Anderson Wins 2nd Fipresci Award For TWBB

Variety reports that Paul Thomas Anderson will be on hand to receive The Grand Prix Film Of The Year award at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s searing portrait of overweening ambition, “There Will Be Blood,” has won the Fipresci (the Intl. Federation of Film Critics) Grand Prix for film of the year. 

Anderson will pick up the prize in person at the opening ceremony of San Sebastian Festival on Sept. 18.

The latest kudos comes after “Blood” took director at Berlin and Academy Awards for Daniel Day Lewis for lead actor and Robert Elswit for cinematography.

The plaudit from the world’s foremost film critics’ org consolidates Anderson’s position as one of the most critically admired directors out.

Fipresci noted Monday that Anderson had been a clear winner among the 242 critics who voted this year for the Grand Prix.

Anderson already won a Fipresci Grand Prix in 2000 for “Magnolia.” 

Other recent winners, pointing to top niches in a modern critics’ pantheon, are Nuri Ceylan Bilge’s “Uzak,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Notre musique,” Kim Ki-duk’s “3-Iron,” Pedro Almodovar’s “Volver” and, last year, Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.”

Inteview: Museum of the Moving Image

Museum of the Moving Image, Queens NY
December 2007

Listen to the talk here.



A PINEWOOD DIALOGUE WITH DANIEL DAY-LEWIS AND PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

Daniel Day-Lewis’s magnificent performance as the ambitious and ruthless oil tycoon Daniel Plainview is at the core of Paul Thomas Anderson’s critically acclaimed movie There Will be Blood. In this discussion, which followed a Museum of the Moving Image preview screening of the film, the actor and director playfully and thoughtfully discussed their intense collaborative process.

The Dirk Diggler Story (1988)

A 31 minute short film shot by Paul when he was just seventeen years old. It was written and shot like a Spinal Tap documentary about the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler.  It was shot on video and edited VCR to VCR. His dad narrated it (like an E! Hollywood true story). Mike Stein (a good friend who also had a small role in Boogie Nights) played Dirk Diggler. Bob Ridgely (The Colonel) played Jack Horner. The length was about 30 minutes. Rewritten as a full length movie when he was about 19-20 in the same vein but decided that the "Spinal Tap" thing was played out.

Interview: The Guardian UK

The Guardian UK, Written By Ed Pilkington
January 2008

'Tell the story! Tell the story!'
With his "big oil epic" starring Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson is no longer American cinema's enfant terrible. All he wants to do now is spin a good yarn, he tells Ed Pilkington

It is 10 years since Paul Thomas Anderson first left audiences and critics dumbstruck and confounded with his breakthrough film Boogie Nights, when he was just 27. How could such a pipsqueak of a director, they asked back in 1997, create a masterpiece that wowed right from its opening sequence: an audacious five-minute tracking shot that swoops and swirls through the nightclub of the film's title in joyful synchronisation to the dance music of the 1970s.

He has astonished ever since. Magnolia, the next out of the blocks, was an even bigger, more complex and yet richly evocative film that belied any attempt to categorise it. He was 31 by then, but still people marvelled at how one so young could conjure up such accomplished work. Anderson appeared to have found his style - the repertory film in which a multitude of characters and plot-lines are interwoven. But then in 2002 he bamboozled us again. He threw out the repertory technique and opted instead for a radically scaled-down and linear story in Punch-Drunk Love. It ran at a conventional 90 minutes - half the length of Magnolia - and though the film was anything but conventional, it left many fans delighted, others disappointed.

Interview: Premiere Magazine

Interview Magazine, Written By (??)
January 2008


American Epic 'There Will Be Blood'
Director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis on blood, oil, and how 'Gangs of New York' probably isn't Day-Lewis's most mom-friendly performance.

Quiet, stoic, and self-reliant Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) rapidly transforms into a wealthy tycoon when he discovers oil in the hard scrub of Southern California and is then driven by an almost demonic desire to extract the riches from the land he has acquired, regardless of the physical and spiritual price to himself and to the people who live there. Plainview eventually meets his match in the supposedly unassuming and deeply religious Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a young yet quietly ambitious preacher in the charismatic tradition. The two recognize the same desire and ambition for power in one another and become locked in a bitter struggle that will bleed from one century into another.

The origins of There Will Be Blood can be traced to a bookstore in London, where homesick Paul Thomas Anderson spotted the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, which then became an unlikely life raft for the struggling writer/director.

Interview: Associated Press

Associated Press, Written By (??)
January 2008

`Blood' Is Breakthrough for Anderson

In the last conversation Paul Thomas Anderson had with Robert Altman, his friend and mentor told him: "I think this film is something different for you."

Interview: The Onion AV Club

The Onion AV Club, Written by Josh Modell
January 2nd, 2008

Paul Thomas Anderson famously dropped out of NYU film school after just a couple of days, intent on beginning a career making movies. It worked: At 26, the writer-director released a remarkable debut feature, 1996's Hard Eight, which featured several actors that would become part of his troupe, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, and Philip Baker Hall. Anderson's real breakthrough, though, came via 1997's Boogie Nights, a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking ensemble piece set in the porn industry. His even more sprawling Magnolia—another melancholy love letter to southern California—earned Oscar nominations and high praise; he followed that with the unsentimental, beautifully off-kilter romantic comedy Punch Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler. Then Anderson seemed to disappear.

It turned out he was working on his magnum opus. The film, loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, stars Daniel Day Lewis in a remarkable performance as a single-minded 19th-century oil prospector. A departure from Anderson's other films, Blood ditches modern-day L.A. and his regular group of actors and focuses largely on one character—Day Lewis is in nearly every scene of the 158-minute film—and the effect of his dark drive on those around him, particularly a young preacher played by Paul Dano. One of 2007's best films, it renders this seemingly small story huge and powerful. A jovial Anderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about Day Lewis, the melancholy of finishing work, and "message movies."

Deleted Scene: There Will Be Blood, My Cock Doesn't Work

95 INT. MESS HALL. NIGHT.

Daniel and Henry together, drunk. Sitting and talking.
Daniel is nodding off. So drunk he can't keep his eyes open. 

                    DANIEL            
          He's not my son. He's not even my son.                     
                    HENRY           
           What do you mean?                     
                    DANIEL           
           He's not my son...

He begins to break down, holds his crotch, looks down; 

                    DANIEL           
            ...my cock doesn't even work how'm           
           I gonna make a kid?           
           does yours work Henry?           
           our Father's worked well, look at you.  
HOLD. 

                    DANIEL       
           I asked you a question...

                    HENRY           
           ...when I'm lucky.


Daniel wobbles up and stands and walks off...HOLD ON HENRY

Interview: Mean Magazine