4 Things We Learned About 'Inherent Vice' and Paul Thomas Anderson
Today’s New York Times delves into the making of Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 stoner-detective novel — and a movie that’s been largely shrouded in secrecy. Among the revelations:
It was influenced by classic slapstick…
Pynchon’s ’70s-set novel is essentially a shaggy-dog travelogue about Doc Sportello (played by Joaquin Phoenix), a private investigator who ping-pongs around Los Angeles, where he finds himself inadvertently embroiled in a series of capers and conspiracies. It’s a brazenly goofy read, and in order to capture that tone, Anderson apparently studied the works of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the slapstick auteurs behind such films as Airplane and The Naked Gun. “We tried hard to imitate or rip off the Zucker brothers’ style of gags so the film can feel like the book feels: just packed with stuff. And fun,” Anderson told the Times. Adds Josh Brolin, who plays a corrupt, brooding cop: “It was no holds barred. Paul would say: ‘We want to go Tom and Jerry on all this.’”
…and by classic noir.
According to the Times, while re-watching such films as The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, Anderson “found that plausibility rarely mattered as much as the pleasure of the filmmaking.” As he told the paper: "North by Northwest? Tell me again how he gets to the middle of the field with a plane after him? I can’t. How does he get to Mount Rushmore? I don’t know, but it’s great.”
Anderson spent 5 years working on the movie.
The writer-director worked on the Vice script while also writing 2012’s drama The Master. It wasn’t the first time Anderson had tried to adapt Pynchon’s dense, daffy writing — he’d made an attempt at bringing the author’s Vineland to screen — so to understand how Vice would work as a film, he took the 384-page book and adapted it, sentence by sentence, as a rough-draft script. “I basically just transcribed it so I could look at it like it was a script,” he said. “It looked like a doorstop. But I can understand this format. As big as it was, it was easier for me to cut down.”
4There’s (probably) a pretty amazing cameo in the film.
Major spoiler alert: With supporting turns from the likes of Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Bencio Del Toro, Martin Short, and Eric Roberts, Vice boasts an ensemble cast that would make Anderson’s idol, Robert Altman, proud. But viewers may want to keep an eye out for the famously reclusive 77-year-old author Pynchon, who may or may not have shown up on set. Anderson is mum on the subject, but according to Brolin, the author made at least one appearance during filming. “I don’t think anybody knew. He came on as the kind of mercurial iconoclast he is. He stayed in the corner.” We’ll keep our eyes peeled when Inherent Vice opens Dec. 12.
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