Paul Thomas Anderson Quotes
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I really subscribe to that old adage that you should never let the audience get ahead of you for a second. So if the film's abrasive and wrongfoots people then, y'know, that's great. But I hope it involves an audience.
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I don't think it's a director's job to peek behind the curtain too much.
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Film school is a complete con, because the information is there if you want it.
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The films that I love are very straightforward stories, like really old-fashioned stuff.
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How do I respond to criticism? Critically. I listen to all criticism critically.
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As I have got older and become a father, there's less and less time for films.
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So with 'There Will Be Blood,' I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write.
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I didn't have any desire I might have had 10 years ago to shoot every single word that I wrote.
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I guess what I like in my movies is where you see a character change by maybe two degrees as opposed to the traditional movie change of ninety degrees. I guess that always feels false to me in movies because that doesn't truly happen. Around me, at least in the life I live, I guess I don't see people change ninety or a hundred degrees. I see them change in very small increments. I think it's just a monitor I might have on myself as a writer to not make any false scenes.
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We’re all children of Kubrick, aren’t we? Is there anything you can do that he hasn’t done?
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To make a film, the final big collaborator that you have is the composer.
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You know, I'm really not that competent at describing things musically.
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I don't think the competition's so rough, within the majority of movies made in Hollywood.
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There’s a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.
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My older sister was at the cusp of new wave, and I had older brothers from my father's first marriage who were rock 'n' roll guys, so I was exposed to a lot of popular culture.
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It's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It always seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) in "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) - that was the first time I became so aware of music in movies. So no matter how hard you try to do something new, you're always following behind.
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I had the standard movie geek childhood, because for as long as I can remember, all I wanted to do was make movies.
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You have to be a brat in order to carve out your parameters, and you have to be a monster to anyone who gets in your way. But sometimes it's difficult to know when that's necessary and when you're just being a baby, throwing your rattle from the cage.
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Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.
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If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first person in the history of the world.
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Of course, I'm no dummy.
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You write who you are. But you also cheat, and youwrite what you want to be. It's embarrasing to be the guy who madethe movie, knowing you're not exactly who you want to be.
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Clinton used to like to get out of the White House a lot. He would take night trips to McDonald's, and stuff like that. I think he wanted to get out of the house.
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I am always looking for that nuance, that moment of truth, and you can't really do that fast.
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Acting is the hardest job in the entire world. By far. Harder than ditch digging.
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Well I'd really love to work with Robert De Niro, because he's still the most talented actor out there.
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No matter how many times you do it, you don't get used to the sadness - for me at least - of coming to the end of a film.
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It's a gamble you take, the risk of alienating an audience. But there's a theory - sometimes it's better to confuse them for five minutes than let them get ahead of you for 10 seconds.
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I have a feeling, one of those gut feelings, that I'll make pretty good movies the rest of my life.
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It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called 'Rule Of The Bone.' I didn't do a very good job. I didn't really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book.
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