LA TImes, Written By Patrick Goldstein
December 12th, 1999
Move over, Mr. Coppola. Take a seat, Mr. Scorsese. It's time for the next generation of film directors to shake things up, in the spirit of the French film rebels of yore.
Not long after his second movie Boogie Nights arrived on a crest of critical accolades, director Paul Thomas Anderson was asked to dinner by Warren Beatty. "I told him I'd love to go," says the brash 29-year-old director, who'd flirted with casting Beatty as Jack Horner, porno king of the San Fernando Valley, a part ultimately played by Burt Reynolds.
"But I told him, 'We're going somewhere public, a really brightly lit place where everyone will see I'm having dinner with Warren Beatty.' "
Beatty took him to Mandarette, one of the star's favorite eateries. While they were having dinner, Francis Ford Coppola stopped by to visit. Coppola offered Anderson a piece of advice. "This is the one moment when you have it, when you can do whatever you want to do," the director told him. "It's the one moment when you have a clean slate, with no stigma attached. And even if your next movie makes $400 million and gets eight Oscars, you'll still have to fight battles that you'll never have to fight right now. So whatever you want to do, do it now."
