How Paul Thomas Anderson Anchors His Cinema In His Actors
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Anderson is a generational screenwriter-director, and one of the best aesthetes of all time. However, it's his ability to tune with actors of all kinds that separates him from the rest. |
 | Swaroop Kodur | |
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON is in conversation with Sean Hayes, Jason Bateman and Will Arnett of the SmartLess podcast, when Bateman puts forth this question to his guest: “(Quentin) Tarantino says that any great filmmaker has only 10 films in them. You have made nine (this was during the release of Licorice Pizza in 2021), tell me that’s not true…”. Anderson, a long-time friend of Quentin Tarantino and a spiritual partner in the subliminal battle for (a kind of) purism in filmmaking and against the idea of letting TV or the remote control take over storytelling, would have normally chosen to mull over the topic and offer his usual level-headed response that is a blend of courtesy and indifference. Listen to any PTA (Paul Thomas Anderson) conversation anywhere, the guy comes off as an aloof, urban hippie-type who never allows himself to be forced into an opinion or answer. “Ummmhmmm…”: that’s the trademark beginning to any of his responses, and he either jumps right into the answer after that or manages to plead out politely to save feelings. But when it came to Tarantino’s now-incessant harp about film directors being good only for ten occasions, the One Battle After Another maker chose to go to war right away. “Oh, that’s horse sh*t,” are the first words to come out of his mouth in reaction. Your pop culture fix awaits on OTTplay, for only Rs 149 per month. Grab this limited-time offer now! PTA: I don’t know what he (Tarantino) is on about... Bateman: Are you gonna do it like Clint Eastwood? Until they cart you off… A long pause, a long breath Bateman: Yes (on Anderson’s behalf) Hayes: What else are you going to do? PTA: I think, yeah… what else are you going to do? Now, Anderson’s bafflement-quip-rebuttal to his fellow-Los Angeles pal could be seen as reassuring to filmmakers across America, even globally. Tarantino’s stance on many things stems from an insane amount of love for cinema, but you’ll also find in there a kind of relatable snobbery of a cinephile, as well as a sense of luxury of getting to make films on his very precise terms: be it the desire to shoot on film and nothing else, or taking many years at a stretch to put a movie together. So, PTA’s dismissal of that ten-movies-and-then-you-are-crap tenet kindles the urge amongst everyone to simply make films, and let legacy form itself at its own will. |
It is this casual disposition of Paul Thomas Anderson that separates him from all other big-league filmmakers in business today. Anderson has, indeed, made 10 feature films (along with an untitled play, a few documentaries and short films, and 25 music videos) over the last 29 years, and it is glaringly apparent that each film is distinctively different from the previous one, making him a most unpredictable mind. So much so that it might be just as fun to just skim through his filmography as it’d be to savour each piece at leisure, because no individual theme or style could ever be pinned to him. And that is a mighty rare achievement for a filmmaker who has wholeheartedly worked within the motion-picture-studio framework his entire career, and has (seemingly) not compromised on how he operates either. True, he makes these self-serious films — There Will Be Blood (2006), The Master (2012) and Phantom Thread (2017) — that have caused actors to go method for months and years together and critics to caress themselves over analysing their motifs and perspectives. He has also shot each of his features on film under autonomous conditions, and is highly likely to continue doing that for as long as he can. And he does take a bit too long in between projects for his fans’ liking. But, you see, most auteurs in Hollywood — Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, etc., included — work of their own accord and bill their films as they best deem, and yet, PTA has somehow created a lane for himself where only he lurks. He is rigid like the best ones out there, but that stickler attitude towards his craft feels softened by an iconoclastic world-view. His love for a time-gone-by could seem defensive and also tiresome at times, but his irreverence for conventional narrative constructs is supremely refreshing. A Christopher Nolan-like traditionalist in him is countered by the lyrical minimalism of, let's say, a Gus Van Sant. The weightiness of his stories, a la Martin Scorsese, is often mitigated by a silliness almost evocative of a Leslie Nielsen or a Ron Burgundy (Anderson apparently wanted to produce the first Anchorman [2003] film). He could muster up the sensibilities of David Lean and Robert Downey Sr in the same film, add a bit of Hitchcock in there for some headiness, and finish it off with the off-handedness of Alex Cox or Robert Altman. PTA’s lane is where anything could trundle into being without feeling out of place, without having to justify itself: perhaps that is why his unauthorised list of favourite films merrily contains I am Cuba (1964), Jaws (1975) and Girls Trip (2017) at once. |
Still, that doesn’t fully answer what makes him such an exciting filmmaker. The secret to PTA’s vibrancy doesn’t potentially lie in how he is spurred by other filmmakers, but more in how he pivots any subject matter towards that very lane of his. It’s a subversive act, embedded in movie magic nevertheless, and his biggest asset isn’t being an aesthete alone, but more so the ability to work with actors of all possible kinds, and tune himself to their strengths. Take, for instance, Punch-Drunk Love, the 2002 film that showed the world, for the very first time, that Adam Sandler has got so much more in him than what the goofballs he had played on screen revealed. Sandler’s reach as an actor, up till that point, was defined by his Saturday Night Live stint and box-office breakouts like Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996), The Wedding Singer (1998) and Big Daddy (1999). These roles, and the actor’s own real-life slacker persona — packaged in oversized t-shirts, shorts and sneakers — elicited an image of foolery to the audience, but Paul Thomas Anderson saw through it all. He talks of watching an SNL comedy sketch featuring the actor on the same SmartLess episode, and acknowledges seeing a genuine kind of human complexity in Sandler that no one had yet tapped. "He's so invested in it (speaking of Sandler's performance in the sketch) that the whites of his eyes turned black. There was a level of anger and commitment to this performance (that) I said, 'that is something else, he is potentially psychotic underneath all of that.' And I loved it," he said on the podcast. PTA defines Punch-Drunk Love as a story about love and finding one’s tune, wherein an awkward, submissive and lonely guy encounters a confident and charming woman and falls in love with her. But Adam Sandler’s casting wasn’t the only left-field move that he made, because he signed on the amazing Emily Watson in the role of the said woman. Watson, a British actor, had stepped into cinema as a trained theatre actor only a few years prior, and was from a different school of thought than Sandler’s in every possible way. PTA’s casting detour, though, crackles with imagination for the two actors make an incredibly handsome and memorable movie couple. |
Another of his enduring couples on celluloid would be Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza (2021). Haim was, and still is, a full-time musician, part of the eponymous pop band also comprising her two sisters, Este and Danielle, whereas Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) was making his acting debut without any prior acting experience to speak of. Their pairing, then, enunciates just how different PTA’s viewpoint is. Cooper Hoffman brings effortless naturalism to his Gary Valentine, a 15-year-old budding actor oozing charm and premature wisdom as he falls in love with a woman 10 years older than him (the story is set in the early 1970s). Alana Haim, in return, plays 25-year-old Alana Kane with a curious mix of emotional depth, empathy, abandon and naivete that becomes the perfect foil for Gary in the film, forging a romance that stands apart miles from the stale stuff we are used to seeing. Anderson’s whimsical (and, frankly, audacious) writing and direction are hugely responsible for the film’s magnetism, but his desire to work with two novices and use their pristine authenticity really becomes its fulcrum. Anderson's films stay anchored in his actors and the characters they embody, helping him suffuse his cinema with the playfulness he strives so hard for. It's a tenet he has quite obviously borrowed from one of his greatest influences, Jonathan Demme, a filmmaker who worked comfortably within the mainstream purview but always sought to bend the rulebook and never feel the same to the viewer or to himself. Demme is famed for casting musicians, fellow filmmakers and other assorted non-actors for parts of varying significance, and although he isn’t the only filmmaker to have done that (Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, Andrea Arnold, Harmony Korine, etc. do it just as elegantly) he still had found a way to keep it loose and understated (which the contemporary lot like Sean Baker, Safdie Brothers, among others, don't manage to). The intent there wasn't to dazzle us with the choice of his cameo, but to draw attention to even the peripherals of the story. "He cared about everybody," says PTA of Demme in a Rolling Stone interview, emphasising that The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Something Wild (1986) director allowed his people to be strong personalities, no matter how fleeting their presences were. |
A valid case in point, regarding PTA inheriting this ethos, is his collaboration with musician Joanna Newsom. One of his most memorable openings arrives in Inherent Vice (2014), where Newsom’s mesmeric voiceover gently ushers us into a static shot of a 1970s Californian evening, with the sea quietly caught between two houses. She plays Sortilège in the film, a hippie woman who sometimes serves as the spiritual aid to Joaquin Phoenix’s Larry "Doc" Sportello. Doc, a private detective, is pot-laden throughout the film, so it is on the off-chance that she is a figment of his imagination, and PTA uses her delicate and transcendent voice to just flirt with that line dividing reality and dreaming. Another fascinating reason behind the casting of Newsom, a very occasional actor, is that she shared the love for author Thomas Pynchon (the writer of the novel Inherent Vice) with PTA. Teyana Taylor’s combative presence as Perfidia Beverly Hills in One Battle After Another (2025) emanates from the singer-songwriter/actor’s own personal flair and spunk. The same film also features Chase Infiniti in the principal role of Willa Ferguson, and Anderson shares in multiple interviews that he waited until he found the right Willa to make the film he had held on to for nearly two decades (inspired by Pynchon’s Vineland). One Battle After Another is Infiniti’s feature debut, with her prior acting experience including nothing else apart from the Apple+ series Presumed Innocent (2023): the 25-year-old holds a degree in musical theatre and is the co-founder of a K-pop dance collective named Duple Dance Crew, aside from being a kickboxing instructor at one point. Two such unorthodox talents are entwined with Hollywood royalty like Leonardo DiCaprio, and one reckons that only Paul Thomas Anderson could dare something as offbeat as that for a high-stakes studio production, which is also the filmmaker’s most expensive project to date. The inclusion of Benicio Del Toro in the same cast, and the amount of influence the ever-groovy actor eventually had on the narrative of One Battle After Another, too, is nothing short of a flash of genius. The story goes that PTA and DiCaprio opted to pause the film’s production until Del Toro got free from other commitments (supposedly he was working on Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme (2025)) because the duo felt that they saw nobody else playing the role of ‘Sensei’ Sergio St. Carlos, the man who transcends from being Willa’s humble karate instructor to Bob Ferguson’s (DiCaprio’s character) road-buddy and saviour. It was Del Toro, shares DiCaprio himself, who came on board and immediately took the film's story in a new direction. One Battle After Another also features a wide selection of non-professional actors who bring in the lived-in quality of their actual jobs, elevating the film’s medley of styles to a new level. ALSO READ | One Battle After Another Is A Mic-Drop Moment By Paul Thomas Anderson |
Tom Cruise says he did something very similar, steering his slick and vulgar Frank T. J. Mackey in Magnolia in a different direction than the original. Mackey is a self-help guru who runs a hyper-masculine, sleazy movement called 'Seduce and Destroy' that preaches sexual dominance and confidence through seminars, and Cruise shared recently that he remodelled the character himself from Anderson's script. The long monologues that Mackey spews, his uncanny look, and his overall swagger — they all have potentially bloomed with inputs from the Mission Impossible star. PTA is regarded as one of those few directors who is able to attract talent of any stature to collaborate with, without ever allowing box office to become his artistic compass; on the contrary, One Battle After Another is his only film to date to have grossed more than $100 million. Actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix might be part of the top-drawer today as far as movie stars go, but they were all on Anderson’s radar well before fame caught up with them. DiCaprio was originally meant to play Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights (1997) but he let go of that role for Titanic (1997), while Phoenix was apparently reluctant to play a porn star so early into his career — it is, indeed, interesting to note that Phoenix would most likely pounce at a role like that today, when he is the cream of the crop. But those opt-outs allowed Wahlberg, and PTA himself, to weave a different kind of charm that brought the actor’s pronounced intensity and street-style realism to be complemented by Burt Reynolds’ mythic, butch-movie-star presence. Add to this the ensemble including Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, and others, and you get a world of the 1970s/’80s porno biz in all its glittering glamour and grotesque absurdity. In the same vein, his casting method doesn’t seem to be employed to simply draw attention to its disruptive nature. His decision to work with an actor like Daniel Day-Lewis feels as practical as it is synergistic, and that twin reason is vital to the kinds of films they have made together. Anderson’s tryst with the period film is an interesting one, to begin with. He rarely looks to explore history as an entity when he travels back in time, but rather uses it as a cultural source to borrow quirks and a sense of abandon. The ‘period’ nature of his films is incidental, and never academic. This way, he allows himself the chance to tell stories the way he trusts himself to, without any glaring agenda or the necessity to sugarcoat anything: the central romance in Licorice Pizza, for instance, which would have had everyone up in arms had it been set today instead of the early 1970s. |
More importantly, it is the character that remains in focus for Anderson, who uses Day-Lewis’s feverish commitment to plumb the depths of human behaviour, and not to highlight aesthetics and fact. There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread are less about the Californian oil fever of the early 20th century and the world of haute couture in post-World War II London, and a lot more about lonely visionaries and the curse of ambition. Anderson knows that it takes highly disciplined and immersive actors to bring to life such men and women who are morally questionable, even detestable, but also enigmatic in ways that the moving images become almost beholden to them. This category of his cinema is austere at first glance, but Anderson finds farce and an original expression of beauty together, be it through Vicky Krieps’ gothic grace in Phantom Thread, or Paul Dano’s unwavering devotion to not laugh at Plainview's milkshake breakdown. |
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