Wednesday, December 31, 2014

New TV Spots, Character Poster For "Vice" Arrive; PTA Talks With The Guardian; More

It's New Years Eve so we'll keep this roundup short and sweet for you all:

A couple delicious new TV spots for Inherent Vice have been made available on YouTube.



Up next, Katherine Waterston stopped by QTV for a 20-minute interview on Vice, and was radiant and charming as always. Watch!


PTA sat down and talked with Mark Kermode for an interview in The Guardian and gave some really interesting insights into the making of Inherent Vice. Here are some highlights:
[Composer Jonny] Greenwood proved a key collaborator on Inherent Vice, despite Anderson originally telling him that “I won’t need that much music – which of course equals ‘I’m going to need a lot of music’. When Jonny first read the script there was all the stuff in there from the book about the Arpanet, which was like the original internet computer. So he started out doing some more electronic stuff, as if these sounds were coming out of the computer. But then these other ideas started to present themselves – orchestral ideas. It’s now getting to the spot in my relationship with Jonny when I can maybe mention a thing or two but really just leave him to his own devices. He’s always the first viewer, too.”
PTA also retroactively defended his composer in his Oscar disqualification in 2007, saying "Oh, the fix was in, wasn’t it? They just couldn’t stand the idea of a guy in a rock band with moppy hair being that good, I suppose. But hey, no sour grapes.”

Relating the musical qualities of Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love to the musical qualities in his more recent work, PTA said the following:
“Well,” he says, “those movies you mention are musicals in the sense that the music is woven so strongly inside them. I think that’s probably true of There Will Be Blood too. But starting with The Master, I was working on things that had a little more dialogue. You know, there’s music in there, but the film isn’t structured like a musical. This was more a matter of just driving to the set each day and listening to some stuff Jonny had sent me, or listening to Can, or Neil Young [both feature on the soundtrack] over and over. That’s what we were trying to do – to make a movie that felt like a Neil Young song, that has that sweet sadness to it.”
On the subject of finding the looks for each character, PTA reiterated that Owen Wilson's Coy Harlingen borrowed a lot from late Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and, awesomely, Zoot from The Muppets. His take on Doc Sportello was just as interesting:
"As for Doc, we really stole his look from Neil Young circa 1970, with the mutton chops. Some of the wardrobes on Doc are a straight rip of him. I don’t think you can make a movie about this period and this culture without looking directly at him.”
You can read the entire interview, which is great, here.

- Finally, Character Poster/Trailer #5 Arrives:

Sunday, December 21, 2014

WATCH: Academy Conversations With PTA, Leslie Jones, Mark Bridges, Daniel Lupi & Joanne Sellar



Here's a small sliver of a talk with the Inherent Vice team: Producers Joanne Sellar & Daniel Lupi, costume designer Mark Bridges, film editor Leslie Jones, and their ring-leader, Paul Thomas Anderson. Have a looksee. 

Join the film on Twitter at @seeinherentvice

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates 

Saturday, December 20, 2014

PTA Talks "Vice" In A 40-Minute Conversation On Studio 360

Via The Film Stage, PTA sat down for a 40-minute interview on Studio 360 on Thursday to promote Inherent Vice. You can download it and store it on your Vice playlist, which should be totaling over 2 hours in length at this point. Give it a listen below:


Join the film on Twitter at @seeinherentvice

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates 

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Bigfoot Character Poster/Trailer Arrives; Listen To An Hour of PTA Interviews on NPR


PTA visited NPR's All Things Considered recently for a brief chat about his new work Inherent Vice. The conversation chiefly discusses the struggles of adapting from such a major literary voice.  Listen:


PTA also talked for nearly an hour on KQED Radio to promote Vice, and that conversation is much more wide-ranging. He discusses his earlier career a bit more extensively than he has recently, and compares the process of adapting Thomas Pynchon to the process of adapting Upton Sinclair for There Will Be Blood. It's a great listen.


Finally, a really cool new character-themed poster and instagram-video-sized trailer for Inherent Vice via the film's social media outlets. One would think these are the first in a series, but it's hard telling. Anyway:

Josh Brolin as Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen


Friday, December 12, 2014

INHERENT VICE: Now Playing


Today's the day, folks. Well, at least for those of you living on the East or West Coast. That's right. After whispers of a potential Thomas Pynchon adaptation first surfaced just over 4 years ago, Paul Thomas Anderson's seventh feature film, Inherent Vice, is now officially playing in theatres.   

You can find New York showtimes here and LA showtimes here.

(UPDATE) Also officially released is the second theatrical poster for Inherent Vice, and we're guessing you'll find it familiar.



There are a couple insanely great pieces about PTA circulating out there today:
- One with Glenn Kenny over at Wondering Sound, in which PTA discusses the use of music in his films. A couple notable quotes to whet your appetite:
“A lot of the time we were shooting stuff that was silent. So there was a ton of stuff during dailies [where] there wasn’t a lot of dialogue. So it was very easy to plug the iPod into the speakers and kind of navigate around, whether it was Chico Hamilton again, or weirder stuff. A lot of the songs I kept playing, like ‘You Go To My Head,’ or ‘Two Blind Loves,’ some of which ended up in the movie, some of which didn’t. I remember particularly loving the feeling of ‘Two Blind Loves,’ and just having the knowledge of that song really was useful. There was one classical piece that I can’t remember now, that I’d play during the rushes, and even though it didn’t end up in the movie, it ended up informing how I shaped the mood of one of the beach scenes. So it’s always useful to play with material even if it doesn’t end up being used.” (One song used to startling effect is “Slow Boat to China,” sung in full by Philip Seymour Hoffman at the end of the film.) “What can I say? Nothing. Except maybe that I’d trade all my screenplays for a writing credit on that song. My ex-old lady Fiona [Apple] sings this song better than anyone.”
And when Kenny asked PTA whether Pynchon was a major influence behind the "Wise Up" musical sequence in Magnolia, the answer he gave might surprise you...
I asked Anderson if Pynchon was perhaps a subterranean influence on the “Wise Up” scene in his third feature Magnolia, in which stanzas of Aimee Mann’s mordant song are voiced by a procession of the film’s suffering characters. “I have to say, if I ever get a do-over on Vice, I would work a Pynchon song into it,” Anderson answered. “As for Magnolia, if I had a do-over for that, I might take the singing out. I know people like it but I’m not sure the movie’s better for it. I could have gotten to them frogs falling a little faster without it. I don’t know that I had Pynchon in the back of my mind when I did it, I just thought, ‘This is a good idea.’”
Read the whole interview in the link posted above these quotes.

A great interview with PTA turned up in Filmmaker Magazine, which the author was kind enough to pass along to us. Here's a great quote from the man himself:
"The only thing I ever really look at in movies is the actors. Obviously there are great movies with great production design and that kind of stuff, but… it probably comes from my first movie, where I realized early on that I didn’t have any money and I was telling a small story, but what I did have was these great actors, which ended up being the most important thing you could have. I remember talking with Jack Fisk on There Will Be Blood about needing money to do special effects, and he said, “We’ve got the best special effect there is, we’ve got Daniel Day Lewis!” And he was right. A nice two-shot with two actors performing great dialogue, that’s a staple of the movies of the ’30s that I love the most.
I don’t fetishize ’70s movies the way some people do. I love them, but my models are those ’30s films, and I’m always trying to emulate that. Sometimes you can’t – sometimes you try to get things in one shot and you realize you’re forcing the staging, and you have to own up to the fact that it’s not working. You always have to keep an eye on it to make sure that your visual ideas aren’t affectations, and that you’re not just adhering to some kind of dogma. But when you can make that kind of thing work naturally, it’s just the best."
You can read that entire interview here.

And now, kids, the countdown to Inherent Vice's wide-release begins: 27 days.

Join the film on Twitter at @seeinherentvice

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
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Flashback Friday: Watch Hour-Long Press Conference For "There Will Be Blood" With PTA & DDL


Above is an hour-long press conference for There Will Be Blood from all the way back in 2008 (centuries ago, right?) featuring both Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis, for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

We'll have another post later this evening with a Vice roundup. Stay tuned for that.

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