Paul Thomas Anderson
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With His “Disrespectful” Remix of Pynchon’s Vineland, PTA Mastered the Art of Adaptation
Adapted Screenplay. It’s often an afterthought: an extra category on the Oscar ballot, an edge in your betting pool. Unlike the rest of the Academy, screenwriters get two shots at an award: one for original screenplay, one for adaptation. If you haven’t sacrificed your career to the cruel gods of screenwriting, “adapting” may seem less … impressive. Isn’t it easier to have a well-paved Autobahn to guide you, rather than hacking your way through virgin story wilderness? Can’t you just “cut-and-paste?” Do we need a whole other category for that? I’ll stop there before the WGA revokes my card. Every […]
by John Lopez on Jan 28, 2026 -
DP Michael Bauman on “One Battle After Another”
For the first time since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a movie with a contemporary setting. To do so, he used a film format dormant for the last half century. Anderson’s One Battle After Another continues a resurgence of VistaVision that now includes The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Bugonia. The format, which uses 8-perf 35mm traveling through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to create a larger negative, gained popularity as a non-anamorphic widescreen alternative in the mid-1950s. It was used for everything from Biblical epics (The Ten Commandments) to musicals (White Christmas) to […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 8, 2026 -
Revolutionary Sounds: Sound Editor Christopher Scarabosio on “One Battle After Another”
Christopher Scarabosio only needed 15 minutes to start dreaming. The supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer was jet-lagged, drifting between trips to London, when writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson asked him to watch the first hour of One Battle After Another. The dialogue was rough, the score spare, but even in that stripped-down state, Scarabosio was astonished at what his longtime collaborator had put on the screen. There were imposing semi-trucks darting across a bypass; fireworks lighting up the night sky; car chases and shootouts across Southern California. When the projector shut off, Scarabosio only had one question for the filmmaker: […]
by Jake Kring-Schreifels on Dec 22, 2025 -
Deep Cuts: Licorice Pizza Editor Andy Jurgensen
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films can all be described as “episodic” in various ways—some more explicitly than others. Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Inherent Vice are divided into subplots and adventures, but even more austere character portraits (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread) have a “and that’s when this happened…” bent. But Licorice Pizza, which follows the tumultuous flirtation between 15-year-old actor/entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and wayward 20-something Alana Kane (Alana Haim) against the backdrop of early-1970s San Fernando Valley, is the first to adopt a memory-based style, in which various sequences flow into each other like a series […]
by Vikram Murthi on Jan 18, 2022 -
For Licorice Pizza’s Christmas Release, Some Theaters Left Out in the Cold
For art-house movie theaters, already struggling during the pandemic, the wide expansion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s critically acclaimed Licorice Pizza on December 25 was seen as a godsend. When the film opened in late November in just four locations, it generated the year’s best per-screen average (at $83,852) and continued to show staying power in its subsequent weeks in limited release. But last Tuesday, just as theaters were starting to promote their Christmas opening of the film, United Artists Releasing pulled it from hundreds of locations, inciting at least one exhibitor to cry “bah, humbug!” Originally set to be released […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Dec 15, 2021 -
Grace of My Heart, Hard Eight and Mallrats: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
I’m a big fan of anything and everything written and directed by Allison Anders, but I’ve always been particularly fond of her 1996 musical Grace of My Heart. A magical blend of the kind of intimate behavior-driven filmmaking Anders is known for with the scale and resources of a big studio movie, it’s one of the most generous films I’ve ever seen in terms of how much it gives its characters (all of whom are presented with deep empathy and respect) and the audience. The heart of the picture is the richly detailed story of a singer-songwriter (a fantastic Illeana […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 6, 2020 -
“I Wanted to Do for Adam What Demme Did for David Byrne [in Stop Making Sense]”: Steven Brill Talks About Directing Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh
Adam Sandler may have chosen to title his Netflix stand-up special Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh as an impudent jab at the critics who consistently trash his comedies, but it’s garnering the actor some of the best reviews of his career. (As I write this, it’s not quite 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes — just an impressive 92%.) That’s deservedly so, given that the special contains Sandler’s funniest and most wide-ranging material in years. The act, written by Sandler with an assist from Paul Sado and Dan Bulla, veers back and forth between razor-sharp observational material, unapologetically juvenile (and hilarious) obscenity, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 19, 2018 -
Watch: Phantom Thread Camera Tests with Paul Thomas Anderson Commentary
Paul Thomas Anderson gets super-technical about the stocks and lenses used in these Phantom Thread screen tests. Includes an in-character food fight between Daniel Day-Lewis and Lesley Manville.
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 4, 2018 -
Watch: Paul Thomas Anderson, Production Assistant, 1992
Paul Thomas Anderson held a Reddit AMA today, where the subject of a video from 1992 came up. In the video, Anderson wanders the set of the Robert Conrad movie Sworn to Vengeance, asking various crew departments about their work and which one is the most important while generally being very snarky and making Clinton jokes. It’s a fun curio.
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 16, 2018 -
Clothes Make the Man: Costume Designer Mark Bridges on Phantom Thread
His last narrative feature, Inherent Vice, focused on disheveled hippies in 1970s Los Angeles. With his latest, Paul Thomas Anderson has swung to a wildly different milieu. Phantom Thread concerns Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) — a near-monomaniacal designer working during couture’s greatest age, the early 1950s — and Alma (Vicky Krieps), the young woman who is sucked into his orbit. With Anderson goes his longtime costume designer, Mark Bridges, here given a dream assignment: not only to design his own couture visions but also to dress the entire world that surrounds them. The film is about an artist, and Bridges’s […]
by Farran Smith Nehme on Dec 14, 2017
