDLER: We talk about it.
PTA: We talk about it all the time.
ADAM SANDLER: We almost – we talked about a kids movie one time. Years ago. Someday. Someday.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You and Daniel Day Lewis…
ADAM SANDLER: I know. I definitely could be his goofy brother. No doubt about it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Unintelligible]
ADAM SANDLER: I think just a good way, is just making sure that the actor gets to keep his confidence. That’s a nice way to approach it. If you’re not getting what you want out of your actor don’t strip away everything. You just got to lead him in the right direction and get him or her – as an actor if you are doing scenes that are deep you just need to feel secure or feel like you’re amongst family. So that’s probably the best advice. I don’t know – there’s more than that – but that’s good for me.
PTA: I agree with that, yeah. A friend of mine made a movie with The Rock and Johnny Knoxville and he said that if The Rock would mess up a take he’d just go “Okay. Alright let’s just try again.” You know and he’d get right back into it and Johnny Knoxville – such a great guy – if he would mess up he would bang his head and he’d be so upset with himself. And he said he could just watch two who just obviously come from different backgrounds, different upbringings where they learned how to handle it differently. Yeah, that thing about confidence, if you’re an actor the second you start feeling confident or that you know what you’re doing or you go “God I’m right here” that’s the second it will slip away from you. It’s just so elusive. It’s slippery – getting anything good let alone something good sixty days in a row on a film shoot is kind of a miracle when it happens. But that family thing is right. Making a movie should be like a family, like a big dysfunctional family where everybody is cool with each other but everyone’s honest with each other too.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Whose story is Magnolia? Who is the protagonist of that story? There are so many points of view.
PTA: I don’t know – fuck… I suppose the answer is whoever the story ends with is who it belongs to. I don’t want to ruin it for everybody here – I already ruined one element of it.
ADAM SANDLER: Hey – just that kid hasn’t seen it. But yeah, maybe you’re right.
PTA: How do you create characters? I don’t know – steal them from people that you know or stories that you’ve heard or things that you’re thinking or writing for an actor that you want to work with - all those different things.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you know if you’re taking too long on something or if you’re rushing something?
PTA: Ha – good question. We’re going to end with that – how do you know if you’re rushing something or taking too long with it? I wish I knew the answer to that. You know sometimes it’s easy to do things if they’re well written you kind of walk in and it goes really well and it’s smooth and it kind of comes together great and you kind of can’t believe it. And other times you bang your head against the wall or something forever and ever and ever and sometimes it gets better and it was worth it and other times you were just doing the work of trying to see if there was anything there and then it never makes the movie. But it’s all work and you have to find your own barometer – you know make deadlines for yourself. Somebody said they “love sound of deadlines as they whoosh past my head.” I know that sound.
ELVIS MITCHELL: So talk to me about the first time you saw Let There Be Light.
PTA: Well like I said, it was on YouTube. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, I guess for first film which I think I watched at the same time, taking nothing away from it because it’s a great film but you see explosions off in the distance and I was familiar with that stuff and already been desensitized to it in a certain terrible way. But this has close-ups with these fellas and hearing them talk, and long takes, it’s not battle footage it was – obviously the acting after that. At the time it was right when The Master – you know you can only go so far when you’re trying to get in the head of another time, and you are sort of hungry for more films of that period that will do it, but seeing a documentary of that period and something that is laid so bare – I watched it again and again and again and again. It was at a time when I was writing where I was feeling pretty good about what I had but something – I just felt like something was missing – and suddenly you get lucky enough to discover something and it kind of opens up for you the story that you are working on and that’s what that did for me.
ELVIS MITCHELL: Isn’t it sad to you that inevitably – even like Under The Volcano – that we might be completely lost in our bodies?
PTA: Perfectly said, yeah. It’s funny to see this kind of happy ending put on it, which you could feel – I don’t know, I know that he had a sense of humor I don’t know if he was applying it in this film but you could feel maybe he was saying “I’ll just put a little swell of music and say that everything is okay and maybe I can get away with it.” There’s no swell of music big enough to make it okay. The fella was talking about his wife and that letter it just doesn’t get any more harrowing – seeing somebody like that so vulnerable and so naked – you just never saw that, fellows from that era that came back – you just never saw that – baring their souls. I had never seen anything like that.
ELVIS MITCHELL: The thing that I feel from Let There Be Light and The Master, is that your movies before The Master, death was always kind of a specter in the background, but this movie you start off the ground recovering from being stung by death. And it seems to influence how The Master starts today.
PTA: In a practical way you need to ask yourself “Are you going to shoot some more footage?” And that’s a real big investment not only in time, effort and energy and money but are you going to be able to do something that hasn’t been shown before, do you need to do that? For that film one look at Joaquin Phoenix like when you look at these guys, look at these faces, and you don’t need anything else. That’s the sort of thought that just occurred to me there. I think that the Battle of San Pedro – to me the best part of that film – yes you have this harrowing war stuff but getting to the end and to see these faces and there’s just this kind of relief – not relief, but it’s faces. It’s not landscapes and explosions – as haunting as that is – the second you see the faces everything comes rapidly into focus. And Let There Be Light is exclusively faces, there’s no war footage at all.
ELVIS MITCHELL: And yet in those faces there’s all that collateral damage from the battle – those starved kids with those lines under their eyes and those worry lines in their foreheads – I Let There Be Light just that pain in their faces.
PTA: Yeah, pain in their faces but also too how they do talk about it. It was a generation that wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t talk badly, kept it all to themselves – and I guess that’s true. But here these guys are really pouring their hearts out – just the interesting thing as we are watching these guys try and mess around with all these different methods about how they may help them or cure them: sodium pentothal, hypnosis and Rorschach tests and all that kind of stuff which I don’t know – did it make it worse? Or help?
ELVIS MITCHELL: It didn’t seem to help, but the funny thing was there was so much confidence in each of these treatments that didn’t really seem to do anything. And in watching The Master…
PTA: Oh the doctor - that kind of real nuts and bolts doctor? He’s like slapping him around – the unsavory character the doctor with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
ELVIS MITCHELL: He doesn’t say “Snap out of it.”
PTA: Yes – he stopped just short of saying “Snap out of it.” But for The Master there was – obviously it helped feed into ideas that eventually got into how to work with mental illness, how to work with the mind. He did spend time in the Naval Hospital so he was obviously around all this kind of stuff. So whatever he knew – this entire made up thing – he was around this stuff and funneling it into what he was working on.
ELVIS MITCHELL: When Philip is questioning Joaquin it’s almost that same kind of… we’ve been trying to probe this soft spot because he understands that there’s trauma. There’s that admission of trauma basically in the conversation and it’s really like watching the interrogations in this.
PTA: A lot of those things had been formed in the script for The Master before I saw this, but it’s that kind of lucky thing that helps verifies something you made up, you found somewhere else - it just helps you feel that you are on the right path by seeing this stuff. Those kind of hard-hitting questions are meant to break you down, get you to open up. Nothing entirely new, there’s psychology, psychosis, yeah…
ELVIS MITCHELL: The cutting of that section reminds me of John Huston’s cutting, as I was saying before, well he said basically “An edit came from a natural [?] plank”. And that kind of cast iron cutting: this is the cut, this is the cut, really isn’t a sequence.
PTA: I have never heard that he said that before. That’s great. It makes sense to me. I think I respond to his films just how nuts and bolts they are. They really are kind of lean mean fighting machines. And whatever it is floats my boat about them. I really like about his films. Love it actually… There Will Be Blood that was kind of the beginning of a real hard-core obsession with his stuff and feeling like – just so muscular. And in addition, not just muscular, John Ford was muscular too, and a sentimental side – I think John Huston was a great writer too. And I respond to his writing as well.
ELVIS MITCHELL: What he does that I always think about with your stuff, is that he poses these kinds of questions about masculinity. Except in his movies those questions are always answered – and in your movies those questions aren’t.
PTA: Well he was more of a man that I’ll ever be.
ELVIS MITCHELL: I didn’t know we were going to be talking about the steak and tequila diet while you were cutting There Will Be Blood – that’s very John Huston to me.
PTA: That was steak and vodka – yeah… I do live in the same neighborhood though. He built a house out where I live – it’s still there actually. Great house – he built it and they ended up shooting Red Badge of Courage along the backyard where I live. It’s not populated with a lot of houses…
ELVIS MITCHELL: Did you read Picture the Lillian Ross book on…
PTA: I did. I did.
ELVIS MITCHELL: Isn’t that great? It’s just one of those rare looks into how entirely decisive he was. If you read that and White Hunter Black Heart you get the sense that he always knew what he was going to do no matter what the costs.
PTA: Yeah – and probably many times against what was better for him - which translates to his films. Better or worse, really nuts and bolts, attack and just kind of a streamlined vision. I don’t think there was a poetic thinking… but he was also – I don’t want to say it was just nuts and bolts with him – he was a painter and he was probably a romantic at heart. And you could feel those kind of things coming through in his films, but just because you make films that’s as cut and dry as Let There Be Light… it would be wrong to assume that he’s this cold person. If anything it’s the opposite – he was nuts and bolts in his filmmaking to allow what was happening in front of him to do the talking. It wasn’t filmmaking getting in the way. He was such a humanist that this idea on making a cut was “Let them tell the truth. I’m not going to tell the truth or make my own truth by cutting it up a bunch of different ways. I’m going to let the things that happen speak for itself.”
ELVIS MITCHELL: Did you know that the editing of that question and answer sequence felt so new to me for you? That kind of let’s get on with it kind of thing.
PTA: Well I have to admit that’s probably just a function of being able to shoot with two cameras at the same time so literally on a computer these days you can just press when you feel it. In the old days you would get two cameras in a big long scene you would get everything matching, get ribbons right and everything else – I don’t know how they did it. They must’ve had two cameras. That’s just a lazy thing – it’s terrible.
ELVIS MITCHELL: And you just exposed your laziness to this audience…
PTA: I know. It’s more of a feeling though, we can’t get any more let’s go somewhere else…
ELVIS MITCHELL: And it felt like to me –watching The Maltese Falcon again, which really has that – there’s this incredible momentum and there’s a real kind of narrow momentum in that particular scene – if it was building toward something in that particular sequence…
PTA: You’re talking about when they are asking questions back and forth – is it inherent thing in that is that it is a cliff hanger and that’s just the luck of the draw that they can get a scene like that, actually work as a suspense scene and work this dynamic interplay. But at the same time you were learning something about this person, this character. These kinds of ideas of screenwriting – the plot, the momentum, the character – usually the worst things you have to go do in a movie are the ones that will move the story forward. You have to stop for a second and somebody has to say some really horrible dialogue: “Well the reactor it will blow up.” But they’re necessary – you just scratch your head when you shoot those “How can we get this off without seeming like we are completely ridiculous?” A scene like the one you are talking about, you get lucky that everything is happening at once. You’re learning new information and you are on the edge of your seat and you want to find out more… well I won’t get another one like that for a long time – it just worked out in my favor.
ELVIS MITCHELL: Yeah – but it’s so unique for a movie of yours to do something like that because the information is generally something we’ve learned over the course of the movie.
PTA: Right – usually if you want to find out the story of someone’s mother or father, that’s the whole thing , sit down for a Q&A… fire questions…
ELVIS MITCHELL: I’ll keep that in mind for this. Since Boogie Nights, Baraka has always come up in terms of influence. Just kind of the beginning where there’s these long cuts in The Master and in some of your other movies and I mentioned this to you when I say Boogie Nights and you said “Yeah, Baraka means a lot to me.” Talk about the first time you saw Baraka.
PTA: I don’t remember the first time I saw it. It must have been on DVD and I just loved it. I love [?]. I like in general movies that are just pictures or music or something like that. And Barraca just kind of really did it for me. And I saw it in the theater – that’s a whole other experience. It’s always stuck with me. Anytime I get the chance to drag someone to it I do it, or I just go on about it and bore people. Joaquin and I were talking about apes and animals and things like that for this character and I showed him the first shot of Baraka and the first shot is of a monkey falling asleep and it’s like two minutes. Just stare at this monkey slowly falling asleep and it’s absolutely hypnotizing. One of the best things I have ever seen – and I showed it to him one day and he just loved it too and said “Let’s try to do that.”
ELVIS MITCHELL: When I talked to him he said that by the end of the movie you were calling him your pet monkey.
PTA: Bubbles – Michael Jackson’s monkey. Yeah, it felt like that. It felt like having a trained monkey. That was one of the ideas in the film whether we really talk about it or not was what happens, like Siegfried and Roy, what happens if you have a tiger? And there were discussions about that kind of thing – having an animal, having a monkey and putting diapers on it and what’s eventually going to happen. It’s not going to like a little hat – it’s going to bite you. No matter how much it flips over and does – it’s not exactly like that frog in that cartoon that sings… like Bubbles who went fucking crazy. Come on – you can’t put diapers on a monkey.
ELVIS MITCHELL: I didn’t know that was the lesson of The Master until just now… it’s weird because the way he moves physically, even when he’s wearing a suit, like the sequence when he’s working as a photographer in the store, he’s completely wrong for it. Being in that environment – he seemed to be looking around prowling for prey basically.
PTA: If you can imagine the sequel to this film – like what happens when this is over and now you’re set loose and you have to go get a job – questions arise like “What the fuck are you supposed to do with your life? How are supposed to get on with it? How are you supposed to live a day-to-day existence?” One thing I talked about with Joaquin was that not only was there trauma these guys had come back with but having the sense of a master or commander that you respect and that you like who you can look up to, a sense of schedule in real life. Suddenly the rug is pulled out from underneath you and you were expected to make your way without that. And that alone is difficult. Not to discount all that’s floating around in your head. But that kind of structure that can be so helpful in people’s lives is missing.
ELVIS MITCHELL: ? and Blake Edwards, one of the things those guys have in common, as I’m watching The Master too I felt a little bit of Days of Wine and Roses, just that sense of wanting to be told what to do with your life…
PTA: I don’t know that film that well.
ELVIS MITCHELL: It’s the most dramatic of his films… playing on all these traumas, the sense of being lost. I noticed that in The Master… people trying to figure out what to do with aloneness is somewhat of a recurrent theme in your work. And I wonder how you made that connect in The Master so much, because it’s really a big part – Freddy is completely lonely.
PTA: I guess he is somebody who will probably move the rest of his life alone and sort of learn to survive alone. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t completely hunger or desire to be around people or to be part of something. But the second he feels too much good will in the room is probably the moment he’s going to slip. That much love and attention is probably worth bailing on for somebody like him. It doesn’t make any sense – but it does. For anybody that knows that feeling.
ELVIS MITCHELL: In the last section of the movie was Freddie kind of going crazy and the way that loneliness kind of warps people. The idea of the way you make your peace with loneliness or you can’t deal with it runs through a lot of your work.
PTA: If you’ve ever taken a vacation away from your family, the first fifteen minutes you’re thrilled and seventeen minutes later you’re lonely again. I think people like to be with other people don’t they? Mostly, don’t they? But then again you let it slip.
ELVIS MITCHELL: It’s that kind of hunger often to be around people when you think about Mark in Boogie Nights he’s really desperate to sort of not be alone… and I can sort of see this arc from him to Adam in Punch Drunk Love now Joaquin in this – these are guys who haven’t figured out how to deal with this. These other guys – Adam and Mark – can be social, but Joaquin in this movie – I kind of feel the way I felt about the way that Paul Schrader’s Travis Bickle – this guy who’s alone, come back from the war, who’s had this regimented life who was probably his happiest when he was told where to be every hour of the day, told how to socialize. All these things are now gone…
PTA: I got a really nice email the other day… she sent me this really nice note and she said “I was so happy that your movie had a happy ending - a happy ending where Freddie ended up where he belonged – naked and being an animal fucking someone else.” I don’t know what will happen with him or how it will go for him but it’s nice to see him in his element completely naked and fucking.
ELVIS MITCHELL: There’s a piece of literature, this book, that he uses as the canonical foundation – is there something like that for The Master?
PTA: Just lots of Dianetics stuff… there’s a great book called Pacific War Diary. You weren’t supposed to write on ships – and his name is James Fahey – he had the most detailed diary that he kept and stowed away and published 20 or so years ago. And it was the best way to try understand what it might be like on the ships day in and day out. That was really helpful – couldn’t get enough of that stuff. That’s kind of the main stuff in terms of the Freddie character. A lot of stuff from John Steinbeck’s biography – a lot of stuff from that – it’s not that Steinbeck was a lonely guy but I think he had periods in life – like college – that were kind of aimless and he kind of wanted to be Jack London but that didn’t really work out exactly right. And he worked on various farms and he worked at a department store… so that stuff was really helpful.
ELVIS MITCHELL: The movie has this interesting… the past and the present… where in the past you were supposed to know what to do with you with your life, and everybody Freddie has grown up with is kind of an adult – in some ways I wonder if he’s kind of imagining that they are more adult than they actually are because it is all from his point of view?
PTA: That’s good, yeah. That’s always true isn’t it? We always imagine that someone is more adult than you are. Somebody’s got it all figured out and you don’t. And they don’t. Yeah. I never thought of it that way, but yeah. Absolutely.
ELVIS MITCHELL: As soon as you see them not from his point of view, you can see that Phil basically doesn’t know what to do with himself. And his wife… is basically saying “This is who you are. This is what you are going to do God damnit.” It’s really amazing to see those people not from Freddie’s point of view to see that they aren’t who he thinks he is.
PTA: Right. No, you said it better than I can. It’s not something I thought of but there it is and I think that’s true. You always sort of peer around the corner and wonder if someone may have it all figured out. And maybe they do – I don’t know. I’ll always be thinking that somebody’s got it more figured out than I do, for sure. Then you go over to their house and it smells kind of like cat piss… “I knew they were weird!”
ELVIS MITCHELL: When he was in that race sequence – when all those women were naked – that’s one of the greatest things you have ever done – just to get in his head that way. And if you were to look at him that would be last thing you would have thought was on his mind.
PTA: What I like most about that night was I thought here is a person who can seemingly drink anybody under the table – drink anything and still be standing – and here he is crumpled into the corner. This is somebody who has absolutely met his match – at a point that he’s sinking and passed out – this guy’s just getting started. That’s my favorite part about that. It’s not the women and all that – it’s he’s still going and he can out-party Freddie.
ELVIS MITCHELL: … That biography of Steinbeck
PTA: Yeah, but it’s also kind of a John Ford thing to have someone to stop and start singing and dancing in a movie – it was like every John Ford movie. I can’t remember what director it was – it might have been Frank Capra or someone saying something about Ford – and he said “Oh… Ford. When he doesn’t know what to do he just casts really shadows and has people start singing and dancing.” And now that I said this to you you’re never going to see a John Ford movie without thinking “There’s the shadows and the singing”
ELVIS MITCHELL: And there’s a fight.
PTA: Preferably all at the same time – with long shadows.
ELVIS MITCHELL: … It’s like an Irish Wake, those sequences. They sing and they dance and they fight and they pass out and they apologize.
PTA: Yeah – The Master singing and dancing stuff comes from having a character who is the life of the party. Somebody who is not going to be happy unless everything is just jam-packed and full – you know, people like that.
AFTER THE MASTER SCENES FIRST TRY
ELVIS MITCHELL: So I was talking backstage when I had Bill Hader on my show and he was talking about seeing a different version that had scenes in different order… when was that? I guess March or April you showed it to him. And what incarnation was that?
PTA: I don’t even remember honestly. I have no idea except that there were lots of different playing around with what’s it gonna be…
ELVIS MITCHELL: Was there more of the kind of dream stuff?
PTA: No, no. If anything there was a lot of talk of what doesn’t need to be in the movie – that was always the discussion. Having screenings where we were just eliminating stuff and seeing if we could do without it. Trying it without the naked girls dancing – trying it without Amy jerking him off. The comfort of an editing room should be about seeing what film you’re making. And seeing what you can do without. It’s not any fun to go in there knowing what your meant – and go do it. That would be dull. It’s kind of fun to mess around with the film and see what you want to do. Whatever he saw was probably just some incarnation along the path of making the film.
ELVIS MITCHELL: Tell me about shooting in 70 – to go from… that box, that one three three of documentaries to that size frame.
PTA: Well we tried to keep the frame smaller than normal on 70 mil which is meant to be two to one, so we boxed it in so we made it 1.85 which is a little bit more headroom and less width. And that idea was this kind of stuff – Let There Be Light and films of that period – somehow it felt a little more intimate. And I knew we were making a movie that was not a lot of wide open spaces but closed rooms... and it seemed to fit. More than any real justification, it works, that seems right, let’s do it that way. And that goes for shooting in 70mm too. I had half-baked ideas on how to make the film and what format to shoot it in and they were all just that – half-baked ideas. We started shooting in Panavision and we would see something that’s not right – and we would see something and be like “That’s good. That’s what we should do.” And with those cameras that’s what it turned out to be.
ELVIS MITCHELL: Do you like 70? Because there is just a power in the frame you just don’t get…
PTA: It’s true. I love it – it was great. Hopefully people will use it more often, and hopefully more theaters will continue to bring back or at least save their projectors. Yeah, it would be great to have them around. It doesn’t seem to me – I know these bigger projectors the size of them – you don’t have to throw a movie projector away in the garbage to make room for a digital projector, you can keep them both. It’s like making room for a lawn chair – there’s enough room up there for everything.
ELVIS MITCHELL: LACMA’s definitely not going to throw out our projectors… but what I like about this is I was expecting a classic 70mm frame and it wasn’t that. It’s kind of like you reconceived it, that’s kind of what you’re saying. It’s kind of one degree but it’s not - it’s a lot taller.
PTA: Yeah we thought we were real clever “Oh my God we’re the first people to ever do this.” And then we realized that Jacques Tati had done it, a film I saw. So anytime you think…
ELVIS MITCHELL: He did it to get those long boulevards; you did it for a very different thing…
PTA: Yeah but that’s the same reason – because we needed to do it and it seemed right. That’s the same reason.
ELVIS MITCHELL: For some reason 70mm seems to be the perfect frame size to film some wrong…
PTA: Is that a compliment? It’s true. You know what, that should be like a poster. They would have done that in the old days.
ELVIS MITCHELL: Actors will service… sort of the size of the… in terms of what they throw off… you needed a kind of frame like that…
PTA: It’s so funny I was just, I tried to walk around the movie… beforehand and there’s a great still of Charles Laughton in Spartacus… Phil doesn’t really know Charles Laughton’s stuff very well – he just doesn’t – but they remind me of each other. And they are kind of – not only in their haminess which can be so great – but don’t think that’s just what they do, they can do everything. That kind of skill in a movie, as an actor, as everything – and just absolutely watchable. And talking about needing 70mm to film this… I think Charles Laughton… feel that way. Some actors are like that. I think some actors just – you wouldn’t think Phil Hoffman would be a great person to fill a movie screen, but to me he is.
ELVIS MITCHELL: This is exactly it. I think I saw the movie a month after I saw him doing Death of a Salesman – and I thought “Yeah, that’s what this is.” There’s that size and it was also about the way he uses his voice – and again the character he’s playing is someone who is completely confident in his voice and you often casts people… lowest speak… I think of Tom Cruise… even, to some extent Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights, these guys know exactly what to do with their voice every time they speak. You really love guys like that, don’t you?
PTA: Yeah, for sure, they’re easy to write. Once you get them to talk like that you have to stop yourself from writing that kind of stuff. The way that Phil talks in this movie is so aristocratic, and I don’t know what it is…
ELVIS MITCHELL: Well it’s a fake aristocrat… he gets pleasure from… like Freddie who doesn’t know the difference I mean you might as well talk like the King of England… it’s really wonderful watching that exchange. The way these guys… they measure their power by the way people react to the way they speak…
PTA: Well, my dad used to talk like that. My dad had a great voice – he would just talk like a normal guy and the minute you fucked up his register would completely change and everything. Everything would get a little bit fucking deeper…
ELVIS MITCHELL: Just like his stage voice basically…
PTA: Yeah, he had a deep voice to begin with, but no. He would go to bed he didn’t say “Two eggs hashbrowns and toast.”
