Interview: "20 Questions"

Playboy Magazine, Written By David Rensin
February ??, 1998


For 27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson, the thrilled critical response to his film Boogie Nights - the story of an innocent young man whose foot-long love gland transforms him into a porn star of the late Seventies and early Eighties - must make the sophomore director feel like he's similarly endowed. The film is based on a short Anderson made when he was 17, called The Dirk Diggler Story. Ten years later, its screen history. In the interim Anderson made another short, Cigarettes and Coffee that got him into the Sundance Institute's Filmmaker's Workshop and that led to his first feature, Hard Eight. Starring Samuel L. Jackson and Gwyneth Paltrow, it was retitled Hard Eight and quickly faded away. We asked Contributing Editor David Rensin to talk with Anderson as Boogie Nights went into wide release. Rensin says, "We met at a popular Valley deli, where the waitresses knew and adored Anderson. He sat down, rummaged into his huge briefcase for his glasses, and with a smile announced, "Let me wash my hands before I begin the interview." I think that he also washed them afterward.

1. You wait until the end of Boogie Nights to show Dirk Diggler's 13-inch cock. Did you ever think of revealing the goods sooner?

In the earliest assembly of the movie, we showed it in his first sex scene. At the time, I wasn't sure if it was to get it out of the way. But when I watched the film, I realized it had to be saved for the end. Metaphorically, it's the come shot. It's everything you could hope for from a movie ending. David Mamet once said, "The last five seconds separates the men from the boys." I took that quote to heart and ran with it.