Interview: Robert Ebert Q&A

Roger Ebert Q&A With Paul Thomas Anderson
October ?? 1997


Chicago, October 1997 - Paul Thomas Anderson has made one of the best films of 1997, and at age twenty-seven is getting the kind of attention no young director has had since Quentin Tarantino erupted. His Boogie Nights, which follows a cast of colorful characters through six eventful years in the adult film industry, is the year's best-reviewed film - a hit at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals.

Although the film's subject matter is touchy, Boogie Nights is not a sex film; porno supplies the backdrop to a traditionally structured Hollywood story about an unknown kid (Mark Wahlberg) who is discovered by a director (Burt Reynolds), encouraged by an older actress (Julianne Moore), and becomes a star - until his ego and drugs bring everything crashing down.

Interview: "A 27-Year-Old Director Tackles 70s Sensibilities"

Seattle Times, Written John Hartl
October ??, 1997


Paul Thomas Anderson wasn't even born when the 1970s began. Yet he's written and directed a 1970s epic about the California porn industry, "Boogie Nights," that is drawn partly from his own experiences growing up in the San Fernando Valley.

"I have strong and distinctive memories of the Valley, from my pre-adolescence and adolescence," said the 27-year-old filmmaker by phone from New York, where the picture played the New York Film Festival. It opens today at the Neptune and Lewis & Clark theaters and moves into 2,000 theaters Oct. 31.

"The Van Nuys industrial section had large warehouses, with people walking in and out of them who were not there to pour concrete," he said.

"I remember I was about 10 or 11, when across the street from my grandmother's house appeared this van and lights, with a lot of shady-looking people hanging around." He even recalls someone saying "They're shooting a porno movie over there."

Interview: "Lights...Camera...Hold it, Hold it; Would Someone Please Reattach Mark's Member, Please...And Action!"

Esquire Magazine, Written By Mim Udovich
October 1st, 1997


It's a movie we saw. It's a movie you're going to want to see. It's a movie that made us want to talk to the director. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is twenty-seven, and Boogie Nights, a truly awesome piece of moviemaking starring Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, and Heather Graham, is his second feature. (The first was the indie Hard Eight) Set in the porn industry of the late seventies, this is a movie that even the Motion Picture Association of America can't help loving. "When I first started talking to them, they said, `No, no, no, we want it to be an NC-17 The rating has been ruined for us with Showgirls out there in that Showgirls way. This would really help us,'" says Anderson, who has, as he contracted to do, delivered an R. "I actually called Oliver Stone, thinking, Here's someone who's been through this and can maybe give me some advice. But it was kind of hard getting advice out of him, because all he wanted to talk about was the hypocrisy of America. Actually, he did end up calming down and being helpful."

Interview: "A Little Nights Music"

Entertainment Weekly, Written By Chris Willman
?? ?? 1997


Twenty-seven-year old director Paul Thomas Anderson didn't grow up to the superhits of the 70's, but he's built a monument to them with his Boogie Nights Soundtrack.

Having handpicked 40-odd songs for the soundtrack to his pornland epic Boogie Nights, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson got nearly everything on his period-pop wish list. Only one songwriter asked to see the film before giving permission to use his tune: ELO-meister Jeff Lynne, whose "Livin' Thing" provides an It's alive! punchline to the scene where smut star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) finally comes to terms with his...gift. "Jeff said, 'I have two young daughters, and I have a problem with sex and violence in movies. Should I see this?' So I screened it for him," chuckles Anderson. At the climax, rather than fleeing, Lynne leapt up, fists raised, as ELO kicked in post-prosthesis. "He said, 'I don't like sex and violence in movies, but this is the most brilliant f---in' movie ever!'"

Interview: "Boogie Might"

Toronto's Eye Magazine, Written By Alex Patterson
September ??, 1997


Director Paul Thomas Anderson gets down and dirty

Minutes before I'm due to call the director of the nostalgic comedy-drama Boogie Nights, a gaggle of Jesus freaks start some kind of revival meeting right outside my apartment. They are unbelievably noisy -- these folks may be doing God's work, but they're doing it with Satan's amps -- so I yell at them, "Lower the volume, damn it, I've got to talk with a guy who just made a movie about the porno business in the '70s!"

That guy's name is Paul Thomas Anderson, he's 26, and Boogie Nights is only his second feature. His noir-ish debut, Hard Eight, earned critical respect but sank without a trace earlier this year. But Boogie Nights won't be so easily ignored. Not only is it drenched with good old S-E-X, it features a star-making performance by Mark Wahlberg (the artist formerly known as Marky Mark) as a kid who makes it big by... well, making it big.

Interview: "Splay Misty For Me"

Details Magazine Interview With Paul Thomas Anderson
September ?? 1997


The Director of this year’s most controversial movie, Boogie Nights, gets his money shot.

Studio City, California, 1979. Late at night, in the darkened family room of a ranch home, a sandy-haired nine-year-old stands in front of the TV, his drop-jawed face illuminated by the flickering images. Gripped by arousal and fear, he keeps an eye on the door and a finger on the stop button of the VCR, which unspools The Opening of Misty Beethoven, a tape he has just discovered in his father’s porn stash. In such moments are obsessions born.

Eighteen years later, Paul Thomas Anderson is in a dim Cuban restaurant in Los Angeles, recalling that moment. Unshaven and wearing a rumpled blue oxford, Anderson looks more like a residential adviser in a freshman dorm than a guy who has just finished directing one of the year’s most anticipated – and controversial films.

Interview: "15 Minutes With The Prodigy"

Girls On - Claire Magazine
Fall 1997


I get 15 minutes. A short amount of time considering my hours of preparation for this interview--up since six a.m., writing out questions, rehearsing, calling Lise ("is that question too obnoxious?"). I come to his jazzy uptown New York hotel 20 minutes early, armed with a recorder, five 90-minute micro- cassette tapes, extra batteries, notebook, four pens, Boogie Nights production notes. Then I sit in the lobby like a dick, not thinking to call his room, testing my recorder for the thousandth time. After half an hour, I finally call, and his assistant appears to usher me to his suite.

I walk in and see that this guy is young. Like 26 or 27 young. And not only did L.A. native Paul Thomas Anderson write and direct Boogie Nights, he also wrote and directed a flick that I recently caught on video and loved, Hard Eight, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Philip Baker Hall. I'm a little star-struck, frankly. But he's just sitting there, all casual and sweet-looking and poised, smoking his Camels. He's kind of thin, with glasses and not-so-recently-washed-looking hair. Regular clothes--khakis, a button-up shirt (not oxford, though). But I notice he's wearing one of those super-hip G-Shock watches. Mmm-hmm. Mental note: wearing G-Shock. This is going well.

Interview: French Premiere Magazine

French Premiere Magazine, Written By Aviva Brooks
April ??, 1998


"I'm nothing more than a movie fanatic who started watching movies at 5 and who decided that it was going to be his job." His favorite film is oh! French and oh! It's Truffaut's Shoot the piano player !

"Between the age of 15 and 18 I only watched Truffaut's and Godard's films. Between 18 and 21, when you acquire a taste, I started watching films from Renoir, Clouzot, Max Ophuls,.."

A thin bespectacled man, PTA "didn't find anything else" to do than making movies. Boogie Nights is his second feature film - which has been a big success for an independent movie- after Hard Eight and a short film which was a fake documentary about John Holmes, the porn actor.

Where does Dirk Diggler come from ?

Interview: "Writer Created From Sundance Project"

Seattle Times, Written By James Hartl
March 3rd, 1997


In Robert Altman's Secret Honor (1984), Philip Baker Hall did a dazzling impersonation of Richard Nixon that dwarfs Anthony Hopkins' recent caricature in Oliver Stone's Nixon.

More than a decade later, he's getting his second shot at a big movie role in Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight, an enigmatic four-character film noir that opened in theaters Friday. Hall plays a veteran Reno gambler named Sydney who adopts John (John C. Reilly), a down-and-out young stranger, for no apparent reason. Gwyneth Paltrow is Clementine, a cocktail waitress who marries John, and Samuel L. Jackson is Jimmy, a crook who complicates their lives.

When he first saw Altman's film on television, Anderson was a music-video production assistant and dabbler in short films. He bought the video of the movie and decided he had to work with Hall.

"I thought, 'This is a brilliant performance,' then for the next 10 years I saw him crop up in roles that weren't good enough for him,'' said Anderson by phone from a California editing room.

"He's one of the great undiscovered actors. The kinds of parts he plays tend to go to Gene Hackman or Robert Duvall. A lot of those kinds of actors are seriously underused, and no one knows they're out there."