Paul Thomas Anderson
When Paul Thomas Anderson was seventeen, he made a short film called The Dirk Diggler Story (1988). Anderson – born in 1970, in Studio City (no less), California, the son of ABC network voiceover man Ernie Anderson – had made his first homemade film at eight, and been given his first camera at twelve. He spent his adolescence lugging around a Betamax, forever videotaping his friends. He made a host of parodies, knock-offs, goof-offs and in-jokes, growing up behind the camera. In his final year of high school, he upped his ambition, making a thirty-minute mockumentary about a fictitious porn star, parodying Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story (Julia St. Vincent, 1981), a softball documentary about 1970s porn’s, um, biggest star. The Dirk Diggler Story was juvenile and ridiculous, but it sowed the seeds for Boogie Nights (1997), a dazzling, over-the-top spectacle that announced Anderson’s arrival as a generational filmmaking talent, receiving three Oscar nominations and becoming a breakout success. Anderson was twenty-seven at the time.
Boogie Nights wasn’t even Anderson’s debut. That was Hard Eight (1996), a movie that he made at twenty-five, but had written the initial story for when he was in high school, inspired by a minor character – Sidney, played by Philip Baker Hall – in the otherwise-forgettable action-comedy Midnight Run (Martin Brest, 1988). After dropping out of film school at New York University, Anderson found minor jobs on the fringes of the entertainment business. One of these was as a personal assistant on a PBS movie starring Hall. Anderson eventually handed the actor a script for a short film called Cigarettes & Coffee (1993). Being plied with unsolicited scripts is par for the course in Hollywood, but Hall immediately knew this wasn’t an ordinary piece of writing. ‘I was wondering, Who was the first actor in the seventeenth century to see a Shakespeare script, and did he know what he was reading?’ Hall would recount. ‘I certainly knew what I had in my hand.’
While stories of Paul Thomas Anderson, boy prodigy, add to his myth, they’re gladly not the definitive narrative of his career. Many prodigious young talents burn bright then flame out, but with his acclaimed, impressive run of films – with nary a misstep among them – Anderson is now comparable to those movie obsessives who started young and grew into towering auteurs, filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese who were once his heroes.
Boogie Nights may’ve served as Anderson’s breakout, but it was only a beginning, and his filmography has deepened as the director has grown older. After the over-the-top melodrama of the epic Magnolia (1999) and the Adam Sandler–starring hijinks of Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Anderson would slow down, maturing as he made a pair of new-millennial masterpieces – There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) – that explored grand ideas about American identity, the founding of nationhood, the corruption of organised religion. He followed that up with a stoner-philosophical noir riff, Inherent Vice (2014), adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same name, and a drawing-room relationship drama about a fashion designer and his muse in 1950s London, Phantom Thread (2017) – each latter-day Anderson film feeling like not just an event, but its own discrete work, even its own world.
‘There’s nothing worse than somebody saying I want to do something that’s a departure,’ Anderson joked upon the release of , but reassured audiences that even his departures should be welcomed. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, bringing the total of Oscar nominations across his filmography to twenty-five. He’s, personally, been nominated eight times, including for both writing (for , , and ) and directing (, ). Anderson is an exemplar of the American auteur, writing his own screenplays and bringing them to screen with a distinctive vision. He’s renowned for continuing to shoot on celluloid and for the ambition and daring of his compositions. Anderson dropped out of film school because he felt that he’d already learnt so much from watching movies, and his own films feel like
