The numbers are unavoidable. Paul Thomas Anderson has made seven feature films and he has made seven films set in California.
“It’s just there, isn’t it?” sighs Anderson. “If there was ever any kind of intention to have a wide variety of work, all of it’s gone out the window.”
Such a fate is ironic to the 44-year-old director, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley preferring Westerns that were shot in Arizona or Texas, as opposed to those (he could tell) in the soft rolling hills of California. “And there I am making ‘There Will Be Blood’ on these soft rolling hills in California,” he says. “In other words, there was zero master plan.”
Having already chronicled the Valley’s colorful pornography industry in “Boogie Nights” and dramatized the early days of Scientology in “The Master,” Anderson has yet again been lured back to his native state. “It’s cinematic, I suppose, and it’s dirty,” he says. “It’s got a long, sad history, but it’s also got a long, beautiful history.”
Anderson’s latest, “Inherent Vice,” is an absurdist romp about a stoned, hippie detective (Joaquin Phoenix) mumbling his way through the darkening haze of post-’60s Los Angeles, after the Manson murders. It’s the first big-screen adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel (the author’s third California-set book), so Anderson notes he’s really “piggybacking” on Pynchon’s obsessions.
If anything, Anderson considered avoiding “Inherent Vice,” since it would mean another California movie: “All these reasons not to do it, they don’t matter at a certain point and you just find yourself doing something that you can’t help,” he says.
In an interview earlier this fall shortly before “Inherent Vice” debuted at the New York Film Festival, Anderson — a little shaggy, like his protagonist, but a lot more lucid — exhibited serenity, if a little surprise, at the directions his curiosity pulls him. But he acknowledged the night before the film’s unveiling was sleepless, “like a bad montage.”
Pre-premiere nerves would be understandable: “Inherent Vice” is Anderson’s most audaciously out-on-a-limb film yet, which is saying something for a filmmaker who’s made it rain frogs (“Magnolia”) and concluded a movie with a brutally wielded bowling pin (“There Will Be Blood”). “Inherent Vice” is a looney “The Big Sleep,” a far-out detective story that embraces a helter-skelter, anything-goes farce. The slapstick of “Police Squad” was an influence.
“They make you feel like there’re no rules in a movie. If it’s going to work, it’s OK. It’s very encouraging to the mischievous side of making a film,” says Anderson. “When you read Pynchon’s work, he does make you feel that way, too. This is a book, but it can go anywhere, as long as it seems right and it’s from a genuine place. Go for it.”
Such improvising has regularly been Anderson’s way. Phoenix, who also starred as the drifting World War II veteran Freddie in “The Master,” says with Anderson there’s “genuine exploration.”
“He has the knowledge and the technical know-how to achieve anything. He can design a scene with a series of shots, but he doesn’t do that,” says Phoenix. “He likes to paint himself into a corner. He wants to think of something fresh and he wants it to be organic. You start working on something and you think it’s going one direction, and then he’ll just scrap an hour’s work and reset the shot to find it.”
Anderson began “There Will Be Blood” as an adaption of Upton Sinclair’s “Oil!” only to veer away, wildly. In “The Master,” he started with John Steinbeck’s memoirs, only to rope in L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics.” But “Inherent Vice” is Anderson’s first steadfast adaptation.
“Within his 400 pages, there’s so much freewheeling and so much material that you’re just holding on tight trying to collect the best material and apply it in the best way possible,” says Anderson. “It’s a little bit more like working in a crowded office where there’s piles of stuff and you just have to remember: Where’s that bit about Japonica?”
Particularly challenging was capturing Pynchon’s tone: antic but laced with menace. “Inherent Vice” is the landscape of a defeated ‘60s culture, “outgunned, outmanned and outmaneuvered,” Anderson says, by stronger forces. But wading through the novelist’s notoriously dense prose, Anderson often felt lost.
“And sometimes genuinely getting lost, like: I don’t understand what he’s talking about. I don’t know what he means,” Anderson says, chuckling. “I’ve never been there as a director. Sometimes you’re just like: I don’t really know what this means, man, but we should film it.”
“I was out to sea,” he says.
But out to sea is exactly where Anderson is most at home, especially if it’s somewhere along the California coastline.
Other observations
Anderson also reflected on some of the inspirations to his latest movie, the Thomas Pynchon adaptation “Inherent Vice,” and how his previous films changed him as a filmmaker.
Relative to director Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” Anderson observed, “I had to get it out of my mind. Growing up, it was so important to me. Altman’s work was so important to me. And that was well enough. I had no need at this point in my life, in my career to try to do another Altman movie. Done that. Did that in my 20s. So if anything, it was about ignoring that and trying to shut it out in my mind in a peculiar kind of way. This is about the book. It can’t be about other movies. But you can’t ignore Altman. Ever.”
Regarding his “There Will Be Blood,” Anderson related, “There were formal structures in place that normally I’m terrible at, that I found really helpful to have as a foundation to start writing from. I deviated a lot from (Upton Sinclair’s “Oil!”), ultimately. But without that book to start with, that movie wouldn’t exist. At that time, I was just so obsessed with classic things. Looking at “Treasure of Sierra Madre,” looking at “East of Eden,” looking at these classic things, just sort of studying how they work and how their bits and pieces are put together. That was really good. It sort of affected everything that’s followed. Like going back to school a bit.”
Anderson noted that his “‘The Master’ was a bit more of a dreamy film, kind of in a little of a sleeping head, is a way to describe it, that leant itself to that kind of stuff. You could write something simple like, “Freddie’s on the beach” and then just know you’re going to go to the beach for a day and you should get as much ammunition as possible to do things. So you get 50 sailors, a machete, some coconuts — just kind of bring some supplies and try to come up with good stuff to happen before the sun goes down. That kind of shooting is really electric and fun, too, because the clock is ticking. … A lot of that, too, comes from working with Joaquin (Phoenix) because he’s very instinctual and very inventive. It’s probably a little bit of me creating that situation, but it’s born out of working the best for him.
Reflecting further on Phoenix, Anderson said, “He’s so good. I don’t know if he does it on purpose. I don’t know if he does it by accident. And I don’t ask. I think he does it on purpose. I’ve done this to him a few times where he looked so confused, and I thought he didn’t remember the line and I fed him the line, and he was like, “(Expletive)! I was acting.”
As for 3-D, Anderson affirmed, “I like my movies in a square box in a theater in front of me. I don’t like them with glasses on. I don’t like them behind me. I like that. I think it’s a really good presentation for a movie. Within that, do whatever the (expletive) you want. Anything else is a ride.”
