Interview [Written]: Paul Thomas Anderson (“Inherent Vice”)

A Filmmaker magazine interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, writer-director of the new film Inherent Vice, adapted from a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

Filmmaker: It’s interesting that you bring up watching older films, because although a lot of people talk about ’70s films like The Long Goodbye and Night Moves in relation to Inherent Vice, for me it owes more to the classical studio movies of the ’30s and ’40s. Like those films it’s very dialogue driven, which is something I love, but I’m wondering if it’s a challenge as a director to strike the right balance between keeping the movie from becoming visually static without getting in the way of the performances and the writing.

Anderson: The only thing I ever really look at in movies is the actors. Obviously there are great movies with great production design and that kind of stuff, but… it probably comes from my first movie, where I realized early on that I didn’t have any money and I was telling a small story, but what I did have was these great actors, which ended up being the most important thing you could have. I remember talking with Jack Fisk on There Will Be Blood about needing money to do special effects, and he said, “We’ve got the best special effect there is, we’ve got Daniel Day Lewis!” And he was right. A nice two-shot with two actors performing great dialogue, that’s a staple of the movies of the ’30s that I love the most.

I don’t fetishize ’70s movies the way some people do. I love them, but my models are those ’30s films, and I’m always trying to emulate that. Sometimes you can’t — sometimes you try to get things in one shot and you realize you’re forcing the staging, and you have to own up to the fact that it’s not working. You always have to keep an eye on it to make sure that your visual ideas aren’t affectations, and that you’re not just adhering to some kind of dogma. But when you can make that kind of thing work naturally, it’s just the best.

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Filmmaker: I was excited to see Jeannie Berlin pop up in the movie, and it made me wonder if The Heartbreak Kid was an important film for you, or if you’re an Elaine May fan.

Anderson: I love Elaine May. I love Elaine May deeply, with passion! The Heartbreak Kid was less important to me than other Elaine May movies like Mikey & Nicky and Ishtar, or even The Birdcage, which she wrote. Where she was really important for me was in the stuff she did with Mike Nichols — those albums are like bibles around my house, I listen to them all the time. I really cast Jeannie because of how much I loved her in Margaret; she’s so delicious in that. It was funny, I met Elaine May at the New York Film Festival because she came with Jeannie Berlin, and my heart got broken when I was introduced to her and she looked at me and said “Who are you?” I wanted to crawl under a rock!

Check out this cool 1970 style version of a trailer for Inherent Vice:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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