I saw that there were a lot of good movies from American filmmakers. First of all, three great New York movies: Time Out of Mind, Heaven Knows What, and Whiplash. Then there’s Birdman, which is another kind of great New York movie, and a great Broadway movie by the way and a beautiful movie about theater. And then there's Gone Girl and Inherent Vice. Gone Girl is this panoramic, phantasmagorical, acid trip of a movie that keeps shifting gears for an amazing cinematic ride. Inherent Vice is also, in a completely different way. It’s like being in a time machine, going back to the time of mutton chops and Neil Young.On watching Inherent Vice for the first time...
Wild movie. You know, it’s the first [Thomas] Pynchon film adaptation, and it really catches his tone. It really catches the antic nature of him: the crazy names of characters, the nutty behavior, and then also the emotional undertone. It has the flavor of Pynchon. It has this Big Lebowski element to one side of it, but the emotional undertone, the desperation, the paranoia, and the yearning in the film... [Paul Thomas Anderson's] an absolutely amazing filmmaker and it’s incredible to see him responding to someone else’s creation and then building his own creation out of it. He sort of did that with There Will Be Blood, but not really. It’s his own movie, inspired by the novel Oil!
I was born in 1960, but I certainly remember 1971 very well and I gotta say, from the minute the movie started to the minute it ended, I was back—way back—to the point where I was thinking “Gee, my son was born in the ’90s.” So it’s a different kind of relationship that he would have. It’s an amazing piece of work, and at this point Joaquin Phoenix and Paul have something so rare between them as an actor and director, and Sam Waterston’s daughter, Katherine, is in it, and she’s riveting every minute she’s on screen. It’s quite a film.
"With Paul, he's interested in what might happen, not what should happen," Waterston recalls of filming in Los Angeles last summer. "He doesn't walk onto set with a clear goal. That can be...surprising. It didn't feel chaotic; it felt thrilling. The set felt really vital. Like you were going into a question together."
For his part, Brolin was particularly struck by the un-Hollywood tenor of Anderson's filmmaking process. Exhibit A: the actors' freedom to lodge constructive criticism (a no-no for so many Serious Auteurs) and course-correct using all means of unusual props.
"With this [film], there was a lack of pretense--a really strange lack of pretense," Brolin says. "When something isn't working, you can say, 'This feels like a turd. Let's cut the middle three pages. I'll try to improvise and provide a bridge. How about some pancakes?"
Pancakes?
"I'm not joking about the pancakes," he confirms. "Many, many pancakes. By the end of the day, you're shaking so much because you've eaten so many pancakes, you know you're going to be diabetic in the next 24 hours."Brolin went on to add that was movie was like "Cirque du Soleil more than pretentious filmmaking."
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Following the Oscar nods and "Is it really about Scientology?" innuendo that greeted his 2012 film The Master, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson takes a left turn into '70s noir - and a cloud of marijuana smoke - with his psychedelic crime romp Inherent Vice. Adapted from Thomas Pynchon's gonzo 2009 novel, Vice stars Joaquin Phoenix as Larry "Doc" Sportello, a shambling SoCal PI investigating the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend's wealthy boyfriend. Along the way, he uncovers a pileup of conspiracies and faked deaths, heroin cartels and pimps. The cast includes Josh Brolin as a hippie-hating L.A. cop, Owen Wilson as a surf-band saxophonist, and Reese Witherspoon as a deputy DA and Doc's part-time squeeze.
Anderson draws inspiration from a certain hard-boiled Raymond Chandler classic as well as the stoner stalwarts behind Up in Smoke. "Paul said it has elements of The Long Goodbye and Cheech & Chong," says Katherine Waterston, the newcomer (and daughter of Law & Order's Sam Waterston) who plays the femme fatale. "It's hard to explain tonally." (Maybe The Bong Goodbye?) And in a film that swings between suspense and absurdity, prepare for a bit of magical realism. "A piece of fruit plays a major role. It's frozen. And it's my friend," teases Brolin. "Even talking about it now is making me chuckle."In announcing its full slate lineup, The New York Film Festival provided a nice writeup on Inherent Vice, which will be the fest's centerpiece screening in its world premiere.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild and entrancing new movie, the very first adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a cinematic time machine, placing the viewer deep within the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s. It’s not just the look (which is ineffably right, from the mutton chops and the peasant dresses to the battered screen doors and the neon glow), it’s the feel, the rhythm of hanging out, of talking yourself into a state of shivering ecstasy or fear or something in between. Joaquin Phoenix goes all the way for Anderson (just as he did in The Master) playing Doc Sportello, the private investigator searching for his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston, a revelation), menaced at every turn by Josh Brolin as the telegenic police detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. Among the other members of Anderson’s mind-boggling cast are Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Jena Malone. A trip, and a great American film by a great American filmmaker.The fest also verified a 148 minute run time for Inherent Vice.
