Paul Thomas Anderson and his influences, July-August 2025
7th July-19th August in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema
Join us from Monday the 7th of July to Tuesday the 19th of August for a complete retrospective of the feature films of Paul Thomas Anderson, leading up to the general release of his new film One Battle After Another in late September. These nine films will be bookended by three more, each by a director who has been a significant influence on Anderson’s work. There will be email announcements in advance of each screening.
The full schedule is below, followed by an introduction to the retrospective. Doors open for all screenings at 6:45pm with the film starting at 7pm - with two exceptions: owing to their length, for Short Cuts and Magnolia doors open at 6:15pm and the film starts at 6:30pm. All screenings are in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema.
Monday 7th of July, 6:45pm: The Earrings of Madame de… (1953, Max Ophuls)
Wednesday 9th of July, 6:15pm: Short Cuts (1993, Robert Altman)
Monday 14th of July, 6:45pm: Hard Eight (1996)
Tuesday 15th of July, 6:45pm: Boogie Nights (1997)
Monday 21st of July, 6:15pm: Magnolia (1999)
Tuesday 22nd of July, 6:45pm: Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Tuesday 29th of July, 6:45pm: There Will Be Blood (2007)
Tuesday 5th of August, 6:45pm: The Master (2012)
Monday 11th of August, 6:45pm: Inherent Vice (2014)
Tuesday 12th of August, 6:45pm: Phantom Thread (2017)
Monday 18th of August, 6:45pm: Licorice Pizza (2021)
Tuesday 19th of August, 6:45pm: Something Wild (1986, Jonathan Demme)
Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the most important American filmmakers of the last thirty years, his films regularly appearing on lists of the best films of the twenty-first century.1 From the freewheeling Boogie Nights to the epic There Will Be Blood and the exquisite, finely-stitched Phantom Thread, Anderson’s career demonstrates range, noticeable development, and a recurring set of themes and concerns.
Start with where and when these films are set. The second, third, fourth and ninth (the most recent, Licorice Pizza) all take place in the San Fernando Valley, the area of LA where Anderson grew up, near Hollywood, and where many film industry workers live. The area’s relationship to Hollywood parallels Anderson’s semi-outsider relationship to the mainstream film industry, reflected in his recurring interest in characters near to but on the outside of something larger which alternately attracts and repels, fascinates and mystifies them. Another two films are set entirely in southern California – Inherent Vice in Pynchon’s fictional city of Gordita Beach, and There Will Be Blood in what is still mostly sparsely populated farmland at the turn of the twentieth century; a third, The Master, starts out in California before leaving for the East Coast. Of his nine films to date, only his first - Hard Eight - is set in the US but entirely outside California (mostly in Reno, Nevada), and only his eighth, Phantom Thread, is set outside the US, in 1950s England.
Temporally, Anderson’s filmography divides into two periods. His first four films are all set either in the present or, in the case of Boogie Nights, the then-recent past (1977 - twenty years earlier). From his fifth film onwards (There Will Be Blood), he has worked exclusively in the twentieth-century past. This turn away from the present mirrors that of many of the major American filmmakers of Anderson’s generation and older. Quentin Tarantino’s last contemporary-set film was (the decidedly retro) Death Proof (2007), Steven Spielberg’s was War of the Worlds (2005), Martin Scorsese’s was Bringing Out the Dead (1999). This mid-2000s turn broadly coincided with a reduction in scale: from the ensemble dramas Boogie Nights and Magnolia to films largely focused on the relationships between two characters, sometimes complicated by the presence of a third term, as in Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza. It also saw a development and refinement of his distinctive, highly accomplished visual style.
From the start Anderson has been a master of the long tracking shot, often used to weave together multiple narratives: the winding, searching opening shot of Boogie Nights, for instance. In this respect he owes an acknowledged debt to one of the early masters of the technique, Max Ophuls. For this reason we open the retrospective with his classic 1953 film The Earrings of Madame De…, which the film critic Andrew Sarris once called “the most perfect film ever made”, saturated with gorgeous tracking shots. (For a short video of Anderson analysing the film, see here.) But there is more to Anderson’s technique than this. There is a general preference for a longer shot length: at around eleven seconds, his average is much longer than the contemporary Hollywood norm of between two to three. There is also a deep sensitivity to, and intelligent use of, colour. Punch-Drunk Love, for instance, is a study in blue, often enhanced by its vivid juxtaposition against a grey or muted background. Compositionally, there is a growing attraction to the geometric or symmetrical that often recalls Kubrick – the final shot of There Will Be Blood could come straight out of The Shining – and a growing pleasure in shooting outdoors. Then there is his love of ambitious, expertly orchestrated set pieces: the parties in Boogie Nights, the oil drilling in There Will Be Blood.
Anderson is also famous for working with some of the major Hollywood actors of the past quarter century and drawing all-time-great performances from them. Until his tragic death in 2014, Philip Seymour Hoffman – for many, the finest male film actor of his generation – was a regular presence in Anderson’s films, featuring in all but one of the first six and culminating in a magnificent lead performance in The Master. There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread centre on two of Daniel Day-Lewis’s finest film performances, delivering some of the most quotable lines in film history in the former. And his role in Magnolia is arguably still the best of Tom Cruise’s career to date. But working with Anderson has also produced revelatory performances from hitherto unknown or under-rated actors: Punch-Drunk Love transformed perceptions of Adam Sandler – without it there would be no Uncut Gems. Phantom Thread launched the career of Vicky Krieps and introduced Hollywood to the excellence of Lesley Manville. Licorice Pizza is entirely staked on two beautiful, first-time performances by Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim. Surrounding these leading performances are great ensembles. Minor roles in Boogie Nights are taken by Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy and Alfred Molina; in The Master, Amy Adams, Jesse Plemons, Rami Malek and Laura Dern; in Inherent Vice, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro and Martin Short; in Licorice Pizza, Benny Safdie, Sean Penn, Tom Waits and Bradley Cooper.
Thematically, it is maybe better to see what recurring concerns emerge over the course of the retrospective. But certainly viewers will see Anderson has an interest in periods of transition and their winners and losers: the transition from small farming to industrial capitalism in There Will Be Blood; the return to civilian life after the psychological wounds of the Second World War in The Master; the end of the 1960s in Inherent Vice; the transition in the porn industry from film to video in Boogie Nights; the transition from youth to adulthood in Licorice Pizza. Characters tend to come from damaged, damaging or broken families, have oedipal attachments and resentments, and be involved with deficient or flawed father figures. Businessmen, religious leaders and other charismatic male leadership figures are often domineering and delusional, conning themselves or others. On the other hand, Anderson has strong sympathy for the ordinary or small-time men and women just trying to get by without getting crushed by these leaders. Yet a distinctively American combination of loneliness and dreams of success often seems to drive Anderson’s characters into cures - relationships, communities and activities - worse than the disease. Finally, there is a consistently critical and deflationary view of individual ambition – artist, financial, intellectual – as both liable to self-delusion and leading to the exploitation of others.
Whatever else all this adds up to, it suggests both a highly critical view of Hollywood and a self-reflexively critical view of the director, a combination reminiscent of John Cassavetes, whose work we have been showing gradually at Goldsmiths over the past couple of years. Like Cassavetes, Anderson has been (hitherto) content to operate on relatively small budgets and stay on the margins of Hollywood, while retaining creative control and siphoning off some of the industry’s best actors.
Other obvious influences on Anderson’s work – particularly in his first three films – are Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. Goodfellas presages Boogie Nights, both interested in mapping a small social world with its own values and sources of meaning, ones that depend on it remaining apart from wider society. There Will Be Blood is dedicated to Altman, whose large ‘choral’ films – Nashville, Short Cuts – are an influence on Boogie Nights and Magnolia. We are therefore showing Short Cuts alongside The Earrings of Madame De… to preface the series. Meanwhile, Demme’s Something Wild is a film Anderson has repeatedly singled out, and credits it as the primary influence on his forthcoming film One Battle After Another. We therefore close the season with it.
The New York Times’s recent list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century included four Anderson films: Punch-Drunk Love (56th), The Master (42nd), Phantom Thread (25th) and There Will Be Blood (3rd). Sight and Sound’s 2022 list of the greatest films of all time included two: Magnolia (185th) and There Will Be Blood (122nd). The BBC’s 2016 list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century included three: Inherent Vice (75th), The Master (24th) and There Will Be Blood (3rd).