PTA Began Work On A Video For Fiona Apple's ‘Hot Knife'

Fiona Apple's first album in 7 years -- The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do -- dropped this past week and we have had it on pretty constant rotation here at Cigs & Vines. With a sudden flurry of attention comes a deluge of interviews and some of them are really great too, like this one. If you follow us on Twitter, you already know Fiona has dropped a few mentions of Paul here and there, saying to Interview Magazine...

"I'm actually very goofy. I hate this feeling like I'm name-dropping, but Paul Thomas Anderson [the director and Apple's ex-boyfriend] told me that two of the funniest people he knows are me and Daniel Day-Lewis. He was like, "You're both hilarious, but everybody thinks you're awful."

 And from the aforementioned NYMag profile...

I assumed she wanted to talk about her album; she said she didn’t care. I told her I thought it was her best work; she said it was funny because she’d run into her ex-boyfriend, the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, and “he remembers me as somebody’s who’s been down on themselves from years ago,” and when he’d asked about the album, she told him she felt “really, really happy, I felt like I can die now, I’ve done what I want, this is me.” 

So it appears the formal couple are still very friendly, which is good news for anyone who adored Paul's string of music videos for her back in the late 90s and hoped that one day he might return to the short format. According to an interview with Fiona in V Magazine, that may still happen.

“I have this weird thing where I’m friends with my ex-boyfriends, and I really care about them. I care about their lives with their girlfriends. I feel like maybe an annoying mother or something.” Among these exes are illusionist David Blaine, in whose office/apartment Apple crashes when in New York, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who started to make a video for Apple’s new song “Hot Knife” before having to work on a movie, and most notably writer Jonathan Ames, the subject of one of the album’s sweeter tracks, “Jonathan.”

We beg to differ, as a new PTA music video would definitely be "most notable" for us. As you may know from reading these many profiles of Fiona, her new album has actually been finished for about 2 years but she (and her management) didn't feel it was a good time to present it to her label who were going through quite a bit of turnover at the time. It appears Paul began working on this video sometime after that most likely, but definitely prior to beginning filming on "The Master" back in June of last year. With the film nearing completion soon, it's possible that he may return to it and finish the video sometime this year. Or perhaps he was just noodling around for a friend and it may never see the light of day. Fingers crossed for the former.



In the meantime, do check out "The Idler Wheel..." (via @markromanek) and stay tuned for one more (very important) little post we have coming later today. (Superfans will probably know what this one is.)

Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates.