"I don't care what the award is, when they put your name next to the names that she just read off, it's an extraordinary thing in your life. These nominees are exceptional talents. I truly to God never thought I would be in the same breath as them. I want to thank them, and I want to thank the many talented people that weren't nominated. Paul Thomas Anderson who's like, I think, Orson Welles. There are so many others."Watch it here. You may recall that PTA even worked with Affleck very briefly back in 2000. Around that time PTA was hanging around SNL in preparation for "Punch-Drunk Love" and directed a short called FANatic (which was a parody of the MTV series) the week that Affleck was hosting. (His girlfriend at the time, Fiona Apple, was that week's musical guest.)
"From time to time I've thought about making a film about that era of local TV and the kind of Wild West lawlessness and the things that could happen. When my dad was doing it, it wasn't national, it was local. And it felt like lunch time was drinking time and you could come back to work totally hammered."That sounds like something I'd definitely like to see. How about you?
"I'm a big fan of Joaquin Phoenix, and I feel like he unfortunately took a little bit of a beating after I'm Still Here. I love that movie. And I think maybe he went a little crazy, too. I've been waiting for his return, and I just loved his physicality, the gnarled shoulders. He has that really brute sensitivity to him that I just really appreciated."
"I went in headlong for The Master this year. As a filmmaker, I'm getting more and more picky about what I like, which is probably why I watch more documentaries than anything else. But there's something about movies like The Master. I knew that movie wasn't going to 100-percent add up. I expected this really inspired, almost tone poem of a movie with fantastic performances, and that's exactly what I got out of it. The plotting was subordinated to the tone and the performances, which in general, I think, makes for a bad movie, but for some reason, in this case, I was like, Oh, this really works. It's a true mood piece, and I just love it.
"It's the antithesis of how I make movies, which is great. All I'm doing is trying to get an ugly-looking close-up. As long as that person is emoting and giving me something funny and sad at the same time, I'm happy. Literally paying zero attention to the picturesque beauty of the scene.
"I am obsessed with Megan Ellison. She runs this company, Annapurna Pictures, and what she is doing for movies right now... She's making true upscale adult dramas, which nobody's doing anymore: Killing Them Softly and Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty and The Master. I'm very, very thankful for Annapurna Pictures this year. The Master is going to lose money, and she doesn't give a shit. She's going to make more movies like that. And that sort of punk-rock spirit with the power that she has is exactly what we need in cinema right now."Amen. We will remind you now that Annapurna will also be financing "Inherent Vice" as well as 2013 films by Spike Jonze, Bennett Miller, David O. Russell and Harmony Korine and are pretty much the bees knees all around. Duplass & Annapurna are both on Twitter, so follow them if you're so inclined.
There’s a strong analog quality to your films in general and the Dark Knight films in particular. You talked about wanting to have a very tactile world, and seeing The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX 70mm you can’t escape the feeling that you’re seeing a film made on film, albeit with hundreds of CGI shots, but integrated in a way that you don’t feel that digital quality in the way you do with most movies that make heavy use of digital technology.
I recently saw a 70mm print of The Master and I realized that, other than my own films, it’s the first photochemically finished film I’ve seen in many years, and it looks the way a movie should look. To me, it’s just a superior form. In The Dark Knight Rises, we have about 430 effects shots out of 3,000, so the idea that the tail wags the dog and then you finish the film in the digital realm is illogical. We make the 430 shots fit in with the remaining 2,500 that we timed photochemically. For that reason, I’ve never done a film with more than 500 effects shots. These films have about a third or a quarter the number of CG shots of any other film on that scale. That allows me to keep working photochemically and to make the digital effects guys print out their negatives so we actually cut the effect with its background plate on film, and we can see whether it matches.
For me, it’s simply the best way to make a film, and why more people haven’t done it I could not tell you. The novelty of digital is part of it. For some filmmakers, there’s a fear of being left behind, which to me is irrational because as a director you’re not responsible for loading a camera. You can hire whoever you need to and shoot how you want to shoot, but I think, very simply, industrial economics favor change, and there’s more money in change, whether or not it’s better. But I talk to a lot of young filmmakers who want to shoot on film and see the value in it. I’ve gone out of my way to screen film prints of The Dark Knight Rises for other filmmakers, because no one prints dailies anymore—they’re not seeing the potential of film—whereas I’ve been seeing it every day I’ve been working for the past 10 years.During the conversation he called it "Paul Thomas Anderson's 'The Master'" which was cute. Wonder if he knows PTA is a mutual admirer?
When you watch current films...
I don't.
There's nothing out there that interests you?Stay tuned. We should have a very helpful/informative post in the near future. FYI, we're a lot more active on Twitter than Facebook so if you like your news up-to-the-moment, that's where you want to be.
Very few things. I'll definitely want to see Paul Thomas Anderson's film called "The Master," and whatever the Coen Brothers do I'd probably be interested in. Not too many others.
GQ: What other directors [do you admire]?
Aaron Paul: Rian Johnson's fresh in mind. He's just so brilliant and such an incredible writer. Or speaking of writer-slash-directors: Paul Thomas Anderson.
GQ: Yeah, wow. I think he's the best there is.
Aaron Paul: He's completely fucking unbelievable. I don't understand how he does it.
GQ: What's the plan after Breaking Bad wraps?Side note/name drop: I met Mr. Paul at the Season 3 premiere party for "Breaking Bad" in NYC and (in addition to being an Emmy winning actor), he was an incredibly nice dude! So there you have it, we've done our part. If you weren't already aware the 5th Season of 'Breaking Bad" premieres this Sunday on AMC and judging by the first two episodes, it's going to be cra-mazing.
Aaron Paul: Not an idea. Maybe start accosting Paul Thomas Anderson. Seriously: turn this interview into a love letter to Paul Thomas Anderson, and kind of beg him to put me in a film. I don't care if it's as an extra, I'll do whatever.
Just met Paul Dano at a screening for Ruby Sparks. Said his "buddy" PTA has screened him a few bits from The Master. [He said] "PTA's the master", then went on a tangent about how The Girl Next Door taught kids how to masturbate.So it appears that much of the inner circle has been privy to quite a bit of the film. Now if we could just find our invite...
"Pretty sure "Master" is NOT in IMAX. Shot in 65 though... will look amazing, I'm sure."Though the difference between the two is not something most laypeople would be able to differentiate someone in the comments has helped set them/us straight.
65mm and IMAX use the same film. The difference is that each frame of standard 65mm utilizes 5 perfs, and each frame of IMAX utilizes 15 perfs. So the IMAX frame is 3 times larger. It also has an aspect ratio of 1.4:1, whereas standard 65mm is 2.2:1.Thanks Mike! Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates. Oh, and if anyone from Pixar is reading this, we love you. Please hire us. Thanks!
Diablo Cody: I know a lot of people feel this way, so it’s not the most original answer. I’m the most insane unrepentant Paul Thomas Anderson fan girl. I’ve been watching actually Punch Drunk Love a lot lately. I really love that movie. To express that kind of truth in a film is to me so amazing. Even late last night I was watching this old video he directed for Fiona Apple and I was like I couldn’t even make a feature film as powerful as this three minute video. I just think he is awesome.There you have it, she's just like us! We caught "Young Adult" the other night and thought was a very good film. Unflinchingly dark at times featuring a monster performance by Theron, it's probably also a career best for both Cody and Reitman and should serve to silence the haters. The film opens this Friday if you get a chance to see it or you can just pop in your 'PDL' dvd one more time while we wait for the Blu-ray.
Patton Oswalt: I love the beginning of Magnolia, the thing about the dealer. That scene is genius. Brilliantly acted.
As we wait for news on PTA's next project, (it has been especially quiet these last few months) we've seen more than a few people voicing their admiration for his work. (Absence makes the heart grow fonder, doesn't it?) The latest is Greg Mottola, director of "Paul," "Adventureland," "Superbad," "The Daytrippers" as well as episodes of "Arrested Development" and "Undeclared." He recently rewatched "Magnolia" and had this to say on his Twitter:Watched 'Magnolia' on blu ray over the weekend and it was just as audacious, heartbreaking and lovely as the first time I saw it. Robert Elswit's cinematography is unbelievably great. [And] it looks incredible on blu-raySomeone responded that they'd recently watched that and "Boogie Nights" recently on Blu-ray and he added that "the lighting is spectacular and perfect for both movies." He also admitted it was the first time he'd seen "Magnolia" since it was released over a decade ago.
We recently mentioned Rotten Tomatoes "Five Favorite Films" feature and found PTA's films on a few more lists digging through the archives today. Happy Friday!"A relatively new film that went straight into my top five, I adore Punch Drunk Love, and I can almost recite it to you. It was on TV on a loop for a while, and it's like The Godfather, you hit that film on TV and you stay there. There aren't many, but you just stay there, thinking, 'I could keep flipping, but there's not actually going to be anything better than this,' and it doesn't matter that you've seen it sixteen times - you just dig it because it's such high quality.Aaron Johnson ("Kick-Ass," "Nowhere Boy") says this about "Boogie Nights":
I think Adam Sandler and Emily Watson are completely marvellous in it, and I didn't know anything about Adam Sandler, I've never seen any of his other films, so I've only seen him in this. I love Paul Thomas Anderson, and I think it's my favourite of his films. Possibly a controversial thing to say, as his other films are, perhaps, hipper, but I love the fact that it's this fucked up love story. I love it stylistically, the jokes, the visual attitude of it and those funky links that he does. I love the apparent arbitrariness of the plot, which hinges on upon the fact that you get free air-miles with a particular brand of chocolate pudding, and I love the way it dovetails at the end.
Everyone in it is magnificent, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, who's in The Boat that Rocked and who is beautiful in Punch Drunk Love. Adam Sandler gives one of the greatest light entertainment performances I've ever seen. It's a submerged light entertainment, it's so integrated, so authentic in terms of naturalism, that you surprise yourself by laughing, because it's so deadpan, so undercover in terms of comedy, and that's my favourite thing of all time, the highest level. For the first twenty minutes you think you're in art movie hell, but you're not, so don't panic."
Paul Thomas Anderson -- what a fantastic director. These are all directors that I would love to work with, you know. I doubt any of them could give a sh*t. [laughs.] Boogie Nights. Pretty epic. It just captured that era so brilliantly. Mark Wahlberg, man -- great role. Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman -- they just blow me away. I could watch it again and again. Great movie.And Justin Long ("Drag Me To Hell," he's not a PC) also names 'Boogie' as one of his favorites:
I think a lot about Martin Scorsese and how heavily influenced Paul Thomas Anderson was by him. I feel like he learned so much from Scorsese in Boogie Nights, and so I feel like picking Boogie Nights is somewhat accounting for my Martin Scorsese love. But I'm also being very honest about a movie that I can watch over and over. Just the epic nature and the grandness of it, and some of the shots and the style of it, and the music -- my God, the way he uses music -- and that great shot where somebody jumps into the pool and you hear the muffled soundtrack. It's brilliant. I never get sick of watching it. And the acting is just some of my favorite actors at the top of their game. I love doing impressions and one of my earliest impressions of an actor was Philip Seymour Hoffman in that movie, when he's saying how much he loves the name and he's chewing on the pen.As always, you can get the latest news on Cigarettes & Red Vines on Twitter and Facebook. Tell your friends.
Pixar currently have the most consistent track record of any studio on the planet so you know they pretty much employ the best of the best. One of their in-house directors, Lee Unkrich ("Toy Story 3"), just did an impromptu Q&A session on Twitter yesterday and gave a little shout-out to Paul. When asked who his favorite contemporary director is he said "That's tough. But probably PT Anderson." And when someone followed up to ask which PTA film was his favorite he replied "Punch Drunk Love." We did a little digging and found that last year Rotten Tomatoes had asked him for his Top 5 favorite films and he said this about the film:"Really, that just kind of encapsulates all of Paul Thomas Anderson's films for me. I'm inspired by the kinetic energy of his films, and the richness of the characters and the performances especially."So there you have it, another admirable admirer. As you were. (via Yenni)
Apologies for the alliteration but just a small bit of non-news while we wait for word on "The Master" and "Inherent Vice". On a recent episode of Marc Maron's WTF podcast, Maron interviews comedian (and friend to PTA), Paul F. Tompkins. You may also remember Tompkins briefly as Prescott in "There Will Be Blood" and as an offscreen voice during Seduce & Destroy. The hour+ long interview is a candid and hilarious discussion between the two comedians which briefly turns to his work with Paul.MM: What's your relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson?If you haven't listened to the WTF podcast or Paul F. Tompkins own hilariously weird Pod F. Tompkast, you really should.
PFT: I haven't seen Paul in a while...
MM: ...the director of There Will Be Blood.
PFT: That's right. I have not seen him since then.
MM: Did you do another movie? You've sort of shown up in most of his movies.
PFT: Magnolia. I did what ended up being just a voice in Magnolia. And that was it. But he's a guy that I have known off and on through Largo, the old nightclub Largo. And he started coming to Largo around the time that comedy started happening at Largo. It had been open for about a year and it was just a music club and then they started doing comedy on Monday nights. And then all the comics and the musicians started to get to know each other and appear on each others shows.
You can check out the entire article by clicking here. (CE)...But back here on Earth, we’ll enter year zero for pop culture. All that we’ll have left to work with will be a VHS copy of Zapped!, the soundtrack to The Road Warrior, and Steve Ditko’s eight-issue run on Shade: The Changing Man. For a while—maybe a generation—pop culture pastimes will revolve around politics and farming.But the same way a farmer has to endure a few fallow seasons after he’s overplanted, a new, richer loam will begin to appear in the wake of our tilling. From Zapped! will arise a telekinesis epic from James Cameron. Paul Thomas Anderson will do a smaller, single-character study of a man who can move matchbooks with his mind and how he uses this skill to pursue a casino waitress. Then the Coen brothers will veer off, doing a movie about pyrokenesis set in 1980s Cleveland, while out of Japan will come a subgenre of telekinetic horror featuring pale, whispering children. And we’ll build from there—precognition, telepathy, and, most radically, normal people falling in love and dealing with jobs and life. Maybe also car crashes.
JCR: Well, they all kind of find their way. They all kind of eventually percolate down and find the audience...Hard Eight, Paul Anderson’s first movie, which is really called Sydney, had some of the best reviews of any movie I’ve ever been in, and I think the shortest theatrical run. But as a result of Paul’s work, after that, he has definitely found an audience. I think just getting a movie done is an accomplishment in itself. It’s almost like a success that you’ve got the money to do it, and you made it, and it’s good.
I was at PEN USA's annual Literary Awards Festival a few weeks ago, having a great time, hobnobbing with all sorts of illustrious writers, when I ran into "There Will Be Blood's" writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who was there to accept an award for his film script. A huge fan of his work, I told him how much I'd liked his movie. He nodded and shyly smiled, and I thought he might say something like, "Oh, geez, thanks for the compliment." What he really said was: "In that story you did, you got the budget wrong."If I actually believed in New Year's resolutions, I'd happily promise to never write about a movie's budget ever again -- all it does is cause pain and misery, both for the press, which is always being spun by studio executives and producers, and for the filmmakers, who are always convinced that clueless reporters and columnists are wildly inflating their movie budgets. (It is safe to say that no one in the history of Hollywood has ever complained about the press underestimating the cost of his or her movie.)To be fair, Anderson wasn't all that angry. We went on to have a perfectly amiable conversation. But I'm sure he was unhappy, since when I made reference to his budget, which I said was in the vicinity of $45 million, I was making the point that his movie -- a dark, intense historical drama -- cost so much (along with the marketing outlays of Paramount Vantage's Oscar campaign) that it could never possibly make a decent profit.The problem that journalists have in reporting about movie budgets is that nearly everyone they ask about a movie's budget tends to -- how do I put this nicely -- offer a whopper of an untruth. In other words, shock of all shocks, people in Hollywood lie. The studio chief who made the movie gives you a low-ball number. The head of a rival studio, eager to make a competitor look bad, gives you a wildly inflated number. Most journalists have reported that Baz Luhrmann's recent film, "Australia," cost $130 million. 20th Century Fox insists that it cost less, saying it received a hefty subsidy from the Australian government, knocking $30 or so million off that figure. But every rival studio chief I spoke to about the film said with great authority, as if they'd seen a host of internal Fox documents, that the film cost $170 or $180 or $200 million, just to throw out the three different figures I got from three different executives.What's a reporter to do? Who tells the biggest whoppers? And how does one reporter use triangulation to figure out the real budget number? Keep reading:I'm old-fashioned about reporting budget numbers. I like to go to the source. In other words, I try not to report a number unless I've gotten it from a top executive at the studio (or financing company) that made the picture or a producer or some other high-level member of the production team. You'd think this would work out pretty smoothly, but even then, I've discovered that budget numbers are a slippery business.My colleague John Horn, who is something of an expert on movie budgets, since he is always writing about film profitability, reminded me of the legendary example of funny numbers involving Jeffrey Katzenberg and his DreamWorks Animation films. When "Shrek 2" was being released, Katzenberg (like most studio execs) was eager to make the film look as profitable as possible, so he didn't stop reporters from believing his movie cost a pittance. That's why Newsweek, in 2004, reported that the film's stars Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz "got $10 million each to reprise their characters, which accounted for almost half the film's modest $70 million budget." But after DreamWorks Animation went public, its budget figures suddenly soared dramatically, with the company acknowledging that the original "Shrek" cost closer to $130 million, with its and other DreamWorks sequels costing "15 to 30% higher" than that.Once burned, twice shy, which is why the showbiz media has a healthy skepticism about budgetary information from studio executives. Sometimes you get the feeling that you could ask five people who worked on a film to tell you the budget -- and you'd get five different answers. When I was writing about the unknown screenwriter who'd penned Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" last month, I reported that the movie (co-financed by Warners and Village Roadshow) cost $35 million. Warners immediately called to complain, saying my number was totally wrong. Rob Lorenz, a delightful guy who's one of the producers of the film -- and has worked with Eastwood for years -- asked how I could have possibly gotten such a wrong figure. Actually, I told him, I got the budget figure from Bill Gerber, who -- ahem -- was the other producer of the film, with Lorenz and Eastwood. Since Gerber had once been a head of production at Warners, I figured he knew what he was talking about. Lorenz told me the film cost closer to $25 million, so I amended the figure, saying the film cost "less than $30 million."This happens all the time. I wrote in a recent post that Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road," a Paramount film produced by DreamWorks, cost $45 million. I didn't make up the number -- it's what a top executive at Paramount (which then owned DreamWorks) told me the film cost. As soon as the story ran, Stacey Snider, who runs DreamWorks, e-mailed me to say the film only cost $35 million. It seems unlikely that Paramount would inflate the cost of a film it financed and distributed, since if "Revolutionary Road" fails to find an audience, it will look like an ever bigger flop if it cost $45 million instead of $35 million. But I also trust Snider, who has a better track record than most studio chiefs in offering honest numbers. So what does the movie cost? Let's just say -- that's a work in progress.As you can see, assessing movie budgets is a skill that relies on instinct as much as actual reporting. Horn uses something akin to triangulation, i.e. the art of measuring from three different points of reference, the epicenter being where those lines intersect. As he puts it: "Ask three people without axes to grind, or reasons to lie, what a movie's budget is, and the average of those numbers can be a close approximation of the film's true cost."When Horn was reporting on the budget of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" for his Word of Mouth column, he asked a few executives "close to Paramount" what the film cost. Two got back to him. One said $175 million. Another said $185 million. Horn ran the lower figure. Even so, the studio complained, saying that while the film's initial budget was in fact $175 million, incentives from Canada and Louisiana -- where much of the film was shot -- reduced the actual cost to $150 million. The Times published a clarification to explain why our original budget number was off the mark.But right around the time that Paramount was upset that our "Benjamin Button" number was too high, I found myself on the phone with a studio boss who complained that our "Button" number was too low, saying, "You guys are so gullible. That movie cost at least $200 million." I guess that makes us damned if we do, damned if we don't. It makes for a frustrating experience all around. As a baseball junkie, I take pleasure in the sanctity of numbers. You know that at the end of game you can accurately calculate every player's batting average, based solely on his performance. Fudging isn't allowed. If a player's hitting .315, he's hitting .315. If he goes 0-for-4 in the next game, his batting average goes down. No explanation, no exception.But movie budgets, like everything else about the business, are never black and white. In Hollywood, the numbers are a lot like the truth -- they are always subject to interpretation.
