Q 13

PLAYBOY: What's the worst part of making movies?

Paul Thomas Anderson: On Boogie Nights, all the time, effort and energy making the movie, and making sure it was technically OK, and then seeing it in theaters and realizing that projectionists have the final cut. Here's what goes on in the booth: Most movies are "plattered," which means all eight reels--one reel is about 20 minutes--are joined together on a big plate that turns and the film runs through the projector. The projectionist's job is to cut the last frame of one reel to the first frame of the next reel and splice it together. It's supposed to be this perfect straight line with nothing missing. But projectionists will drop film on the floor. They'll cut and splice in weird moments, and skip frames. I was at a theater where the movie was down for 15 minutes. It broke and fell on the floor. The projectionist picked it up, put it together. There were frames missing, there was dirt all over it. And he never made a call to New Line saying, "This has happened, send me a new print." If I hadn't snuck into the theater to see the audience reaction, that dirty print would still be playing.

Q 14

PLAYBOY: Your film is full of maternal issues. Dirk's real mom was shrewish. He had sex with his adoptive mom, who also turned him on to cocaine. You've been silent on your relationship with your own mom. What are you trying to work out? Has she seen the movie?

Paul Thomas Anderson: I've been reluctant to talk about that because maybe I'll deal with it in another movie. It's not so much about trying to guard privacy; it's about trying to guard, in a mysterious way, the stories I might tell. I don't want to give away the ending. I also don't want to be the guy who's dealing with his mother for 30 years. However, I heard from my sister that my mother saw the movie. As far as her response, I don't really know.

Q 15

PLAYBOY: Clearly, you're a student of dysfunctional and reinvented families. Is there an on-screen or TV family that reflects your ideal?

Paul Thomas Anderson: There's a Max Ophuls movie with Joan Bennett called The Reckless Moment. A great little noir thriller. In it, Bennett has two or three kids. Someone gets murdered and she discovers the body and she wants to figure out how to dispose of it. Turns out the mother thinks her daughter has killed this guy, but he actually died accidentally. The great thing is that throughout the second half of the movie, the mom manages to focus on taking care of her kids. She has a teenage daughter who's nervous about a date and wants to take the car, and whose stocking is ripped. She has a son who is hungry and can't find his schoolbooks, and he rags on his sister for being nervous. The movie is all this stuff on top of all this other stuff--and here is the mother, taking care of everything. Whenever I think of that movie I go, "I want to be in that family!"

Q 16

PLAYBOY: Defend remakes.

Paul Thomas Anderson: My feeling about remakes is: Just rip it off. Don't call it a remake. Don't bastardize it. Just give it another title. Isn't re-creating and rehashing and ripping off and riffing off patterns that have already been created part of what we do? So just make it your own and call it something else. Without trying to insult anyone, and unfortunately Gwyneth is in this movie, I'm not sure about the thinking behind remaking Dial M for Murder. Do they think they can do it better? On second thought, maybe all those Hitchcock movies can be done better. Yeah. He's overrated, that Hitch guy.

Q 17

PLAYBOY: Now that you're a hot commodity, meeting all the industry power players, what's worse, talking to a suit old enough to be your parent or talking to one your own age?

Paul Thomas Anderson: It's weirder talking to a suit my age. Staring across the desk at someone of my generation who doesn't love movies hurts even more than when it's some old fogey. I want to shake him and say, "How come you're in this job and you don't love movies? I could kill you with my bare hands."

Q 18

PLAYBOY: What can't film school teach?

Paul Thomas Anderson: Anything. I use my brief experience with film school to bad-mouth it with authority. The first day I walked into the classroom I was faced with seeing Battleship Potemkin and a professor who said, "If you want to write Terminator 2, get out." Well, fuck you. Maybe there's some kid who wants to write Terminator 2, and how dare you start with Potemkin? Why not start with Terminator 2 and work backward? To me, that's the way to learn. That's how I learned about movies, tracing them back from what I just saw. I'd see Raging Bull and ask myself, "What was that guy watching?" OK, I'm going to see every Elia Kazan movie; I'm going to go rent Max Ophuls' movies; I'm going to watch The Searchers.

Q 19

PLAYBOY: Which test-screening experience will you never forget?

Paul Thomas Anderson: One of the scariest was during our first test for Boogie Nights, when Bill Macy gets the gun to kill his wife. It was a crowd of 18- to 24-year-old college students and kids in Westwood. They cheered when he got the gun. I sank in my seat and thought, What have I done? How did I fuck up? Then he killed her and they cheered again. Then he shot himself. That time they shut the fuck up real quick. I felt better. I thought, OK, a point can come through here. But it still didn't wipe away the notion that I'd somehow blown it. Plus, we'd gotten the audience with the usual sort of bullshit carnival-barker street recruitment. They're always amped up for something that doesn't accurately reflect what the film is. On Boogie Nights it was, "Come see the raucous new comedy about the porn industry." Raucous comedy? Well, the first half is sort of wild and fun and outrageous. If that's raucous, OK. So I figured, go ahead. Have your fun, because pretty soon someone will get hurt and what you have to watch will punish you many times over. Then the movie was 20 minutes longer, and those minutes showed incredibly severe, violent stuff. At the time I felt pretty good making them suffer. [Laughs]

Q 20

PLAYBOY: You're just beginning your relationship with the press. Is there a rumor or a factual error following you around that you'd like to nip in the bud?

Paul Thomas Anderson: Well, there is that fucking gerbil thing people are saying about me. I mean, I'm tired of it. Enough is enough already. I'm new at this and I just wish people would respect my privacy.