Interview: The Skinny

Crest of a Wave: Paul Thomas Anderson on The Master
Feature by Jamie Dunn. Published 30 October 2012
Source: The Skinny 

According to David Thomson, cinema’s great dissident critic, the putrid stench of death hangs in the air at your local multiplex, commingling with the more familiar funk of nacho cheeze and acne-faced adolescents. “Film is not dead,” Thomson writes in a recent issue of The New Republic, “it is just dying. This morbidity is familiar to us all.” Paul Thomas Anderson, director of The Master, this festival season’s most thrilling spectacle, clearly hasn’t received the memo.

“There’s always going to be a way, right? There’s got to be,” the 42-year-old filmmaker tells me from his office in Los Angeles when I ask about Thomson and other critics’ recent premature obituaries for the medium. “But, as Neil Young says, maybe that’s a hippie dream.”