Written Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson (“The Master”)

A recent interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, writer-director of his newest movie The Master. An excerpt:

Congratulations on a stunning film. The world was probably expecting something quite different — this is a film about a friendship between two disturbed men.

Thank you. Yes. That was what we talked about all the time. We were concerned with the love story between these two men, about how desperately attracted they are to each other and how good and bad they are for each other. It’s a romance that can never work.

Is it accurate to say your inspirations at script level included unpublished fragments of There Will Be Blood, the lives of John Steinbeck and L. Ron Hubbard and stories from actor Jason Robards?

Yes. Jason Robards told me a story about coming back from the South Pacific after VJ Day on a ship which had run out of booze. The crew broke into the torpedoes to get at the grain alcohol fuel. The soldiers would collect fruit from the islands and mix it with the 180-proof grain fuel to make ‘torpedo juice’. That was quite common.

Robards woke up on the mast of the ship, teetering on the edge, one day. I always wanted to get that into a film.

And yes, John Steinbeck worked the sugar beet fields in California during the prohibition.

It was a process of collecting stories and hoping they found a home with other things. At a certain point, ideally, it starts to write itself. It’s always a chore at first, but then at a point you look back and you can’t believe you’ve written it and it’s a great feeling. But it’s a pain in the ass, to begin with.

For more of the article, go here.