Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson (10th feature, TBA)

Started by Montclair, September 21, 2021, 09:35:17 PM

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ono


RudyBlatnoyd


pynchonikon

"Joel sets the bar high, and I wanna keep..." is what I hear.

RudyBlatnoyd

As in, Joel Coen (who he just worked with and whose movie he is promoting in that interview) has set the bar high.

ono


RudyBlatnoyd

Washington is a fine actor and also one of the most charismatic screen presences going, so if he does work with PTA that would be very exciting.

I'd love to see him work with Tom Hanks, too. And Isabelle Huppert. And, well, lots of gifted actors.

pynchonikon

Listening to the way he's talking about the magic of "lack of cell phones" and how fascinated he is by the endless potential of period setting in the recent podcast of Increment Vice, I would be not surprised at all if he will never make a contemporary movie ever again.
(I can't decide if it's "I'm just feeling more intrigued and comfortable on a period setting", "I can't figure a truly interesting and compelling story set in the present" or a bit of both)


Pringle

It's probably a lot more fun, and a lot more creative, to do a period piece. You get to do research and you get to pull from personal memories and from movies and art that you've seen from those time periods.

RudyBlatnoyd

Yeah, if you're lucky enough to be able to get the budgets and the creative freedom to depict distant time periods on screen, it must be hard to resist the temptation.

Montclair

Quote from: Montclair on December 28, 2021, 11:30:30 PM
Quote from: PaulElroy35 on November 29, 2021, 10:58:27 AM
Quote from: Montclair on November 29, 2021, 02:20:37 AM
After seeing "Licorice Pizza" I'm even more excited for his next film! If this fun movie with an obsessive attention to period detail is the result of him taking a break in between writing a difficult script -- I can't wait to see the movie that springs from the script he was having trouble with. I just hope that he casts real actor's actors this time in all of the roles.


So you didnt like Alana and Cooper then?

It's not that I didn't like them, I just felt their performances were pretty good, not great. Which I've never felt before in a PTA movie.


Quote from: Drill on December 21, 2021, 09:08:49 PM
Was going to post this in the "actor/directors who mention PTA" thread but where there's smoke...

https://twitter.com/bloodsimpIe/status/1473397511557582850

Quote from: pynchonikon on December 21, 2021, 11:54:15 PM
I choose to believe that this is definitely not coincidental.

I wonder if this means they're talking about that jazz movie Tiffany Haddish mentioned? That entire "Get Thee Behind Me Satan" by Ella Fitzgerald sequence in The Master is one of my favorite PTA moments ever, so imagine a movie filled with that music!

His next film will either be with Denzel or Leo or Joaquin. I guarantee it.

RudyBlatnoyd

I think that PTA has actually made two conscious deviations in his career so far. The one that's often mentioned is how he left behind the attention-seeking pyrotechnics post-Magnolia. But something else he seems to have shied away from since The Master is the kind of self-consciously IMPORTANT, sweeping epic that There Will Be Blood and its follow-up represented.

Perhaps he felt it would be too easy to succumb to the Kubrick comparisons and allow his movies to all develop elephantiasis? Since Inherent Vice, he seems to have deliberately chosen to rein in those impulses and consider the possibility of a different, more eccentric auteurism. I think this had made for a more interesting career trajectory. In Phantom Thread and LP, in particular, there's a very detectable note of healthy skepticism towards that sort of 'Great Man' narrative that he seemed to find more appealing 10-15 years ago. Both those films are certainly engaged in deconstructing that narrative, but they're still to some extent fascinated by it, but I'm not so sure that's where PTA's mind is at nowadays.

I do wonder if late style PTA will be increasingly small stakes and intentionally marginal in structure, theme and style. I'm not sure that another TWBB type of film is on the menu, but then what do I know!

Montclair

I disagree, I think another TWBB, The Master style epic is what's next. I mean, Phantom Thread was a period piece costume drama with sweeping orchestral music starring Daniel Day Lewis, doesn't get more IMPORTANT than that. It was like the weirdest/best Merchant Ivory movie that they never made. Punch Drunk Love was a light workout in between the heavy lifting of Magnolia and TWBB. Licorice Pizza was a light workout in between the heavy lifting of Phantom Thread and what's next(the challenging project he abandoned when he decided to quickly do LP instead).

Drenk

I wouldn't describe both TWBB and The Master as "epic" pictures. Yes, they burned a fake oil rig for TWBB, but it is mostly a very quiet movie in a no man's land.
Ascension.

pynchonikon

If you think that TWBB was actually his last film that partly explored the father-son dynamic, a plot device that seemed to really interest him and defined his work in the first phase of his career, you might indeed be into something, RudyBlatnoyd.

RudyBlatnoyd

It's hard to articulate exactly what I mean. There's a sort of devil-may-care, invigorating scrappiness to his films post-Master, in some ways, that wasn't ever quite there before. I guess it's a product of TWBB and TM feeling like the works where he set out his stall as the 'pre-eminent American filmmaker of his generation', and now he doesn't feel the need to prove himself in that way, and even seems to be a little disenchanted with that kind of Kubrickian / Fordian seeking after perfection and the Great American Movie. Not to get into spoilers, but contrast the ending of TWBB – which makes a very definite statement, albeit in a brilliant way, tying up the film's thesis – with the ending of LP, which is something else entirely (the more I think about it, the odder an ending it seems).

Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of saying that I think he just keeps getting more intriguing as a filmmaker.