Interview: NY Times

A Director Continues His Quest
By DENNIS LIM | December 27, 2012
Source: NY Times 

“THE party’s definitely finished, but you’re sort of left to do the dishes,” the director Paul Thomas Anderson said the other day as he walked a visitor through the spacious ranch house in this city’s Encino section that served as his production base and editing facility for his latest film, “The Master.”

With the movie’s release months behind him, his staff was down to a handful of people. The main order of business for the moment was the preparation of vegetarian tacos for lunch, but there were still loose ends to tie up for “The Master.” Reels of celluloid, packed in rows of boxes, filled a room, awaiting transfer to a storage vault. On a kitchen table sat a stack of mock newsletters produced for the film’s Oscar campaign, rave reviews in the form of a religious pamphlet titled “The Cause Footpath.” Work was in progress on the DVD release; one major supplement will be a 20-minute sequence of outtakes that Mr. Anderson edited together in the trancelike style of the film.

PTA Says ‘Inherent Vice' Will Be A More Faithful Adaptation; Hopes To Shoot In 2013

In a fantastic interview with the New York Times today, PTA dropped some news about his next project "Inherent Vice" stating that it would be a more faithful adaptation than "Oil!" was and that he hopes to shoot next year.

His next project, which will take him into another chapter of the century, the late ’60s and early ’70s, is an adaptation of “Inherent Vice,” the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon. The book is a stoner private-eye saga, and Mr. Anderson has found an invaluable “research bible,” he said, in the underground comic strip the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. 

This is the first authorized adaptation of a Pynchon work, which suggests that Mr. Pynchon, famously reclusive, is cooperating in some fashion. But Mr. Anderson, a fan of that author since his teenage years, declined to speak on the record about him and seemed loath even to utter his name. “I would get dangerously close to betraying trust,” he said. 

While “There Will Be Blood” was inspired by Upton Sinclair’s “Oil!,” this will be a more faithful adaptation — and a new kind of screenwriting challenge — for Mr. Anderson. “It’s more secretarial,” he said. “The credit should be like ‘secretary to the author.’ ” He added that he has “a large stack of pages” and hopes to shoot next year. “But it’s no less fun. In some ways it’s just what the doctor ordered right now for me: being more selfless.” 

As always, the idea is to “burrow around” (a phrase he used more than once to describe his process) to find his way into someone’s head. Mr. Anderson said, again without mentioning Mr. Pynchon by name: “It feels really good to be doing that, being a participant in his mind.”

In the interview he also talks a bit more extensively about his influences for "The Master" in regards to Scientology and how he never saw it as an "epic" but more of a "chamber drama." Read the entire thing here.

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NYTimes Talks ‘The Master' With Joaquin Phoenix; 70mm NYC Tix Onsale Now

Early on, Mr. Phoenix said: “I told Paul I wasn’t going to self-modulate in any way. I wanted to just expose the id.” 

Today the NYTimes posted a great (but brief) interview with Joaquin Phoenix who talks about his brilliantly unhinged performance in "The Master."  Read the entire thing here. The Village Voice also sat down with Paul a few weeks back for a lengthy interview which was also published today. There are some minor spoilers (the ending is discussed in the next-to-last-paragraph on the last page) but it's a fantastic read and easily the best of the recent interviews. We've archived it here too in case you want to save it for later.

In other news, we received word directly from The Weinstein Company that "The Master"s 9/14 engagements in New York and LA will be exclusively in 70mm. In NYC, those theatres are The Angelika, Village East Cinema and AMC Lincoln Square and in LA the Arclight (with more theatres possibly to join.) Tickets are now onsale for opening day at Village East Cinema in NYC and opening weekend at the Arclight with tix going onsale for the other two within the next week or so.

#THEMASTER70MM 

See when "The Master" is playing at a theatre near you.

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