Interview: "Lights, Cameras, Oscar"

Newsweek
January 26th, 1998


It's January. Have you written your acceptance speech yet? Newsweek's David Ansen and Corie Brown ask some of Hollywood's hottest directors to vent about studios, statuettes and Titanic.

It is awards season in Hollywood, and the only talk is of Oscars. Shall we listen in? Newsweek invited four of 1997's most celebrated directors to a round-table discussion at Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Two of the filmmakers seem sure to get Best Director nominations; one's a long shot and the other doesn't have a chance in hell. Still, from the moment they met they all bonded marvelously. Curtis Hanson, who directed "L.A. Confidential"; Gus Van Sant, who made "Good Will Hunting," and Paul Thomas Anderson, of "Boogie Nights" fame, all exchanged apparently heartfelt compliments. Barry Sonnenfeld, who gave us "Men in Black," arrived enthusing about the movie he'd just seen, "Wag the Dog." The directors posed for pictures, dissing difficult actors and sleazy agents. ("They're just guys who sleep with hookers--it's disgusting," one said about a particular agency.) And then they sat down for the interview.

James Brooks, who directed the highly nominatable "As Good As It Gets," couldn't make it to Hotel Bel-Air, but he called in from Australia to say that one of the highlights of awards season is finally meeting some of his fellow directors. "You're herded into the same parties, you go to the same events," he said. "You get to know each other for the first time." He missed quite an afternoon in L.A. Excerpts:

Does "Titanic" change anything in Hollywood? It cost $200 million, and it's a huge hit.

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?

Interview: "A Natural Porn Director"

Independent On Sunday, Written By Paul Mungo
January 11th, 1998


When Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights was shown at the Toronto film festival last year, it was perhaps inevitable that the young American director would be hailed as the "new Quentin Tarantino". New Quentin

Tarantinos have been popping up fairly regularly in the past few years: the qualifications are a childhood spent in darkened cinemas, youth, and at least one ambitious, quirky film. If the movie features a faded Seventies star on the way back up, so much the better.

Anderson's faded Seventies star is Burt Reynolds, who plays sleaze king Jack Horner in Boogie Nights. And the film, set in the subculture of the hard-porn industry in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was described by one American critic as "the most sensational act of moviemaking so far this year". It was directed by Anderson when he was just 26.

Anderson is 27 now. Despite the light straggle of beard on his chin, he seems younger. He is dressed mall-style, his shirt hanging out over his trousers, and is prone to American teenage expressions like "jeez". He cheerfully describes himself as "a standard-template film geek" who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, with three sisters, his mom and dad. It was, he says, "normal suburbia - except that it's the capital of film production". His only real connection with the entertainment business was through his father, who did voiceovers for TV.

Interview: The Guardian

PTA Interview: The Guardian
January ??, 1998


With all its razzle-dazzle and surface kitsch, Anderson's multi-stranded story of the fuck-film subculture and its murky, neo-Runyon denizens - names like Dirk Diggler, Jack Horner, Amber Waves - could have been pure cartoon. But Anderson knows their world too well for that, having been raised in the San Fernando Valley, LA's capital of porn production.

"It was always there," he remembers. "Bunker-type warehouses with no sign on them near my high school. You'd see people coming in and out and you knew there was something going on. I guess that speaks to anyone's effort to get back to their childhood - what was that shit I was witnessing when I was 11 years old?" The young Anderson knew perfectly well what was going on: he had his first taste of porn aged nine, when he sneaked a look at his father's video of a popular item called The Opening Of Misty Beethoven. He admits he is too fascinated with the genre to have much journalistic detachment. "I've been into it as a consumer, but not as some freak who's masturbating his life away. Probably more of a fascination with the film-making of it than anything else." Boogie Nights has been criticised for romanticising its subject matter - the Modern Review has already attacked it as "Porn Kitsch" - but the film derives its considerable ambivalence from its portrayal of a lost hedonist utopia that crumbles in an apocalyptic final act. Anderson's take on porn is, he admits, equivocal.

Interview: "Blame It On The Boogie Man"

Telegraph Magazine, Written By Ben Thompson
January 3rd, 1998


Can a film about a well-endowed porn star seriously be a hymn to the idea of family ? Paul Thomas Anderson thinks so. Ben Thompson talks to the director.

The cinema has created some unlikely heroes in its time, but few more unlikely than Eddie Adams. Adams, aka 'Dirk Diggler', the imaginary Seventies porn-star whose rise and fall is the focus of Boogie Nights, is a suburban cowboy blessed by nature with a mighty penile appendage. Rejected by his mother, he is plucked from obscurity by benevolent pornographer Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds, who apparently disliked the film so much that he fired his agent for ever signing him up to appear in it) and forms a new and strange set of family attachments within a colourful company of 'adult' film-makers.

As well as the marathon feats of sexual endurance which become his bread and butter, and the copious drug consumption which is the closest the porn world gets to jam, Eddie's odyssey carries him through a dimly remembered Seventies netherworld of great music and terrible fashion. This Day-glo backdrop sustains Boogie Nights through its marathon two-and-quarter-hour running time, and much innocent retrospective fun is had at the expense of such indulgences as the eight-track cartridge player. But the film is no mere kitsch-fest - it's the foreground that commands the real attention.

Although many commentators will doubtless see Boogie Nights as another staging post in the cinema's long descent into terminal decadence, it is actually a rather heart-warming piece of work. People always say that about films that allow us a voyeuristic glimpse into a world normally deemed to be forbidden, but in this case it's true. The film's writer-director, 26-year-old wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson, happily admits to the influence of seamy porn films such as The Opening of Misty Beethoven on his adolescent development, and yet Boogie Nights, which is proving a surprise hit in America, is no laddish celebration. In fact, it's an elegiac history of considerable moral complexity, upon which Anderson turns the observant and playful eye of the child he still was when the Seventies ended.

Interview: "From Here To Houdini's House"

Sundance Online, Written By Saida Shepard
Date Unknown


The Emerging Filmmaker Conversations with Sundance Lab Fellows Paul Thomas Anderson

In January of 1993, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film, a short called Cigarettes and Coffee, screened at the Sundance Film Festival. To make the film, Anderson pooled friends, acquaintances, and resources from his years as a production assistant. Cigarettes and Coffee inspired Anderson’s feature film script, Sydney, which he brought to the 1993 Filmmakers Lab. At the Lab, Anderson took portions of Sydney through a dress-rehearsal process, working with actors, workshopping his script, and learning about film industry politics. Sydney, later renamed Hard Eight, initiated Anderson into the challenge of retaining directorial control amid the promises and pitfalls of The Business.

Anderson’s second feature, Boogie Nights, documents the makeshift family of a porn production empire from the excesses of the 1970s into the changing climate of the 1980s. At twenty-seven, Paul Thomas Anderson has been compared to Robert Altman for his ensemble work, and to Martin Scorsese for his anthropological detail. In this interview, part of a series with Lab alumni, Anderson talks about his start as a director, the lessons he’s learned from making two features, and his plans to make many more: “Either like thirty, if I continue to smoke; maybe forty if I quit.”

Interview: Boogie Nights Screenplay Introduction

Boogie Nights Screenplay Introduction
Written by Paul Thomas Anderson - December 12th, 1997


So here is the script I suppose, technically, was ten years in the making. When I was seventeen - young, impressionable and horny - I wrote a short film called The Dirk Diggler Story. I shot it on video and it was fun and actually pretty good.

What I was doing for the ten years I was trying to write this script? Well, I was actually devising what I think is an interesting method. The short film was a fictionally documentary, basically a Spinal Tap and Zelig rip-off. A couple of years later, when I was nineteen, I expanded the short into a feature, keeping the structure of a fictional documentary. Well, by that time, the format, so wonderfully done so many times, had, in fact, 'been done so many times.'

I spent a couple of years getting over that format and decided to write a straight narrative. So when approaching the first draft, I was basically adapting a documentary. It worked wonderfully for me to have a sort of 'bible' to reference whenever I felt myself getting lost in so many stories and so many ideas.

I want to note a couple of (some obvious) sources of inspiration and would urge anyone who hasn't seen these films to see them as soon as you can. Stop reading this stupid introduction and see these films: Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo), Nashville (Altman), GoodFellas (Scorsese), Singin in the Rain (Donen), Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim (Truffaut), Putney Swope (Downey, Sr.), 42nd Street (Bacon), The Jade Pussycat (Chinn). These are pictures which not only influenced and inspired me to make films but were really templates (all in odd and various stages), massive life preserves in the writing of Boogie Nights.

The script you have in your hands is the one we went to the set with every day. You will see that some stuff is shot exactly as written and you will notice that some stuff has changed. The changes, by a ;large percent, are the result of having brilliant actors who have me, the biggest geek fan of their work, laughing at any and all bits if improv that they could muster. If you hire John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Phil Hoffman, Mark Wahlberg, Luis Guzman, Heather Graham, Bob Ridgely, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Melora Walters, Ricky Jay, Bill Macy, Thomas Jane and Alfred Molina, the best thing to do is sit back and enjoy all that they give.

I've come to realize that my function as a director is to be a good writer. My obligation as a director is to deliver the actors a good script, thus making my job as a director describable as 'hanging out' and watching them go. No good actor needs direction beyond 'Let's do another one' and 'Keep it simple.'

I hope one thing that is clear is that this script is not written like a book. In other words, this is a script not a novel. In other words, there is no description of behavior. In other words, there is not flour and sugar. In other words, this is a script written for actors. An actor does not need a full description of their character. They do not need: 'Angela, thirtyish and hot as hell. I mean real hot, hot like the Noxema girl (if you know what I mean). She walks smoothly and with a flair for the exceptional into the room, and then looks longingly at her hands, remembering that her father once told her, "You're a bad girl,"' This is how most screenplays are written. This sort of thing must be written by writers who have no interest in meeting or socializing with actors. If you have written this and you can find an actress to play this part, as described, you will have a bad actress. Actors do not need this, they do not want it. Don't give it to them; they will not read it anyway. This is writing for studio executives. Studio executives do not make movies. They pretend that they make movies. This is a script written for people who really make the movie, people who physically put it into existence, and all they need are the facts. Pure and Simple.

There are two sequences in the script that are fairly important to the script, but in the end were not very important to the picture. They are Becky/Jerome/Dirk's Car sequence (sc. 138 - 146) and Dirk's return home to Sheryl Lynn (sc. 182 - 185). We shot these bits and they were wonderful, but in an effort to focus the storytelling, I cut them. I miss them only when I see them, but I sure don't miss them when I'm watching the film.

The 'Sequences' that you'll see listed through the script were mile markers for the production crew. It's a system that I formed from ripping off a more complicated system that Preston Sturges devised in structuring his shooting scripts. Each Sequence, marked by letters, usually meant that some very specific piece of music was being used and we should all pay attention to that vibe. It translated into costume design stuff (more color, less color), camera moves (fast, slow, with zooms, high or low contrast, etc.) and a general handle on how the film would structure. Sequence D was our favorite because it was a free-for-all. No matching. No rules. No anything. D for debauchery, D for drugs, D for down, D for do anything.

I wrote three drafts of Boogie Nights. This is the final shooting script. The 'pink pages' (noted with asterisks next to the scene) or rewrites are stuff that I did either right before shooting as a result of something in rehearsals or as a result of budgetary/scheduling conflicts.

A few people to thank for this script and its publication: John Lesher, Joanne Sellar, Walter Donohue, Mike DeLuca, Lynn Harris, Lloyd Levin, Wendy Weidman, Dylan Tichenor, Paula Chavez.

If you liked the movie, I hope you like the script. If you didn't like the movie, this script isn't going to help much.

P.T. Anderson

12 December 1997

Los Angeles, California

Interview: Creative Screenwriting, Paul Thomas Anderson

Creative Screenwriting Magazine, Written By Kristine McKenna
?? ?? 1997


Paul Thomas Anderson introduced himself this year in a very big way. February saw the release of his first film, Hard Eight, a study of four lost souls adrift on the Reno gambling scene that garnered glowing reviews, but was so poorly marketed that it never found its audience. Just eight months later he hit a home run with his second film Boogie Nights, a two-and-a-half-hour epic chronicling the shifting fortunes of the pornography industry during the years of 1977 to 1983. Set in the Fernando Valley, where Anderson was born in 1970 and continues to live, the film features an ensemble cast that includes Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, William Macy, and Alfred Molina.

Interview: People/AOL Transcript With Don Cheadle

People/AOL Chat Transcript: With Don Cheadle
November 17th, 1997


Quentin Tarantino, move over. The latest entry in the Cinematiste Enfant Terrible competition? Twenty-six year old Paul Thomas Anderson whose second film, Boogie Nights is now playing at a theater near you. Anderson began his career working as a production assistant on assorted television movies, videos and game shows in Los Angeles and New York. His first short film, Cigarettes and Coffee proved a hit at the 1993 Sundance Festival - allowing him to rework the concept into the feature-length Hard Eight , a strangely compassionate, character-driven story about hustlers in Nevada. Boogie Nights, Anderson's second movie, continues his fascination with people on the fringes. This time out his camera is focused on the mom-and-pop entrepreneurs of the adult film industry in Los Angeles circa late-seventies/early-eighties. Despite its controversial subject matter, the film has opened to rave reviews.

PEOPLE Online talked to Paul Thomas Anderson - as well as Don Cheadle who plays Buck in Boogie Nights - on November 17. Here's what the two of them had to say.