Paul Thomas Anderson on What Makes a Movie Great

Slowly, cautiously, vaccinated to the nines, we are returning to some of the basic pleasures of ordinary life. A few nights ago, my wife and I went to our local movie theatre, a multiplex with huge screens and blaring sound systems. I love all of it: the coming attractions for horror flicks I’ll never see and for spy films I wouldn’t miss; the chattering crowd; the Brobdingnagian snacks; the adhesive floors. Our choice for the night was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” a film set in the San Fernando Valley of the nineteen-seventies. It’s about the strangeness of being young, the experience of becoming a human being and shaping a self. The fractured narrative is wised-up and sly, but also winningly sincere. It’s been a long pandemic, and this was an exhilarating reminder of what joy is like.

Anderson is fifty-one, and he has been making movies since he was an adolescent. He is a Valley kid, and he’s never really left those suburban streets. His first features—“Hard Eight” and “Boogie Nights”—came out when he was in his mid-twenties, and, ever since, he has been the sort of artist whose new work is always an event. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tom Cruise, Melora Walters, Julianne Moore, and Joaquin Phoenix are among the veteran actors who have appeared in his best films, which include “Punch-Drunk Love,” “Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master,” and “Phantom Thread.”

Anderson rarely speaks to reporters. I was reminded of that when I got on a Zoom call with him the day after seeing his movie. His square was not indicated by his name but, rather, “Mason & Dixon,” a sign of his admiration for the reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon. (Anderson made a film of Pynchon’s novel “Inherent Vice.”) I spoke with Anderson for The New Yorker Radio Hour; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. He was speaking from his home in the Valley. And, since he has set “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” and, now, “Licorice Pizza” in that territory, I began the conversation by asking him why the place resonates so deeply for him.

I love it. It’s as simple as that: it sort of begins and ends there. I can remember being a kid and thinking at a certain point, probably in my teen-age years, I’ve got to get out of here. “Out of here” being over the hill, not in the San Fernando Valley. Maybe that’s L.A., maybe that’s New York, maybe that’s London, maybe it’s Shanghai—whatever it is, I have to get out of here.

But I’m one of those people who loves to get away for twenty-four hours and then I start getting itchy and thinking about home. I just want to come back home. I’m one of those homebody-type people. I’m comfortable here. My family’s here, my friends are here. It’s a place I keep returning to. Whatever ambition you have to spread your wings, I always find myself returning here. After London, when we were making “Phantom Thread”—it was a dream of mine to be able to work there—but when I got back home, I was just so thrilled. The Valley is not the prettiest place in the world, it’s not the most cultured place in the world, I understand that, but it’s home.

When I was a kid, I’d listen to late-night radio and watch late-night television, and everybody from California would make jokes about the Valley. I didn’t know what that was. What was the joke? What is the Valley in a spiritual sense and in terms of the landscape of your youth?

It’s funny—I wonder if Johnny Carson might’ve contributed to that because he would always say, “Beautiful downtown Burbank!” It may not be beautiful. And there is no real downtown. . . .

I mean, the San Fernando Valley—what is it? It’s a flat space between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Santa Monica Mountains. Its primary reason for existing, at one time, was farmland. And, famously, there’s the story from “Chinatown” of how water was diverted from the Valley.

It’s a suburb. And the suburbs seemed to always come in for a beating. I’m not quite sure why. When I was first writing “Boogie Nights” when I was a teen-ager, there was a terrific story in my own back yard. I didn’t have to go far. I didn’t have to make things up. I could do the research, learning more about these people in this industry, but it was familiar to me. At some point, I probably read that I should “Write what you know.” That’s a good place to start. This work is hard enough. So why am I struggling to try to learn something that’s beyond my grasp or that doesn’t speak to me?

“Licorice Pizza” centers on two characters. One is Gary Valentine, played by Cooper Hoffman, a teen-age guy who is incredibly charismatic for his age. He’s a small-time actor. He starts a water-bed business and then a pinball palace. His patter, his bravado, is amazing for somebody fifteen years old. He falls for a girl, Alana Kane, played by Alana Haim. She’s much older than he is. She’s in her mid-twenties, with a thwarted life but an inner intelligence that’s also magnetic. How is that rooted in your experience? If you’re writing what you know, what’s the germ of the story of “Licorice Pizza” for you?

I was the second of four [children], so I had an older sister and she had older friends. She is a good two, three, four years older than me. And a buddy of mine had an older sister. So, we just sort of happened to fall in the cracks so that, when we were fourteen, fifteen, these were girls that were around us—our sisters’ friends—were eighteen, nineteen. And they had cars! So, every waking hour was devoted to trying to get them to drive us somewhere! And behind it was trying to flirt with them or hang out with them or get noticed by them in some way that was more than just being an irritating little brother.

I can remember having a couple of friendships with some of those girls who I met along the way. They were just friendships, but they were fantastic. They were fantastic just because they were just friendships, you know? To have a friendship with a just slightly older woman, who wasn’t your sister—I had a toe in a version of the adult world or what started to feel adult just because of the transportation that they had.

Maybe the greatest assertion of power and age difference in the movie is not the erotic one but the driving one. At one point, Alana is driving not a car but a truck, and she’s driving it at one point backward at full speed down a hill, down into the center of town. [Gary is her terrified and thrilled passenger.] This is high drama. It’s better than Grace Kelly driving at top speed along a mountain road in the South of France with Cary Grant.

That sequence that you’re referring to is a catchall for any number of episodes that were either that dangerous or slightly less dangerous. And they happened particularly in Southern California because it’s such a driving community. We are slaves to our cars. We love them. Especially at that age—your whole life was dedicated to getting a car somehow. And the kind of trouble that you found yourself in as a result was usually vast; you look back and think, I cannot believe I made it out alive. So, that sequence taps into those episodes. At the time, you just think it was just hilarious fun, but with a little bit of distance you realize it was really life-or-death.

We see on the screen a title card. And it announces that this production is by Ghoulardi Film Company [Anderson’s production company]. This name is something with incredibly deep meaning for you and your family, and it’s rooted at home, in the San Fernando Valley.

My father—his name is Ernie Anderson, and he was originally from Boston. After the war, he came back and was a radio d.j. in Vermont, and he ended up in Cleveland, Ohio. He was on the ground floor of some television programming that was happening there. He created and was the host of one of those classic late-night horror shows. And his character’s name was Ghoulardi. [The show ran on WJW on Friday nights, from 1963 to 1966, and was an influence on everyone from Drew Carey to the Cramps.] He wore a fake Van Dyke beard and sunglasses with one lens popped out. His job was to introduce these horror films and show the kids a good time. Ghoulardi was an incredibly popular character locally in Cleveland. [My father] eventually came to Southern California, to the San Fernando Valley, and worked as a voice-over announcer with ABC, he did lots of different commercials. He became the booth announcer for “The Carol Burnett Show.” But Ghoulardi always kind of followed him around for anybody who was in Cleveland at the time. The list is surprisingly long—there were amazing people who were children in Ohio at the time, from Chrissie Hynde to Jim Jarmusch.

One time I went back to Cleveland with [my dad]—I must’ve been about seven or eight years old—and we got off the airplane and it wasn’t two steps into the airport before he was mobbed by people who recognized him. It was just this incredible thing to see your dad, who was not famous in any way in my life that I had here [in the Valley] with him, be this superstar of Cleveland television.

I’ve always thought of writing as something that you can do, or imagine yourself doing, simply because you have a pencil and a piece of paper. It’s a great deal harder than that, but you have the instruments to do it. You have the self to do it. And nothing else is required other than, well, genius or talent. To make movies, you can’t be St. Francis of Assisi. You have to be a field general in some way. And yet you started making movies when you were really young. You were twenty-six when “Hard Eight” came out, twenty-seven for “Boogie Nights.” How did you know you could do it? How did you put yourself forward?

My mother likes to say that I didn’t start directing when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven—that I started directing when I was four or five years old. She tells these stories about how I would get everybody together and organize these shows.

I loved to make films as soon as I could. I was lucky enough to be wanting to make films when it became much easier because the camcorder, the home-movie camera, came around. Steven Spielberg was the shining star, but he was working in Super 8, so you’re actually cutting the film, splicing it or cementing it together. I had this device, this home-movie camera. It was huge and cumbersome, but you could immediately see the results. You could immediately put something together. You could learn rapidly. You could make a horrible movie one day then not a bad one the next day and then another one and then another one. You were able to keep practicing.

I was so young when I made my first film, but I was incredibly self-conscious and prepared. I was prepared because I knew I was the youngest person on the set and I didn’t want to let everybody down. There were a lot of people around me who’d been doing it for ten, fifteen, even twenty years. I really didn’t want to be the reason why we slowed down. I’d already worked as a P.A. on so many film sets, so I was aware of what made a good film set work and what didn’t. It was always a matter of communication. I was the person who was there helping to get coffee, knowing that no one knows what’s going on. Everybody is bumping into one another. A film set can get like that. I could see examples of why something was running smoothly; there’s a good line of communication. You don’t have to be screaming. Yes, there’s a dictator, but it can be a benevolent dictator. It doesn’t require this kind of mythological, screaming, chaps-wearing, bullhorn thing. It’s just about organization and communication. You can have fun doing it and be kind and get it done.

You read about Hitchcock, who had everything mapped out, storyboarded, every shot prepared. Meticulous. The film is almost pre-edited. Then there’s someone like Jean-Luc Godard, who’s improvising, writing the script for the day that morning, and there is a kind of haphazard, or seemingly haphazard, way of going about it. Your films always have a voice. I rush to see them because I always know I’m hearing from you in the most personal way, whether the film is set in London or in the San Fernando Valley—stories of radically different kinds. How much of that comes out of the writing? Is the writing the most crucial element of the creative process for you?

It all begins and ends with the writing. That’s an exaggeration, but the point of that is to say that, if the writing is good, you’ve got a very good shot at making a good film—or you’ve got a good shot of making your day. You’ve got some clarity that you’re walking into the situation with. And the reason you know is because when you write a scene that doesn’t work, you generally spend way too much time trying to do it. You spend too much time reshooting it, rewriting it, trying it a hundred different ways. And then you realize this thing doesn’t belong in the film.

I love writing. It’s the most important part for me. Because if it’s good and it’s happening, I’m that much more comfortable on a set or that much more comfortable waking up each day, going, Great, I’m looking forward to shooting the scene.

And you know that going in?

Most of the time, you know. Sometimes you think, This is the greatest scene that we have in this movie. And then something tells you, No, you don’t need this. I mean, that’s the trick. It’s like, after this many years, you’d think you’d be able to spot it quicker. Actually, this time I had some scenes that I wrote that just were not working. And I would say to Alana and Cooper, “What if you didn’t say any of this dumb dialogue that I wrote and you just walked and silently looked at each other?” And it was great. We’d have this magical thing. And it was a classic example of too much dialogue—enough with the writing!

Cooper Hoffman is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Alana is Alana Haim, who until now has been best known for HAIM, her band, with her two sisters, Este and Danielle. There’s a certain audacity in picking those two as lead actors for a major film. Until now, we knew Cooper Hoffman mainly as a “son of” and Alana Haim as a musician. Why’d you choose them?

I swear if you were in my position, the question would be, How could you not choose them? I happen to know them. I knew Alana certainly had the talent and the competence from her years as a performer. I knew Cooper had the heart and the soulfulness. It was unclear whether he could really—you can never know if someone’s going to have that kind of talent in front of your eyes. Or when you turn on a movie camera and they become, like, Pee-wee Herman in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” when he’s staring into the camera or mouthing the other person’s line. I mean, it’s always possible—believe me. But the more that we read the script together and hung out together and really investigated this as a real possibility, it just seemed like a far less complicated choice than you might imagine. It was looking for two authentic, genuine people who can’t hide their emotions. And here they are right in front of me, and they want to learn, and they want to try really hard, and they don’t want to let me down. They don’t want to let themselves down. How could we not do this? This is just gonna be, at its best, a wonderful experience for all of us.

So, they were the choices from the start? There were no auditions?

There was no audition for Alana’s part. That was what I had set my mind on. . . .

You’d done music videos with her.

Yeah, many, many. I’ve worked with her and her sisters for a number of years now. I contacted them because I liked the music and I offered my services. And I have a collaboration that extends beyond the music videos. I love them as a family. I love their music. And so, we’re very intertwined that way.

As a matter of fact, the experience that I’d had making the music videos really informed the type of film that I wanted “Licorice Pizza” to be. We were always running around the streets of the Valley. We had no money. We had no time. We usually had about ten people on the crew, probably five sometimes. And they were the happiest days I’ve had shooting—so immediate. And they’re such great collaborators; I feed off their energy. And it was that energy that was getting into the [“Licorice Pizza”] script.

There was a traditional casting process when it came to the Gary character, the one that Cooper plays, probably because, well, it’s just how you do it. I guess I was sort of playing by the numbers. Maybe there’s a kid out there and I can find him. That went on for quite a long time, unsuccessfully. I mentioned Cooper’s name to Alana, Danielle, Este, the three [Haim] sisters. They talk all the time, these sisters. They’re always talking all over one another. And when you say something that lands, well, they all stopped talking and they kind of looked at me and said, “Maybe that’s a good idea.” I got their attention. And so we began that process, in a way, of auditioning Cooper.

How did they know him? What was he bringing to the party?

They know him because I know him. I’m as close to him as I can get while I live in Los Angeles and he lives in New York. They had been introduced to him five or six years ago. He came to town and I was looking after him and I had to go off and take care of something. So, I said, “Babysit him. Hang out with him for a minute.” And they did. And they were as taken by him as everybody is that meets him, this incredibly personable, charming, empathetic, unique person.

The last four movies prior to this, you worked with Daniel Day-Lewis, twice, and Joaquin Phoenix, twice—two astonishing, experienced actors. They know what they’re doing, to say the least. Your stars here are both superb, but they’re relative rookies. How does that change the way you work with them?

Well, it’s different for sure. It’s different in some of the silliest, most basic ways. Somebody that’s been doing it a long time knows how to pace themselves physically, emotionally, in the course of sixty-five days. It would have been very natural—and I could see that the amount of nerves and concentration and energy that they were putting into this—that they could have burned out quite easily.

I had to take them through each step of the process and give them enough time to prepare. I said, “You have to learn this script inside and out, because there won’t be any time to learn the script while we’re in the middle of it. It’ll be like we’re skiing down a mountain at a hundred miles an hour.”

You get to the basic things, like, especially with Cooper—he’s sixteen, seventeen years old. Have you eaten breakfast? Have you had a snack? Are you tired? You really do have to take care of them in that way.

Did you have to bring a juice box to the set?

Exactly! Here’s a juice box and some string cheese! But it was much more about the pragmatic pieces of what it means to go to work each day over a period of time. The emotional parts, the words and the characters that they were playing, that was there. It was clear to them. One of the most beautiful things to watch was the difference between day one and day three, the difference between [day] three and day five.

You worked with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cooper’s father. I hesitate to ask this question because it might be somehow off or vulgar, but do they resemble each other in any way? Both as people and as artists, as actors.

There’s a physical resemblance, sure. But what I think is nice is that Cooper is really his own person. He’s got his mom’s eyes and his mom’s smile. And from time to time he turns his head and he looks a lot like his dad. But working with Phil was like working with Daniel or Joaquin. They had been doing it for so long that they had figured out the business of acting and movies.

His character is an incredible, lovable schemer. And you have that in other films of yours—charismatic, morally complicated strivers like William H. Macy or Tom Cruise in “Magnolia,” Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood” or “Phantom Thread.” What draws you to characters like that, these schemer types?

It’s funny. It isn’t until you finish writing the movie, making the movie, and come out to promote it when it gets framed like that. And you go, I am?

I don’t think I know. I’m not just being silly. I think it’s just a natural gravity toward characters who, because of their nature, will supply good dramatic situations, preferably comedic situations as well. What’s nice about Gary’s ambition is that it’s the ambition of a teen-ager, which is very, very large but only lasts about fifteen or twenty minutes. So, that’s ripe for good dramatic and comedic possibilities.

I can’t imagine an Oscar ceremony this coming year without seeing Alana Haim as a central figure in it. Her performance is a knockout, and, again, she’s doing it the first time out of the box. Yes, she’s a performer, a musician. She’s been onstage a million times. But how does this happen?

I think the answer is that some people have a gift. Daniel Day-Lewis has a gift. Joaquin Phoenix has a gift. Phil had a gift. Some people can make words explode out of their mouths on a movie screen so that it appears that they have just been formulated in their mind and their heart. And they can do it all while they’re walking and talking, you know? It’s, like, weird. I’m drawn to people who can do it well, because it’s a certain type of magic trick.

And then you say, Well, wait. Is it magic? Or is it just this full-blown gift that some people can do it? I was very concerned because there’s a long history of film directors who thought they were seeing some brilliant performance in front of their eyes when, in fact, they were, like, blinded by some light or something and missing some crucial component. I would constantly check in with the guys that I was working with around the camera. I’m like, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing? I knew she’d be good, but she’s just, like, she’s so unpredictable and she’s so scary, but you can wrap your arms around her. She’s, like, all of these things at once.”

You aren’t making Marvel films, you’re not making “The Fast and the Furious” franchise films; on the other hand, you aren’t making tiny-budget indie movies, either. You’re making films for adults on a midsize budget. Is Hollywood treating you well? How are you looking at the landscape of the business these days?

Boy, it warms my heart to be able to tell you that I feel happier than ever working in this business. I’ve got my own little corner of the sandbox and am working with people that I really admire, like at M-G-M. I’m incredibly happy right now. But that’s me. There’s no end to the kind of sky-is-falling questions that always surround films, and what’s going to happen.

Obviously it’s gotten even more complicated with streaming and the sort of overabundance of superhero movies. Most of the stuff I don’t take too seriously. I mean, it seems that there is a bit of a preoccupation with superhero films. I like them. It seems to be something that’s popular these days to sort of wonder if they’ve ruined movies and all this kind of stuff. I just don’t feel that way. I mean, look, we’re all nervous about people getting back to the theatre, but you know what’s going to get them back in movie theatres? “Spider-Man.” So let’s be happy about that.

I saw movies of that kind when I was a kid and still do, but I wonder, if you were a twenty-seven-year-old making your first films now, would you be in better shape in this environment? The environment of Netflix and streaming and all the rest, or the environment you grew up in?

That’s a great question. And I’ve thought about it a little bit lately. There’s a lot of money out there right now for people to make movies. When I started making films, there was a lot of money out there for a window of time, and it was home-video money. If you could make a movie for, let’s say, a million and a half, two million dollars, keep it under three, and you had a couple of genre elements, there was the home-video component to making a film that needed to be fed. Which is essentially the same as streaming—call it home video, VHS, whatever you want to call it. It’s something that gets into your house and gives you entertainment, right? So the playing field hasn’t changed that drastically, you know? There’s some money out there.

Now it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Because there’s so much stuff. I am one of those people who spends an hour looking at the menu and then I’m exhausted.

And you watch the Dodgers instead.

Right. I go watch the Dodgers. Like, I knew that there were three titles that had been recommended to me, let’s say by a critic that I respect, and I’ll think, I should really see that. But by the time I get around to it, I get so lost in the menu, I’m frustrated and I say, Screw it. But it requires a viewer’s participation to get up off the couch and go search these things out. I think the audience has become quite lazy as well. They’re shovelling tons and tons of shit out at us all the time, so you don’t know where to look. But, then again, audiences are now getting lazy. They’re saying, “I don’t know when it’s important for me to get up off the couch—you guys have made it impossible for me to figure out.”

I know there are probably at least ten movies that I haven’t seen this year that I want to see. The fall movies come around and I simply haven’t found the time or I simply haven’t made as good an effort as I could have. I dedicated six hours to Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” this weekend, and I was thankful for that. It’s incredible. And I’ve still got two more, three more, hours to go.

Are you interested at all in making things for television?

I wouldn’t say no, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. I had this conversation with Quentin [Tarantino]: I think neither one of us has a problem with writing material. Sometimes the problem can be cutting material, you know? Sometimes you’re in the middle of writing something and you have way more than you need and you go, Well, maybe this should be a TV show, you know? That’s not the solution. The solution is not to just use a lot of B-material and make a longer-form thing. The solution would be cut down, get to your good material, tell your story properly and make a film. So, I’ve never thought about it in a very serious way. I don’t watch a lot of it, so I don’t know exactly how it works. The structure is something I’d have to learn, you know. I don’t mean to sound like an idiot. Of course I’ve seen episodic television, but there’s a rhythm to that writing and a structuring of how you pull a story over multiple episodes, which at this point would be a huge learning curve. The people who do it, do it incredibly well. I think I’d feel a little bit like a tourist trying to step into that.

I can’t help asking you, what is the last movie that you’ve seen that you adored?

Oh, my God. You’re putting me on the spot. I’ve seen so many things. What was the last movie? I just finally saw “The French Dispatch,” which I really liked.

I have one for you! I can’t believe this. I found a movie called “The Good Fairy,” a Margaret Sullavan movie that Preston Sturges wrote. [A 1935 romantic comedy, directed by William Wyler.] As much as I love doing this work and I love movies, I’d never even heard of it until a couple of weeks ago.

Those are great recommendations. I hope you’ll be glad to know that Richard Brody’s top movies of the year just came out and your film and “The French Dispatch” were the top two.

I just read Richard’s review of our film and I’m still sort of processing it all. I’ve had good reviews in my day, but this one might take the cake for how, what the film means to me and how he wrote about it. An old cold black heart like mine kind of warmed up a little bit. It’s pretty great.

I just finished reading the dialogue between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, a book-length interview, in which Truffaut was asking the questions of Hitchcock. Is there a filmmaker so central to you that you’d want to have that dialogue?

Did you ever see the Kevin Brownlow documentary called “Hollywood”? It was made in [1980] and is a multipart series on the silent era. And what’s amazing about it is that, in 1980, most of those people were still alive. He filmed everyone from film directors to stuntmen and movie stars, reminiscing about the beginning, the real beginning, like, 1917. I was reading [the cinematographer] Billy Bitzer’s autobiography recently; he’s talking about coming out from New York with D. W. Griffith and getting started. That kind of stuff has really been getting me emotional. I knew a little bit about it, but you realize that you could spend your whole life dedicated to it and still not know much of anything. I think back to any of those silent-movie-era filmmakers, whether it’s D. W. Griffith or Raoul Walsh; even Howard Hawks started in silent films. So talking with anybody who was on the cusp, between the silents and sound, would be interesting. I’d love to hear those stories, have those conversations.