Ahead of One Battle After Another, Simon Thompson takes a deep dive into the rise of filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson…
Paul Thomas Anderson is a filmmaker with a career that feels like a study in irony. He’s an arthouse filmmaker, but possesses Hollywood insider status, seemingly able to tell his stories even in the most risk averse era in the history of American cinema. His films are often about outcasts, structured around ambiguous narratives, meditate upon struggles with loneliness, and are shot and constructed with Kubrickian levels of deliberation, yet he’s a director who has cultivated a surprisingly outsized following given the nature of his work. In short he’s a living legend and we are lucky to have him still making movies with the same level of passion and craftmanship that he has had since bursting onto the scene in the mid 1990s.
Paul Thomas Anderson was born in California in 1970, the son of Edwina Anderson, a housewife, and Ernie Anderson, an actor. Ernie Anderson’s career as both the host of a horror show named Shock Theatre and as an announcer on ABC triggered Paul’s early fascination with filmmaking and entertainment. While Anderson had a difficult relationship with his mother because he wanted to pursue an artistic career, Ernie was more than encouraging of his son’s ambitions.
Anderson began to experiment with directing from the age of 8 but the turning point in his budding career came in 1982 at the age of 12, when his father bought a Betamax Camera, a relatively new piece of technology at the time. Hopping between 8mm, 16 mm, and video during his teenage years, Anderson made his first serious production as a senior in High School (financed via a part time job in a pet shop), a half an hour Spinal Tap style mockumentary about a porn star named Dirk Diggler, inspired by the real life and career of a porn actor named John Holmes. Little did Anderson know that he would be returning to the same subject and character just nine years later.
Deciding to learn his craft at film school, Anderson opted to stay close to home by choosing Santa Monica College. However, Anderson found film school to be creatively stifling and dull, lamenting the teaching methods at Santa Monica for turning filmmaking into “ homework or a chore” completely sapping his enjoyment of the artistic process. For the next few years of the early 1990s, Anderson bounced around. First he attended Emerson for two terms as an English student being taught by David Foster Wallace, and spending a brief 48 hours in New York, before learning the ropes of his chosen career as a production assistant, splitting his time between Los Angeles and New York working on tv, music videos, feature films, and game shows.
Inspired by the likes of Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Mann, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, David Mamet, Mike Leigh, and Martin Scorsese, Anderson set off on making a 20 minute short film entitled Cigarettes and Coffee in 1993. Financed by a combination of money won via gambling, his girlfriend at the time’s credit card, and money that his father had saved for him to go to college, Cigarettes and Coffee tells the story of a group of complete strangers whose lives are all connected through a $20 bill.
The production was a guerrilla effort with an inexperienced crew, but Anderson’s single mindedness drove the project to be completed in a few short weeks. Through his friend Shane Conrad, who worked for Panavision, Anderson was able to hire a camera and a dolly, as well as being able to attach Miguel Ferrer in a starring role.
Cigarettes and Coffee is an important chapter in Anderson’s career for two reasons. The first is that it represented early signs of Anderson’s stylistic traits such as long takes, an expansive/ interconnected cast of characters, the exploration of loneliness, regret, societal alienation, use of dark humour, and the idea of fate and destiny. The second is that it was his first collaboration with consummate character actor Phillip Baker Hall, whom Anderson had first met as a production assistant.
Having completed Cigarettes and Coffee, Anderson immediately entered it into the short film circuit, where it quickly attracted both a word of mouth following, and showed industry bigwigs that Anderson was a talent to look out for. The buzz around the short reached fever pitch after it was submitted to the Sundance Festival Shorts programme, and the organisers were so impressed that Anderson was invited to the festival’s feature division a year later.
He was mentored by veteran Scottish director Michael Caton Jones, who described him as having; “talent and a fully formed creative voice, but not much hands-on experience” and imparted his knowledge and skill to the young director during the process of developing his short into his first feature. With Sundance adulation in his back pocket, Anderson quickly formed a deal with Rysher Entertainment, a subsidiary studio of corporate titan Viacom, to direct his debut, Sydney, a hardboiled noirish crime drama.
The plot of the film tells the story of John (John C. Reilly) a young, broke, hapless gambler living in Nevada. John, through a chance meeting comes across Sydney (Phillip Baker Hall) a mysterious but successful gambler, who takes John under his wing and teaches him the nuances of professional gambling. Things begin to become complicated however when John both befriends a small time criminal named Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) and falls in love with Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a beautiful cocktail waitress and a part time prostitute. John and Clementine suddenly find themselves in a situation that is way above their heads, and fully pushes Sydney to his limits.
Filmed on a budget of $3 million, a dispute arose between Anderson and Rysher due to the studio re-editing the film without his consent, and because of this Anderson re-titled the movie from Sydney to Hard Eight (after a line spoken by Samuel L. Jackson’s character) raising $200,000, with the help of the cast, to complete Hard Eight on his own terms.
Released onto the festival circuit, Hard Eight premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 1996, where it quickly began to attract attention as Cigarettes and Coffee had done three years earlier. Hard Eight garnered rave reviews from critics such as Roger Ebert who praised it for “[reminding him] of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us.”
A masterpiece of economical storytelling, featuring a cast of misfit characters who, while not being entirely likeable, are still very easy to empathise with, as well as featuring outstanding performances from its talented cast, that since its release in 1996 have all become household names, in retrospect Hard Eight is a key work in the 1980s-1990s golden age of American independent cinema. At the age of just 26, and only a half decade removed from being a film school dropout, Anderson was now being touted as a Robert Altman for the 90s.
During the final phase of the production of Hard Eight, Anderson completed a script with which he intended to follow Hard Eight, titled Boogie Nights. The script was a revisit of his early mockumentary short The Dirk Diggler Story that he had directed in high school, but now he’d have a feature length runtime, the backing of a major studio in the shape of New Line Cinema, and $15,000,000 to play with.
Set in the late 1970s-early 1980s, Boogie Nights follows Eddie (Mark Wahlberg) a teenage nightclub dishwasher living in the San Fernando Valley. One night while working, Eddie has a fortuitous meeting with porn mogul Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) who believes Eddie both has what it takes to become a successful porn star, and will also help him realise his dream of making truly artistic pornography. From there on Eddie finds himself in the world of Jack Horner, becoming a part of his close knit family of fellow porn stars with Horner as a kind of strange father figure to them all, experiencing an Icarus like rise and fall.
Stylistically Boogie Nights is a combination of the narrative structure, stylised cinematography and rapid music video style cutting of Goodfellas, a balance between drama and dark comedy a la Nashville and Pulp Fiction, and the integration of music into the narrative/chronicling of a rapidly changing industry being inspired by Anderson’s love of Singin’ in the Rain.
The casting process for Boogie Nights began instantly after the completion of Hard Eight, with Anderson searching for a young star to portray the story’s protagonist Eddie Adams, aka Dirk Diggler. At first Anderson wanted Leonardo DiCaprio, who was then fresh from the success of The Basketball Diaries and was steadily growing a reputation as Hollywood’s most in demand young leading man, to play Eddie. DiCaprio, however, had painfully to turn the script down despite his enjoyment of it, due to signing up for James Cameron’s Titanic.
Shortly afterwards Anderson met Joaquin Phoenix to convince him to take the part, but failed to assuage Phoenix’s concerns over the script’s material and playing a porn star. The failed DiCaprio bid would have a silver lining, however, as Anderson decided to meet Mark Wahlberg, DiCaprio’s Basketball Diaries co-star, whom DiCaprio had personally recommended for the part. Casting Wahlberg at this point was something of a risk due to the fact that he had done little acting work and was primarily known for being a mediocre white rapper and modelling. But Anderson, seeing he had the right mannerisms and appropriate charisma for the part realised that it was well worth the risk.
For the role of the film’s deuteragonist, artistically ambitious porn director Jack Horner, Anderson consulted the likes of Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Sydney Pollack, Warren Beatty, and Albert Brooks but to no avail. In another piece of risky casting, Anderson decided that Burt Reynolds would be perfect for the role. At this point in his career, Reynolds was seen as being a faded star, his 1970s popularity and top of the marquee status having passed him by, and he was now reduced to taking supporting parts in not particularly distinguished projects for money.
With Wahlberg and Reynolds on board, Anderson got to work on assembling the supporting cast, bringing in a crop of upcoming acting talent including Don Cheadle, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, and Thomas Jane in the various supporting parts.
Production on Boogie Nights would be far from smooth sailing. First, after his terrible experience with Rysher Entertainment, Anderson fought tooth and nail with New Line, demanding both that the finished film be three hours long and rated NC-17 (an MPAA rating harder than R, as an R rating stills allows someone under the age of 17 to see a film with a parent or guardian present). In Anderson’s eyes, the film had little to no mainstream appeal to begin with, so such a restrictive certification didn’t matter at all.
But New Line wouldn’t give an inch – so Anderson decided to take their demand to aim for an R rating as a challenge. Once Anderson reached a compromise with the studio, tensions flared up again due to Anderson’s contentious relationship with Burt Reynolds on set.
Plainly speaking, the pair got on each other’s nerves. Reynolds resented Anderson’s youth, saying in his autobiography years later “ that he wasn’t crazy about being directed by someone younger than some sandwiches I’ve had”, as well as the director’s enthusiasm for film history, feeling patronised by Anderson’s tendency to bring up various film history facts and shooting techniques to someone who was a good three decades their senior.
According to various rumours Reynolds was confused by the movie’s tone on set more than anything else, thinking that his agent had signed up for a career killer, leading to him fighting with both Anderson and members of the cast as a result. Boogie Nights was released in October 1997, to rave reviews and fantastic box office, grossing $43 million from a $15 million budget.
Film critic Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised both Anderson’s ability to hold the audience’s interest despite the film’s two and a half hour length, as well as Reynolds’s performance, calling it “his best and most suavely funny performance in many years” as well as ascribing the same level of praise to Wahlberg. Mick Lasalle, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle complimented Anderson’s ability to recapture the 1970s both tonally and visually and Roger Ebert singled it out for its expansive narrative, intelligent character study, and breakneck pace, commenting that; “Boogie Nights has the quality of many great films, in that it always seems alive.”
If Hard Eight was Anderson’s tentative first step into prominence, then Boogie Nights was a Usain Bolt style forward gallop into mainstream recognition. At the age of only 27, Anderson was now an academy award nominee (sadly losing the best original screenplay award to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for Good Will Hunting) and a best new filmmaker winner from Boston Society of Critics’ Awards. Now, having reached rockstar like status, the new PTA movie was steadily becoming an event that film buffs would circle in their diaries.
During the tedious post production process of Boogie Nights, Anderson started to come up with ideas to distract himself from the monotony of editing. Steadfastly writing all of them down, he began to compile them into a script format attempting to find a specific structure to them. Thanks to the success of Boogie Nights, Anderson was given a blank cheque by New Line to make a movie about anything that he wanted with a guaranteed right of final cut.
For his once in a lifetime blank cheque which Anderson titled Magnolia, he originally envisioned a small scale drama that could easily be shot in 30 days. As he started work on the script however, his vision began to expand into a large scale story involving an extensive and connected ensemble cast of characters to create an epic cinematic mosaic – in his words the “all-time great San Fernando Valley movie”.
The writing of Magnolia was Anderson’s most experimental to date, as he started with lists of words, specific images, actors, and music, to jumpstart ideas. He realised he wanted regular collaborators Phillip Baker Hall and Melora Waters involved due to a recurring mental image of them playing a father and his estranged daughter, and through his research into magnolia trees came across the perfect title. Memories of his time as an assistant on a TV game show named Quiz Kid Challenge also came flooding back, which he incorporated into the script’s plot.
Anderson drew inspiration from two musical sources for the movie’s plot structure. The first was The Beatles track A Day In The Life with the rhythm structure ” [of building] up, note by note, then [dropping or receding], then [building] again” being something that Anderson sought to emulate. It was the music of singer/songwriter Aimee Mann, a personal friend of Anderson’s, that truly underpins the entire film, with the song Deathly spurring him to create the character of Claudia Gator and the use of Mann’s music in general forming the connecting tissue between the various character arcs.
When it came to the casting Anderson hired his regular collaborators such as Phillip Baker Hall, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, and John C. Reilly all for leading parts, but thanks to his newly found clout due to Boogie Nights, he was able to secure Tom Cruise – then at the absolute apex of his movie star prime. Cruise was a huge fan of Boogie Nights and personally contacted Anderson about a leading part in whatever he was making next during the early days of Magnolia.
Cruise was nervous about taking on the part of Frank TJ Mackey, an outwardly confident pick up artist selling seminars on his technique to gullible audiences, but secretly an internally traumatised damaged husk of a man. Both Anderson and producer Michael DiLuca successfully convinced Cruise to work outside his comfort zone, presumably selling the star Magnolia as a chance to showcase his acting range.
Set in the then present day San Fernando Valley, Magnolia chronicles the lives of a group of individuals, chiefly Donnie, a washed up child game show star (William H. Macy), Jim, a likeable yet naïve cop (John C. Reilly), Jimmy, a game show host with a dark secret (Philip Baker Hall), Linda, a depressed trophy wife (Juliane Moore), Jimmy’s estranged drug addict daughter Claudia (Melora Walters), Stanley, a child prodigy (Jeremy Blackman), Phil, a male nurse ( Philip Seymour Hoffman), and Frank (Tom Cruise) a sleazy proto Andrew Tate who spreads his ideas about women and relationships through a series of elaborate seminars.
Each of these characters are connected through the presence of a rich, yet elderly and terminally ill man named Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), a successful TV producer behind a hit game show. Carefully over the course of three hours, Anderson weaves a complex spider’s web of a story with each strand meticulously tied into the last.
In contrast to the poppy, exuberant style of Boogie Nights, Magnolia is a masterclass of slow, deliberate, Kubrickian adult filmmaking. Anderson uses roving long takes, close ups, and very few cuts, so that the audience has the illusion of an intimate connection into these character’s lives. Anderson wanted the film to have a tight and warm colour palette, as shown by its extensive use of greens, browns, and various shades of white, going as far as shooting a sequence of the movie that’s set in 1911 with a period accurate Pathe handheld camera to boot.
After wrapping Magnolia, tempers flared up once again between Anderson and New Line over the direction of the film’s marketing. Anderson specifically wanted any campaign to avoid placing Cruise’s involvement over the rest of the ensemble cast, despised the trailer and poster New Line put out, to the extent that he designed a new one and cut a trailer of his own. Although the studio would accept his demands, after a period of reflection Anderson came to a realisation that he was being unreasonable.
Released in late 1999 in limited cinemas and then given a wider release in January 2000, Magnolia received a far more muted reception at the box office than Boogie Nights, more than likely due to its more abstract plotting, sombre tone, and extensive length, grossing $48,000,000 total from a $37,000,000 budget.
Critical reception was a lot more divided than it had been for Boogie Nights also. Janet Maslin who had praised Anderson’s previous film absolutely savaged Magnolia in her review for The New York Times, as did Observer film critic Philip French, finding Anderson’s attempt to create a modern Greek tragedy unconvincing, calling the characters “stunted and pathetic.” Luckily for Anderson, the critics that loved Magnolia far outnumbered the ones that didn’t and they were more than vocal in their praise. USA Today gave it three stars out of an available four, calling it one of the best movies of 1999, Roger Ebert called Magnolia “ operatic ecstasy” and rated it both 4 out of 4 and as his 2nd favourite film of 1999, just behind Being John Malkovich.
For Anderson, though, the cherry on top had to be receiving praise from none other than Swedish filmmaking genius Ingmar Bergman, who cited Magnolia as an example of the strength of American filmmaking. Over time Magnolia has come to be rightfully designated as a masterpiece. It’s a film of both scale and great intimacy, and without going too far into spoiler territory, a masterful mix of the mundane and the surreal – a virtuoso filmmaking display which showed that Paul Thomas Anderson was far from being a flash in the pan.
Anderson’s follow up to Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love (2002), represented a return to the small scale style of storytelling he had shown in his debut Hard Eight six years previously. An absurdist comedy romantic drama, Punch Drunk Love is both excruciatingly painful to watch, yet carries a disarmingly sweet tone surrounding its misfit protagonist, in line with Anderson’s previous work.
In a casting move that shocked many fans of Anderson at the time, the director decided to cast gross-out comedy kingpin Adam Sandler in the lead, writing the character of Barry Egan with Sandler in mind. Given Sandler’s previous credentials, Anderson had to rigorously argue his case to producer JoAnne Seller Anderson that Sandler was the perfect choice as the lead.
The plot of Punch Drunk Love follows Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) a lonely, miserable, bored businessman balancing both an extensive dysfunctional family and the mundane nature of his job. Through one of his sisters Barry meets a beautiful woman named Lena (Emily Watson) who of course he is instantly smitten by. Their blooming relationship is threatened, however, by Barry’s impulsive nature which leads him to become the victim of an extortionist.
Taking cues from the works of Jacques Tati and Hollywood musicals such as The Band Wagon, Punch Drunk Love is a bold colourful kaleidoscope of a movie. The distinctive intertitles designed by Jeremy Blake serve to function as both Ozu like pillow shots and to give the movie a novelistic quality at the same time.
Punch Drunk Love showed Anderson’s humanistic qualities as a filmmaker, directing Adam Sandler and Emily Watson to acclaimed performances which saw the former begin to be taken seriously as an actor. Unfortunately Punch Drunk Love bombed at the box office, but since 2002 its reputation has grown to the extent that it’s been put on numerous decade’s best lists.
Although it was mainly critically acclaimed (largely for Sandler’s performance) rather than derided at the time, it’s a film that’s so tonally unconventional that, like There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Sly and the Family Stone, or Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Punch Drunk Love needed a good decade or so for the critical consensus to catch up with its various virtues and its balance of black comedy, sweet natured romance, and off kilter surrealism is a formula that has been adopted by numerous filmmakers who’ve been influenced by Anderson’s work.
Through the mid-2000s Anderson experienced a form of writer’s block, struggling to write a screenplay about a conflicted family. But salvation would arrive in the shape of food writer Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, who after reading the works of Upton Sinclair, purchased the film rights to his novel Oil! with the blessings of the Sinclair estate.
Schlosser immediately sought out Anderson to direct an adaptation of Sinclair’s satire of the oil industry, finding its themes to be as relevant in the 21st century as they had been in 1927. After his meeting with Schlosser, Anderson purchased a copy of Sinclair’s novel while staying in London, drawn to its striking front cover of a Californian oilfield.
Anderson quickly realised that the book had immense cinematic potential, and used the first 150 pages of the story as the basis for a screenplay, retitling it from Oil! to There Will Be Blood as he felt he hadn’t included enough of Sinclair’s writing (due to the story’s immense length) for it to be considered a proper adaptation. Anderson conscientiously researched the early oil industry, visiting an extensive number of museums in Bakersfield, California so that his narrative was as historically accurate as possible.
When it came to casting the protagonist Daniel Plainview, Anderson only seriously considered one actor to be fit for the role, Daniel Day-Lewis. Given Day-Lewis’s selectiveness when it comes to parts, Anderson was relieved to find out that the actor was a huge fan of Punch Drunk Love and although the director had sent him an unfinished script, Day-Lewis was so enamoured by what he had read that he took the part, citing Anderson’s ability to balance epic scale with intimate character writing as his reason for agreeing.
For the part of the charlatan faith healing preacher Eli Sunday, Anderson chose young and upcoming actor Paul Dano, who had quickly entered his permanent indie darling status since his role in Little Miss Sunshine. Despite being a constant hindrance to Plainview’s ambitions, Eli has a moral compass and a duplicitous nature that perfectly reflects Plainview’s own.
It took Anderson two years to gain any financing for the movie, due to the various studios that he met mistakenly thinking that There Will Be Blood didn’t have the scope to be a major studio project. It would be Paramount that decided to take the risk of financing There Will Be Blood, providing Anderson with $25,000,000 that was seen as a risk by Hollywood insiders due to the commercial failure of Punch Drunk Love.
Spanning the 1890s-1920s, There Will Be Blood is centred around an unscrupulous silver miner named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) who, after discovering a sizeable portion of silver in a deep pit, breaks his leg. Having survived and crawled his way to freedom, Plainview takes his findings into an assay office receiving a silver and gold claim for his trouble.
Several years later, in another stroke of astounding luck, Plainview happens upon oil in California. After the death of one his co-workers in a tragic accident, Plainview adopts the man’s son H.W (Dillon Freasier) using him as a prop to convey a cuddly family friendly image, as he cons local landowners into selling their resource-rich properties for pennies compared to their real value. This puts him in the crosshairs of local preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who quickly realises Plainview’s true nature, sparking a long standing feud between the pair.
An epic meditation on the nature of greed and power in the vein of John Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood is some of Anderson’s most ambitious work to date. This is demonstrated by extensive long takes, an introduction sequence which contains no dialogue and only diegetic sound, and one of the greatest movie scenes of the last 25 years where Plainview and his crew try to put out a burning oil derrick in a sequence of sound and imagery comparable to Erich Von Stroheim or Fritz Lang.
There Will Be Blood was quickly recognised by the vast majority of critics, appearing on almost every best of the year list and being nominated for nine Oscars, winning two (Day-Lewis, for best actor, and a best cinematography award for Robert Elswit). Day-Lewis and Dano’s performances are both magnificent, portraying two scam artists whose hatred of one another boils down to them having more similarities than either individual would care to admit.
There Will Be Blood also marked the first of several collaborations with Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood, whose classical yet industrial score provides the perfect sonic backdrop to the story, to the extent that you can’t imagine There Will Be Blood without it. Since 2007, There Will Be Blood has only grown in popular and critical estimation and in 2016 was voted the third greatest film of the 21st century so far, finishing behind In The Mood For Love and Mulholland Drive.
Although only 37 years old at this point, There Will Be Blood saw Anderson enshrined into elder statesman status within American filmmaking – a serious minded auteur in the same class as Kubrick and Terrence Malik. Since 2007 Anderson, like the Coen Brothers before him, has shown that he can create movies that reflect the two sides of his style.
Since There Will Be Blood, he has struck a balance between making movies in a similar vein, such as The Master (2012), a sweeping Juvenalian satire of both Scientology and cults in general ; an adaption of Thomas Pynchon’s (easily one of America’s greatest living novelists) Inherent Vice (2014), a sprawling stoner neo-noir crime comedy; Phantom Thread (2017) a stab at a romantic drama, a genre which Anderson hadn’t explored before that point; and Liquorice Pizza (2021), a coming of age comedy-drama in a similar tone to Boogie Nights.
This year Anderson’s latest work, One Battle After Another, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland and starring Leonardo DiCaprio is due to be released [watch the trailer here].
The subject of where One Battle After Another will stand in Anderson’s illustrious filmography is something that only time will tell, but in an industry built upon endless recycling and ripping off other ideas the fact that a bonafide auteur is still active and so passionate about filmmaking is a beautiful thing.
Simon Thompson
