Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks , livre ebook

Abrams , New York

CONTENTS
260

Jack Fisk

264

Mark Bridges

268

Vicky Krieps

INTERVIEWS

242

JoAnne Sellar

246

Dylan Tichenor

250

Robert Elswit

254

Jonny Greenwood

WORKS

26

Chapter 1

There Will Be Blood

54

Chapter 2

The Master

82

Chapter 3

Inherent Vice

104

Chapter 4

Boogie Nights

132

Chapter 5

Hard Eight

152

Chapter 6

Magnolia

180

Chapter 7

Punch-Drunk Love

206

Chapter 8

Phantom Thread

10

Foreword

Josh and Benny Safdie

14

Introduction

Adam Nayman

236

Junun and Selected

Music Videography

274

Afterword

Adam Nayman

276

Production Details

278

Acknowledgements

280

Design Details

282

Index

284

Bibliography

287

Image Credits
10

Foreword

Josh and Benny Safdie

I m really drunk . . . really, I am. I m out of my head. I m so

wasted-I m really wasted. . . . Really Dirk, I m really just

wasted. I m crazy right now. I m really crazy. You know?

Dirk rushes back inside-hoping to catch the clock strike

midnight as it marks the end of a year he owned-leaving

Scotty alone with his Dirk Diggler-wannabe car still sticky

from a crummy paint job. Scotty gets inside (I don t believe

he s half as drunk as he claims to be) and sobs to himself,

I m a fuckin idiot! . . I m a fuckin idiot . . . Fuckin idiot!

Fuckin idiot! Fuckin idiot! Fuckin idiot! The Watts 103rd

Street Rhythm Band kicks in and its cool laissez-faire vibe

represses your own loneliness deep down to a place you

know will come back to haunt you.

I was fourteen or so when I saw

Boogie Nights

for the first

time. It was our first film by Paul Thomas Anderson. Our

introduction to his work coincided with the beginning of a

life-long journey and obsession with Al Goldstein and his late-

night public-access show

Midnight Blue

(which a few years

later would host Anderson s subversive Frank T.J. Mackey s

900-number commercial).

Boogie Nights

is a movie that

wears its fascinations and obsessions on its sleeve. Suffice it

to say: There was a lot of overlap on the Venn diagram.

Don t know what it says about us, but as much as we relate

to Dirk s quest for real imported Italian leather, it was the

Scotty, the Rollergirl, the Buck Swope, or even the Kurt

Longjohn wanting to talk about lighting with Little Bill while

his wife has an ass in her cock that cut us deep. Anderson

fills his movies with peripheral

C

haracters that feel like the

center of their own films.

I remember being a young teen watching the Fuckin

idiot scene (as it would become dubbed) with Philip

Seymour Hoffman. I remember rewatching it . . . Rewinding

it . . . rewatching just that scene, trying to understand it.

Here we had a moment of cosmic humanity in the midst of a

film told in the "Hollywood-style". It was so lived-in. Bravura

filmmaking by a twenty-six-year-old.

When

Punch-Drunk Love

came out, I was eighteen. We had

grown up with Adam Sandler. In particular, we had grown

up with and obsessed over his first two comedy records. The

jewel cases were monuments. Then came his movies, which

were always perfect. As kids we loved comedies. Comedies

were the movies. The serious stuff that our dad showed

us to help us better understand life is simply that: Life.
11

They were not even called movies. They were the things that

weren t out to make us laugh, but to rescue answers from

the wholly ambiguous. These films moved us, but Sandler s

were our first religion: Absurdist tales about pulling through

in your own weird way despite everyone and everything

conspiring against you.

As we grew older, the type of movies that our dad

obsessed over eventually became part of our own personal

wanderings. Some of those films were by Paul Thomas

Anderson. Movies like

Boogie Nights

unlocked a gateway to a

trove of other films by filmmakers of the seventies like Robert

Altman . . .

Boogie Nights

was a manhole to our own sewers, a

passageway for ourselves away from the ones our dad forged.

Of course, we still watched Sandler films, but they started

to mean something else. They were, and will always remain,

pure to us. Remember our dad was the one who turned

us onto Sandler to begin with. So you could imagine the

inner psychic whirlpool when

Punch-Drunk Love

came out.

It was a Sandler film, but through this realist formalist

lens. Happy learned how to putt.

Of course, everyone points to the explosive rage in the

scene where Barry smashes those panes of glass, but it s

the first-date dinner scene that blew and continues to blow

our minds. It s the intricate yet loud micro-performing-

like the way Hoffman put his hand on Wahlberg s back

when he leans forward to check his ride, Sandler s

instinctual wrist flick when Lena brings up the hammer story

from his youth . . . or the leg bouncing while the manager

confronts him about destroying the bathroom . . . or the

bathroom destruction itself!

Sandler s rage and inner madness was being filtered through

Anderson s subtle microscope and, yes, it was still funny and

entertaining. But now it was also begging us to ask ourselves

about our own repressions. . . . It forced us to recall Sandler s

previous films through a new lens. The worlds were no longer

mutually exclusive . . . they could co-exist.

For that, we owe Anderson everything. . . .

For his documentary-style blocking. . . . For his deft, warm

allegories of impossible people. . . . For his repertoire of actors

shuffling around playing different characters from film to

film-like a big book of stories-like the films of Fassbinder,

Cassavetes, Altman, or Sandler. . . . For recording hundreds

of firecrackers hoping to find that one that CRACKS. . . .

For the performances zapped-alive in a composed frame

like controlled experiments. . . . For the formalism that feels

perfectly in tune with the subject matter. . . . For the realism

found in that formalism. . . . For the shared obsessions. . . . For

reflecting the psychic creative god-complex conundrum that

IS filmmaking in masterpieces like

Phantom Thread , There

Will Be Blood

and

The Master

. . . . For each and every event a

film of his becomes. . . .

. . . For being vanguard always.
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13
14

Introduction

Maybe he is the most demanding man, says Alma

(Vicky Krieps) in the opening scene of

Phantom Thread

(2017). The he in question is Reynolds Woodcock

(Daniel Day-Lewis), a celebrated designer of high-end

women s fashion, whose imprimatur is an aspirational

status symbol for those who can only dream of

affording it. Alma s introduction not only ensures

that Reynolds s reputation precedes him, it also cues

us to see the man s demandingness as his defining

trait. In tandem with the subsequent, fetishistically

detailed sequence depicting the great dressmaker s

daily ablutions-a straight razor shave, vigorous shoe

polishing, gangly legs sheathed in purple stockings-

the phrasing generates an expectation of gold-plated

standards, and that the film to follow will be a portrait

of the artist as an emissary of rigorous discipline.
15

THE MOST DEMANDING

It would do a disservice to the complexity of

Phantom Thread

to describe it as a film that begins and ends with Reynolds in the

bathroom-from primping to purging. But if there s one thing that this

most sardonically scatological of romantic comedies requires-one thing

that, like its self-monogramming (anti-)hero, it demands-it s an unclenched

perspective. For all its forbidding, foreboding atmosphere,

Phantom Thread

is a surpassingly funny movie, and the satisfaction of seeing a figure as

singularly fastidious as Reynolds come progressively unruffled has a

component of pure, ecstatic schadenfreude.

Few directors are as fascinated by the spectacle of carefully maintained

facades crumbling as Paul Thomas Anderson. Think of the alpha machismo

of Tom Cruise s Frank T.J. Mackey ebbing away during a calamitous night

in the San Fernando Valley in

Magnolia

(1999). Or of cult leader Lancaster

Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) inadvertently undercutting his own

grandiloquent psychobabble with an angry epithet in

The Master

(2012).

Or of Day-Lewis s tight-lipped oilman Daniel Plainview coming unglued

during a church service in

There Will Be Blood

(2007), crying out I ve

abandoned my child in abject, guilty humiliation, knee bent in resentful

deference towards a higher power. Breakdowns are Anderson s specialty;

in light of his fixation with physical and psychological deterioration, it s no

wonder he eventually made a film called

Inherent Vice

(2014).

Phantom Thread

imagines a scenario where the journey from hubris to

humiliation results not only in a leveling effect, but a kind of liberation as well.

As a piece of filmmaking, it is a tour-de-force of artistic control, matching

the formal assurance of his other films without relying on or succumbing

to their wild tonal and rhythmic shifts. Yet buried at the center of

Phantom
Thread

-or, to take up its script s various embroidery metaphors, stitched

into its lining-is an insistence on the necessity, for Reynolds as well as the

martinet-ish mindset he represents, of embracing helplessness and, with it,

release: Of recognizing that purity and Puritanism are not natural conditions.

The author of this revelation will turn out to be Alma, who is initially

willing to humor her husband s control-freak tendencies. I have given him

what he desires most, she says towards the end of the film s prologue:

Every piece of me. Her dreamy appraisal of her relationship with Reynolds

paints married life less as a blessed union than an ultimatum met, yet she

also insists on finessing the terms