Paul Thomas Anderson: The Master, Scientology and flawed fathers
The director talks about making this year's most controversial Oscar contender
By Xan Brooks | 10/25/12
Source: The Guardian
The Master rolls in midway through the Venice film festival. It comes billed as thunderstorm, a controversy, its arrival trailed by rumbles of dissent. This, we are told, is the Scientology film, a veiled biopic of the demagogic L Ron Hubbard; the movie that freaked Tom Cruise. In the event it turns out to be all that and more. So much more, in fact, that the delegates stumbling out from the screening appear momentarily nonplussed.
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master charts the fortunes of lowly Freddie Quell, a volatile drifter who falls under the spell of charismatic Lancaster Dodd. Shuffling through the postwar west, Dodd plies his trade in town halls and parlours, spinning tales of reincarnation and space aliens and cooking up a new religion as his "gift to homosapiens". What follows, though, is not so much a display of tabloid fireworks as a sweeping epic about hope, loss and the scars of war; a celebration of the American knack for self-renewal and a criticism of it too. The Master contains multitudes. Days after its premiere, I still can't shake it from my head.
I meet the director in an upstairs ballroom of a Venice hotel, where sunlight bounces off the marble and the windows are thrown open to show the sea. Anderson turned 42 last June. He has flecks of grey on his temples and three children at home with the actor Maya Rudolph. Yet the setting seems to galvanise him, stoking embers of the precocious young upstart who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia and then ushered Daniel Day-Lewis towards the best actor Oscar in There Will Be Blood. Anderson is jumpy, excited, ready for battle. The Master has been dogged by so many rumours and so much misinformation that it is a relief to finally have it exposed. It is time he set the record straight.
Source: The Guardian
The Master rolls in midway through the Venice film festival. It comes billed as thunderstorm, a controversy, its arrival trailed by rumbles of dissent. This, we are told, is the Scientology film, a veiled biopic of the demagogic L Ron Hubbard; the movie that freaked Tom Cruise. In the event it turns out to be all that and more. So much more, in fact, that the delegates stumbling out from the screening appear momentarily nonplussed.
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master charts the fortunes of lowly Freddie Quell, a volatile drifter who falls under the spell of charismatic Lancaster Dodd. Shuffling through the postwar west, Dodd plies his trade in town halls and parlours, spinning tales of reincarnation and space aliens and cooking up a new religion as his "gift to homosapiens". What follows, though, is not so much a display of tabloid fireworks as a sweeping epic about hope, loss and the scars of war; a celebration of the American knack for self-renewal and a criticism of it too. The Master contains multitudes. Days after its premiere, I still can't shake it from my head.
I meet the director in an upstairs ballroom of a Venice hotel, where sunlight bounces off the marble and the windows are thrown open to show the sea. Anderson turned 42 last June. He has flecks of grey on his temples and three children at home with the actor Maya Rudolph. Yet the setting seems to galvanise him, stoking embers of the precocious young upstart who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia and then ushered Daniel Day-Lewis towards the best actor Oscar in There Will Be Blood. Anderson is jumpy, excited, ready for battle. The Master has been dogged by so many rumours and so much misinformation that it is a relief to finally have it exposed. It is time he set the record straight.
