I came to production design as someone who has always loved movies.  I also loved art, design, architecture and photography, so discovering that I could have a career that combined all my loves was one of the greatest moments of my life.   I have a realism-based approach to filmmaking — most of the worlds I create are fictional, but within the context of the film my goal is to make them feel real, grounded, worn, authentic. If a director wants a stylized or surreal approach I would need to find a way to dirty it up and add imperfections to […]

This one’s zippy: a two-minute supercut of close-ups of objects and gestures in Boogie Nights, mostly the former. Taken out of context, a formidable amount of art direction and fetishistically shiny framing comes to the forefront. Entitled “Boogie Nights — Close-ups, Objects etc.,” this is the first video uploaded to the Vimeo channel of Justin Barham, who notes, plaintively, “If I knew people were going to actually see it I’d have given it a cool title.”  

This 1998 interview with Paul Thomas Anderson has been online for a while; credit to The Seventh Art for finally bringing it to my attention. Talking with fellow director Mike Figgis after only two features under his belt, a supremely unfazed Anderson eats pizza while holding forth on Boogie Nights‘ origins as a short film equally inspired by Zelig and This is Spinal Tap, shares a lot of opinions about inadequate porn performances, discusses a written-but-never-filmed sex scene for Don Cheadle’s character, and generally shows almost no self-consciousness about saying whatever he wants. Emblematic of the era sentence: “I was actually with Quentin Tarantino the other […]