53 Hidden Details And Behind-The-Scenes Facts From Paul Thomas Anderson's Movies
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
I don't know about you, but I'm already eagerly awaiting Paul Thomas Anderson's next film (whatever and whenever it may be).
TIFF / Via giphy.com
To tide me over, I started rewatching Punch-Drunk Love (my favorite PTA movie), and ever the trivia junkie, I started looking up some behind-the-scenes info, which snowballed into looking up behind-the-scenes info for all of his films.
Sony Pictures
Here's some of what I found out:
1.As of early 2022, Anderson has directed nine feature films.
Hard Eight (1996)
Boogie Nights (1997)
Magnolia (1999)
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
The Master (2012)
Inherent Vice (2014)
Phantom Thread (2017)
Licorice Pizza (2021)
2.Most of Anderson's movies are set in the past.
Boogie Nights, Inherent Vice, and Licorice Pizza all take place in the 1970s; The Master and Phantom Thread take place in the 1950s; and There Will Be Blood takes place at the turn of the 20th century.
Magnolia also includes numerous scenes that take place decades earlier.
3.Like Wes Anderson (no relation), Paul Thomas Anderson has collaborated frequently with the same people.
This includes cast and crew.
4.Between the two of them, Jon Brion and Jonny Greenwood did the scores for eight of Anderson's nine films.
Brion did Hard Eight, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love, and Greenwood has done every film since There Will Be Blood.
5.Aimee Mann also performed or contributed music for the first three of Anderson's films.
6.Mark Bridges has served as costume designer on every one of Anderson's movies.
He also did the costumes for I Heart Huckabees, The Artist, and Joker.
7.All nine of Anderson's movies have been produced by Daniel Lupi, who was also an EP on Us, Her, and Lincoln, to name a few.
8.Lupi's fellow producer JoAnne Sellar has worked on each of Anderson's movies, minus Hard Eight.
She also worked on The Wicker Man and The Anniversary Party.
9.Casting director Cassandra Kulukundis has also worked on every PTA movie except Hard Eight.
She also did casting for Ghost World, Art School Confidential, and the Gossip Girl reboot.
10.Actors Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, and Melora Walters all starred in Anderson's first three films.
11.Luis Guzmán appeared in Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love.
12.Philip Seymour Hoffman improvised most of his scenes in Hard Eight.
13.Burt Reynolds turned down the role of Jack Horner in Boogie Nights seven times.
He told Conan O'Brien it "just wasn’t [his] kind of film" and "made [him] very uncomfortable."
14.In fact, Reynolds hated the film so much he fired his agent after seeing it for the first time.
But plenty of other people loved the movie and his performance — he ended up getting an Oscar nomination and winning a Golden Globe.
15.William H. Macy didn't need to audition to play Little Bill.
He told Jason Reitman: "I got the script through the normal channels. I think I was still with CAA then, and the script was even more outrageous. I said, 'Is this a porn film?' There was actual shtüpping in it! Then I met with Paul and, the actors in the room will love this, I decided I wanted to do it and met with him at the Formosa Café, and it was about 10 minutes in when I realized he was selling me. I wasn’t there to audition for him; he was trying to convince me to do it, and it was one of the great moments of my career."
16.Actual adult film stars appear in small roles throughout Boogie Nights.
The judge in the scene where Amber and her husband are in court fighting for custody of their son is played by Veronica Hart, and Little Bill's wife is played by Nina Hartley.
Amber Hunter (aka Lil' Cinderella) also has a small cameo as Colonel's friend, Summer Cummings and Skye Blue both play girls in the jacuzzi, and Lexi Leigh plays a member of Floyd's entourage.
17.Mark Wahlberg kept the prosthetic penis he wore to play Eddie.
He told Ellen DeGeneres: "It’s in a safe locked away. It’s not something I could leave out. All of a sudden, my kids are looking for a spare phone charger and pull that thing out and go, 'What the heck is this?!' It wouldn’t be a good look."
18.Tom Cruise was such a fan of Boogie Nights he specifically asked Anderson to cast him in his next movie.
His portrayal of Frank T.J. Mackey ended up earning him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.
19.Anderson was inspired by Aimee Mann's music to write Magnolia.
In fact, Claudia's line "Now that I've met you, would you object to never seeing me again?" is taken directly from Mann's song, "Deathly," which opens with the lyrics "Now that I've met you, would you object to, never seeing, each other again?"
20.Mann's music is also literally seen in the movie.
The CD jewel case Claudia snorts cocaine off of is Mann's album, I'm with Stupid.
21.If you think Magnolia is too long, you're not alone.
Anderson himself told Marc Maron in 2015: "I'd slice that thing down. It's way too fucking long. It's unmerciful how long it is."
The movie is over three hours long.
22.Pat Healy plays two separate pharmacists in Magnolia.
He's in the first scene as the pharmacist who gets murdered, and later appears as the pharmacist Julianne Moore's character yells at.
23.Thomas Jane was also supposed to play two roles, but due to scheduling issues only appeared as a young Jimmy Gator.
Jane told AV Club: "I wanted to work with Gene Hackman, so I took this Gene Hackman film [Under Suspicion], but the schedule overlapped into Magnolia, and so I couldn’t play the two parts in Magnolia. I had to only play one. Paul never forgave me. And the movie with Gene Hackman, of course, has been totally forgotten."
24.Anderson wrote Punch-Drunk Love with Adam Sandler in mind.
25.After seeing Magnolia, Sandler wasn't sure if he could actually work with Anderson.
He said on the SmartLess podcast: “I went alone, and it was sold out, and I was in the front row, and I was looking up at it, and I was fucking terrified,” Sandler said, adding that he thought, "'Oh this guy is fucking better than me. I don’t want to fucking be in this. I’m going to ruin his movie! Holy shit!'"
26.Sandler wasn't the only one doubtful about his casting.
JoAnne Sellar told Indiewire: "[Anderson] was a huge Sandler fan, and I was just befuddled. I just didn’t get the whole Adam Sandler thing at that stage. I mean, the Saturday Night Live stuff, yes, but the movies that Adam had done weren’t for me. As a British person, I didn’t really get the humor. But Paul just kept saying, 'Oh my God, he’s so great!' And he completely made me change my mind about Adam."
27.In Punch-Drunk Love, the first time Barry goes to the grocery store, an out-of-focus character in red clothes is seen following him.
It's Emily Watson's character, Lena. By this point, they haven't met yet, but as she explains later in the movie, she saw a photo of Barry on his sister's desk, so would have recognized him in the store.
28.The cuts on Barry's knuckles after he punches his office wall spell out "love."
29.According to Jon Brion, Anderson wanted Punch-Drunk Love "to feel like a musical but nobody ever breaks into song."
30.The song "He Needs Me," heard when Barry and Lena meet in Hawaii, is originally from the 1980 live-action adaptation of Popeye.
31.There Will Be Blood star Daniel Day-Lewis was a fan of Punch-Drunk Love.
32.Day-Lewis listened to oral histories from the turn of the 20th century to nail down Plainview's voice.
33.Day-Lewis' speech about building schools and bringing bread to Little Boston was improvised.
34.Paul Dano originally was only supposed to play Paul Sunday.
Kel O'Neill had been cast in the role of Eli Sunday, but after filming what was supposed to be Dano's single scene, Anderson asked him to play Eli as well, pivoting the brothers to be identical twins.
35.The story about O'Neill's departure changes depending on who you ask.
A New York Times Magazine story from November 2007 said there were "reports that [he] suffered from intimidation" because of Day-Lewis' method acting and ended up quitting.
However, O'Neill told Vulture in 2017 that he was fired after a few weeks, though there doesn't seem to be clarity on why.
36.The film The Master was partially inspired by L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology.
Anderson claimed that when he showed Magnolia star — and perhaps the world's most Scientologist — Tom Cruise The Master, the actor "had issues" with the film.
37.Joaquin Phoenix's parents were briefly members of the Children of God cult.
38.Freddie's first lines in The Master — and the opening lines of the whole movie — were improvised by Phoenix.
39.Inherent Vice was Anderson's second time adapting a novel.
The first was There Will Be Blood.
40.Inherent Vice is also the first film adaptation of one of Thomas Pynchon's novels.
41.For a while, Robert Downey Jr. was attached to play Doc.
Joaquin Phoenix was ultimately cast, and Downey Jr. told GQ: "I think [Anderson] told me I'm too old. Which I love when people tell me."
42.Inherent Vice originally didn't have a narrator.
43.Inherent Vice was the first of Anderson's films that Maya Rudolph, his wife since 2001, appeared in.
She played Petunia Leeway.
44.Rudolph inspired Phantom Thread.
He told Metro: "I was very, very sick in bed one night. And my wife looked at me with a love and affection that I hadn’t seen in a long time. So I called Daniel [Day-Lewis] the next day and said, 'I think I have a good idea for a movie.'"
45.Daniel Day-Lewis once again employed his meticulous method acting to play Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread.
He worked with New York City Ballet Costumes Director Mark Happel for a year to learn dressmaking. Day-Lewis even recreated a Cristóbal Balenciaga — who Reynolds was based on — gown by hand.
46.According to Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread is his final film.
Just a few months before the film was released, he announced he was retiring.
47.Anderson specifically didn't want Phantom Thread to look like a certain Netflix series.
Gaffer Michael Bauman told IndieWire: "One of the first things he said was, 'Look, this cannot look like The Crown.' That was a big thing. When people think of a period movie, it becomes this beautifully polished, amazingly photographed — I mean The Crown looks beautiful — but super clean, gorgeous light, and he was clear it couldn’t look like that."
48.Jonny Greenwood earned his first Oscar nomination for the Phantom Thread score.
49.The term "licorice pizza" is slang for LP vinyl records.
It was also the name of a music store chain ultimately bought by Sam Goody in the mid-'80s.
50.Anderson wrote the role of Alana Kane in Licorice Pizza specifically with Alana Haim in mind after directing music videos for her and her sisters.
51.Philip Seymour Hoffman's son Cooper was cast after Anderson had trouble finding a trained actor who could match Haim's energy.
Licorice Pizza was both Haim and Hoffman's first film.
52.Haim and Hoffman had met years before starring opposite each other.
She and her sisters babysat him, though she told Variety: "He hates when I say 'babysat' because he was 13 and didn’t need a babysitter."
