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Compelling, flawed characters. Ensemble casts. Masterfully chaotic stories rooted in universal
themes. Visual innovation. Technical competence. An overall strong vision and auteur-like control.
These are some of the characteristics that, in my mind, make Paul Thomas Anderson one of,
if not the best, director of the last 20 or so years.
Before we get started I think it is important to note that usually in this series I tend to
feature directors who have undergone a greater change in the level of budget that they work with.
With the exception of his early work, Anderson has mainly stuck to producing work around the $25 to
$40 million range and has never ventured into the realm of studio blockbusters.
Nevertheless, let’s take a look at three projects which have been
made at increasing budget levels: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza.
In doing this I hope to give a sense of the trajectory of his career,
his approach to filmmaking and how some of his methods of production have both remained the same
and slowly shifted throughout his career.
“I was way too young to be given the keys to the car
I think. I wrote it because I had to because it just came out.”
Anderson’s interest in making films began in his childhood in the San Fernando Valley
and continued throughout his teenage years. He would write,
direct and then film his ideas for shorts with his father’s Betamax video camera.
He attended Santa Monica College but quickly became disillusioned with film school when he felt
his ideas and experimentation were discouraged and filmmaking was turned into homework or a chore.
Instead he started working as a production assistant on sets in LA
and managed to cobble together $10,000 from a combination of money for college,
gambling winnings and his girlfriend’s credit card to produce the short film Cigarettes & Coffee.
He managed to cast Philip Baker Hall, an actor he greatly admired due to his work
on Secret Honor - a film made by one of his greatest influences, director Robert Altman.
“Yeah it was based on stuff. I’d been working in Reno. I’d spent some time up in Reno and I was
coming off experiences there of watching old guys. I loved this actor named Phillip Baker Hall, still
love him and I heard his voice as the character. I just started writing and that’s what came out.”
He would continue this writing process throughout his career. Many of the films he would write
were based on life experiences he had and set in locations that he would frequent or had lived in.
He took these experiences and places and created narrative arcs and settings with them.
At the same time he often filled in the characters based on actors that he wanted to work with
and wrote the roles with certain actors in mind.
Cigarettes & Coffee did very well. It got into the Sundance Short programme.
When Anderson decided to turn it into a feature length film he also got into
the Sundance programme in order to develop it.
It was there that he secured funding for the feature version, titled Sydney,
through Rysher Entertainment all while in his early 20s. He was so young that some
crew members on the set initially mistook him for a production assistant instead of the director.
“You know I just bluffed my way through directing. You gotta understand that at that time
probably based on the success of Pulp Fiction and a couple other small independent films
there was a lot of cash floating around from these cable companies. So if you could make a
movie for under $2 million they could kinda sell it off piece by piece with just enough
genre elements and a couple cast names and you could just go make your movie.”
So, with an independently funded $2 million low budget he set
out to make the film by squeezing the production window into a narrow 28 days.
He cast the film by scooping up some well known actors on the tight budget
and shot it all on location.
Due to the tight schedule they had loads to shoot, particularly for the casino scenes
which they had to squeeze into night shoots from 10pm to around 8am the next morning.
To shoot a lot in the small window it helped that Anderson always had a very clear idea, visually,
of how he wanted to capture the film, and no time was wasted with extraneous shots or deliberation.
To execute the cinematography he hired Robert Elswit,
who at the time was probably the biggest name crew member on the project.
They quickly found that they complimented each other and had similar visual sensibilities.
Robert Elswit “Paul doesn’t need a lot of help in certain areas. I understand his taste,
maybe so it’s never a surprise. I can anticipate what he wants to do for the most part.”
“He always has a visual style before he starts. Always. I mean it changes
to some extent but it’s completely thought out. Nobody is more prepared.
Nobody has really thought through pictorial style as completely as Paul.”
This style included explorative camera movement - often done on
a Steadicam - and slow dolly tracking. Elswit lit with moderate contrast ratios,
exposed the actors well and used hard light in a naturalistic way.
Even though both loved the look of anamorphic lenses, the producers prohibited it due to
budgetary reasons. As a compromise they shot Super 35 Kodak film stock with Panavision cameras and
lenses in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio - an aspect ratio he would often use in his later films.
Rather than giving loads of direction to performances, or ‘manipulation’ as he called it,
he tried to instil the feeling of what he wanted to the actors before production and
cast all the parts exactly as he wanted them. As the cliche goes - most of acting is about casting.
When it came to editing he worked with a similar methodology. He doesn’t like cutting everything
up too much and instead prefers to keep the performances intact and pull from limited takes.
When he submitted his first two and a half hour cut of the film,
friction between him and the production company ignited over final cut. Rysher Entertainment
cut it down, changed the music, titles and even the name of the film to Hard Eight.
As a final compromise, the company said they would be happy to release Anderon’s version of the film
if he came up with the funds himself in order to finish it. So, he used all the
money he had from a recent deal he had signed for his next film Boogie Nights to finance post
production and cut it the way he wanted to -and agreed to give up his original title Sydney.
Paul Thomas Anderson used the modest budget to secure a solid cast of big name actors to draw in
an audience, produced the relatively small scope story over a limited 28 day production window,
saved money on production design and by shooting Super 35 with an experienced DP,
and eventually won out the creative battle for final cut.
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“I went into my next situation thinking that the lesson I learned was to be paranoid, protective
and don’t trust anyone. Fortunately I got to work with a great studio and a guy named Mike De Luca
who was able to see what I’d gone through and said ‘No, no. Trust me and put your faith in me.”
Let’s backtrack a bit. Anderson first came up with the idea for his second film Boogie
Nights when he was 18. He wrote and directed ‘The Dirk Diggler Story’,
a 30 minute mockumentary about the golden age of porn.
“After I made the short film I wrote as a sort of full length documentary taking a
kind of Spinal Tap approach, you know. But by the time I’d finished that, that format
had kind of been worn out and done many times. I just kinda figured the way to do this is to
go nuts and just make it straight narrative. I eventually had a shooting script of 186 pages.”
The eventual script looked at the rise and fall of a character in the 1970s porn scene
and examined the idea of addiction, ego, surrogate families and communities.
Like Hard Eight, he wrote the script with certain actors in mind - including performers that he had
worked with prior on Hard Eight. And set it in the San Fernando Valley, an area he had grown up with
and was familiar with. It featured an ensemble cast, inspired by the work of Robert Altman.
“Casting and writing are kind of the same thing. Because I write parts for
actors that are my friends or actors that I don’t know that I really want to work with.”
With a buzz starting to go around about the script and while in post production on his first film,
New Line Cinema came on board to produce with a $15 Million budget
and promised a more hands off approach.
As it was a lengthy script that was larger in scope and needed
the casting of many well known actors, the budget increase was still a bit stretched.
After their positive experience on Hard Eight, Elswit was again hired as his DP.
Elswit remarked that from the first location scout Anderson would outline
the kind of shots he wanted. That detailed level of specificity helped them to save time
and money, since it was a lengthy, ambitious film for its budget level.
This vision was also important when coordinating and communicating some of the complex long takes
that Anderson had in mind. The most famous of which was probably the opening shot of the film,
where a Steadicam operator started on a ride on crane,
which boomed down, gave the operator a chance to step off and then track characters into an
interior - introducing the audience to the space and world of the film in the first 3 minutes.
“These long, complicated tracking shots are really fun to do. I think the actors love
them. Movie acting is sort of so pieced up and chopped up. Very rarely is action called and
3 or four minutes later their scene happens. It’s just kind of fun for them to really
act something through and let it breathe. Let it happen.”
Due to the arduous nature of the shot the main steadicam operator Andy Shuttleworth had a backup
Steadicam operator as they had scheduled doing this 1 shot over an entire night.
Eslwit lit the exterior scene with two strong, hard backlights and some
smaller units which were meant to mimic street lights which were metered at a stop of T2.8.
Inside the club his team rigged the lowest budget 70s-style disco lights they could find overhead
to keep all film lights out of the shot. This was brighter at T/4.
To maintain an even exposure across the different lighting levels Elswit used a wireless iris motor
to slowly move the aperture remotely, going from T/ 2.8 outside to T/ 4 as the camera moved inside.
This time they had the budget to shoot with anamorphic lenses.
They used Panavision C-series and pretty much shot the entire film with 3 lenses.
A 40mm and 50mm for wider frames and a 75mm for close ups.
Anderson disliked heavy film grain so they shot on Eastman 100T 35mm
film stock - the slowest practical speed stock they could find.
Like on Hard Eight Elswit liked to observe the natural light and then augment it with
additional fixtures. To do this he would take stills on slide film during location recces,
which had a limited dynamic range and therefore clearly showed what the natural light was doing.
He’d then come in and accentuate the natural light by, for example,
using large tungsten lights through windows for day interiors to mimic sunlight.
Overall, the budget was spent on a large ensemble cast, re-creating the 1970s period
scenes in the film, over a longer production schedule with many scenes in a long script
which were shot innovatively with more extensive technical gear.
After a career of producing almost non-stop critically acclaimed work
Anderson turned to the 70s and, again, the San Fernando Valley for his next idea.
“I had a story that wasn’t exactly mine but that paralleled mine. My relationship with
Gary Goetzman, who I don’t know if many of you know is a producer. Gary worked in the Valley.
He was a child actor. When that didn’t really work out he started a waterbed business.”
“The stories he told was an opportunity to enter into a world that I remember very well.”
Again, his script pulled from his own experiences, in a setting he was familiar with,
with dialogue and characters written for specific actors, or first time actors, that he had in mind.
Having worked many times with Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the past,
he turned to his son to play the role, who, although it was his first film,
gave a more realistic, understated performance than Anderson saw in the other castings.
This was paired with an on screen chemistry with another first time actor,
Alana Haim, who Anderson had shot music videos for in the past.
The long screenplay with its many scenes meant he needed a budget
of around $40 million - which was supplied by MGM.
In the build up to the film Anderson decided to shoot lots of tests - partly to find a look for
the film and partly to see if his two leads had enough on screen chemistry for the movie to work.
This was a luxury that the higher budget afforded
him - compared to Hard Eight that had to be shot in 28 days.
During these tests they also looked at different lenses and pushing and
pulling different film stocks until they settled on the look they were happy with.
After parting ways with Elswit after many films together,
Anderson had developed an unusual way of working without a dedicated cinematographer.
He, along with key technical crew members, such as his Gaffer Michael Bauman,
camera operator Colin Anderson and key grip Jeff Kunkel all put their skills into a
giant pot and shot a project without having a director of photography as a department head.
This worked due to the director’s technical
prowess and track record with his experienced team of collaborators.
This was first done on Phantom Thread, which they shot in the UK
and repeated on various music videos.
However, when it came to shooting in the US they needed to have an officially credited DP due to
union requirements. So, Anderson and Bauman shared the official credit of cinematographer
while they continued working in the same collaborative style as before, with Anderson
providing a visual direction and his key crew offering their input and technical execution.
“Because we’re shooting in California you’re kind of required to have someone listed as the
cinematographer versus when we were overseas…The workflow is a very collaborative environment.
He and I kinda worked very closely with Colin Anderson who is the camera operator. You know,
they’ll formulate a shot, the two of them will, and he and I will have done preliminary scouting
and talk about the lighting and then on the day we’ll execute what the plan is.”
Like with many of his films, they mainly shot on vintage C-series anamorphic lenses from the 70s.
After doing extensive tests they chose a set of Cs which included three different 50mm lenses
each with different characteristics which they picked from depending on the situation or shot.
Anderson has always been passionate about not only shooting on film
but even screening the dailies, the raw footage, projected using 35mm.
Andy Jurgensen “One of the things that we do is that we do film dailies. We watch dailies while
we are shooting. On set we have a space that we work out of that we can project film. It’s me,
it’s the camera department, the core team of the camera department basically department heads
would come in and out. We use that process to figure out takes we’re going to use.”
Overall, Licorice Pizza’s larger budget offered the director more time and resources to fine
tune his vision by doing extensive camera tests, location scouting and tests with actors before
stepping onto set. This resulted in a final film which utilised extensive shots with
vast period correct backgrounds, shot with a curated selection of technical gear,
stunts, and an ensemble cast which included some big name performers.
Certain aspects of Paul Thomas Anderson’s way of working as a director have remained consistent
throughout his career, such as: writing scripts based on his personal experiences with ensemble
casts which are ratcheted up by chaotic actions, shooting on 35mm film, often with anamorphic
lenses, working with a small, consistent crew, focusing largely on casting and then letting
actors do their thing, and creating innovative visual languages based on camera movement.
However, the more established he has become,
the more he has also been able to take his time to create the films, with more extended
production schedules and more time for testing and finding the look before production begins.
After the departure of Elswit, his methodology has also shifted away from
the traditional route of working with a credited cinematographer,
to a collaborative working style where he leans on the expertise of his crew department heads.
Despite these changes, his films always have a recognisable tone and style that
ties them together despite the genre, script or subject matter of the film.
Thanks to everyone for watching and a special
thanks to all the supporters of the channel on Patreon.
Let me know down in the comments what other directors you’d like to
see featured in this series. Otherwise until next time, thanks for watching and goodbye.