Sight & Sound Crowns ‘The Master' As The Best Film Of 2012; Watch Interviews With DP, Editor, More

It's December already which means that awards season is upon us. Kicking things off is Sight & Sound who have just named "The Master" as the best film of 2012. (We agree.) Very good news for the film and hopefully the first of many accolades to come. (via The Playlist) Additionally, a few video interviews with key department heads/collaborators on the film have also come to light which you can check out below for a deeper insight into how "The Master" was made. (via xixax)

Below The Line (with editor editor Leslie Jones, production designers David Crank & Jack Fisk, costume designer Mark Bridges):



Camerimage (with DP Mihai Malaimare Jr.):


Pre-order "The Master" on Blu-ray or DVD.

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Bill Hader & Patton Oswalt Talk PTA; London Retrospective Coming Soon

Hope everybody had a good holiday, we have a few random odds & ends for you this morning. First up is this analysis of all of PTA's Tracking Shots by Sight & Sound. It's an excellent video which shows the evolution of the camera movement throughout his filmography and definitely worth a viewing if you haven't already seen it. Secondly, we have a quote from SNL MVP Bill Hader who was on Elvis Mitchell's excellent podcast The Treatment back in September (but we just got around to listening).

"You're into what you're into. And people can be into a lot of different things. It's funny too - when you meet people like Maya Rudolph is with Paul Thomas Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson hangs out at SNL a lot. And I'm a huge, huge fan of his movies. But when we talk about movies we talk about like, 'Chud.' You know? Or we talk about how we both saw a double-feature of 'Darkman' and 'My Blue Heaven.' And he's goes, 'I saw that double-feature!' And I was like, 'Yeah, I went into 'Darkman' and then snuck into 'My Blue Heaven'.' He goes, 'They came out the same week and.. [trails off]' You know what I mean? Those are the things you're kinda into."

"My Blue Heaven" and "Darkman" are both available from Netflix if you'd like to recreate your own double-feature. Comedian Patton Oswalt spoke to Onion AV Club about his Random Roles and gave the following hilarious anecdote about appearing in "Magnolia."

Magnolia (1999)—“Delmer Darion” 
PO: Delmer Darion. God. I was doing a show one night, and I went back in the kitchen and was hanging out, and Paul Thomas Anderson was there. We were just talking, and he was like, “I’m doing this movie if you want a part in it.” I said, “Yeah, sure.” So they called me the next day and said I needed to come in to be fitted for a wetsuit. I said, “Can I see the screenplay first?” And they were like, “Nope.” So I went in and got this custom wetsuit made, and they gave me two pages of the script and flew me to Reno. We shot this scene and then hung out all night drinking. And a week later, we were shooting and I was in the wetsuit. It was so hot to the point where I wasn’t even sweating anymore. And Paul was dumping bottles of water on my head to keep me from passing out and I was like, “Paul, what are we doing?” He said, “I can’t say right now, but I’ll just say that you are the first frog that falls out of the sky.” And I went, “Okay.” So that’s what working with PTA is like.

Sounds about right. And finally there will be a PTA Retrospective in London at the Prince Charles Theatre starting January 23 and showing all of his films (bar "The Master" which you can now pre-order in the U.S. on DVD/Blu).

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Interview: Sight & Sound

The Anderson Tapes
Source: Sight & Sound


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Scans courtesy of johnvanderpuije

Interview: "Sight And Sound Q&A"

Sight & Sound Magazine, Written By Gavin Smith
January ??, 1998


Paul Thomas Anderson talks to Gavin Smith about porno fandom and the road to redemption.

One of the things that's interesting about Boogie Nights is its tone shifts, for instance between dramatic and comic/parodic.

There are two answers to that. First, two of my favorite movies are F.W. Murnau's Sunrise and Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, what I call gearshift movies, that can change tones [snaps fingers] like that. I like to see that in movies because that's what real life is like, and it's also good storytelling. And second, this relates to how I came to this story. The first version was a short film I made called The Dirk Diggler Story, when I was 17. That has some of the same textures, but it's much funnier. It's my point of view as a 17-year-old, and what was funny to me then was the titles. As a mass audience, we're amused and turned on by porn titles - Ordinary Peepholes, The Sperminator, Edward Penishands - but then this is quickly not funny. There was something in that short film that was darkly comic, but there were a lot of smartass moments. Over the course of ten years, just by getting older and slightly sick of it all, that's where more of the sadness and drama comes into it. I just sat there and lived with and it was just not fucking funny anymore.

But isn't the coda a fantasy redemptive happy ending?