Did the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon really appear as an extra in Paul Thomas Anderson’s screen adaptation of his novel Inherent Vice?
The American auteur, a longtime Pynchon fan, has always been coy about their collaboration, describing the writer as a spiritual adviser for the film rather than a hands-on collaborator. We know they’ve chatted. And we know that Jackson Pynchon, the novelist’s only son, was credited as an intern on Anderson’s The Master.
The mystery deepens with One Battle After Another, his new film, a transported take on Pynchon’s novel Vineland. Anderson perfectly preserves the relationships at the heart of the book, notably the two competing father figures and a plucky teenage daughter. But the names have been changed, the setting is now the 21st century and the politics are less charged than in Pynchon’s alternately uproarious and melancholic contemplation of ways the 1960s counterculture failed.
Pynchon’s Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie trying to care for his wannabe groupie daughter, Prairie, is now Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, a sometime dynamiter with a defunct revolutionary group known as the French 75. His adversary Brock Vond becomes Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a fascistic military man obsessed with Bob’s estranged wife, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and their 16-year-old daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti).
RM Block
“It’s about taking something and turning it into something else,” Anderson says. “With Inherent Vice it was a more faithful adaptation – moving things around, condensing, making it cinematic. But with this I was a bit more ‘disrespectful’ to the source material.
“I have huge respect for the book and the author. But to tell the story I wanted in my head, I had to steal what I needed and move things where it made sense for the film. The emotional-core triangle was preserved, but some characters and dynamics shifted to fit the story I was telling.”
That story reflects Anderson’s ongoing deconstruction of Americana. Save for the British-set Phantom Thread, Anderson’s films explore and explode classic and distinctly American characters, industries and myths.
Boogie Nights, his breakthrough, from 1997, first glamorises and then demonises the 1970s pornography industry, reflecting on the darkest aspects of fame and excess in southern California. Magnolia captures the emotional and geographical sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, with its chatshows, self-help gurus and familial discord. There Will Be Blood, featuring a famous central performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, reimagines the myth of the American dream through the pitiless rise of an oil baron. The Master delves into the uncertainty of the postwar United States’s cultism and spiritual promiscuity, while Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza both embrace the disillusionment and hazy nostalgia of the 1970s west coast.
In this spirit, One Battle After Another is an action comedy powered along by such all-American movie signifiers as bank robberies, a high-school dance and border-crossing flashpoints.
“Honestly, you just make it up as you go along,” Anderson says. “You focus on the plot – the essential building blocks, like ‘My past is coming to get me ... there’s a guy looking for my daughter,’ and ‘how do I find her?’
“That logic is your best friend and worst enemy. Sometimes you embrace ‘movie logic’, skipping ahead or bending time for pacing. The structure helped balance action and humour. The first act is this chaotic wreck. Then the next two acts deal with the aftermath, which allowed momentum, humour and character to emerge naturally.”
Anderson began making short films as a teenager, including The Dirk Diggler Story, a mockumentary from 1988 that laid the groundwork for Boogie Nights. Largely self-taught, he briefly attended Emerson College and New York University; he dropped out after two days, using his tuition refund to pay for Cigarettes & Coffee, a Sundance-selected short from 1993 that he turned into his first feature, Hard Eight.
From the start, Anderson has favoured big-swing, character-driven ensemble storytelling. And, from the start, he keeps returning to the same text. Anderson has spent more than two decades gradually shaping his adaptation of Vineland.
Although he had once intended a straight adaptation, Anderson ultimately pulled only the emotional and thematic threads that resonated with him: ruined revolutionaries, haunted pasts and generational reckoning.
Simultaneously nurturing a long-standing desire to make a car-chase action film and develop a story about a woman revolutionary, he spent years weaving these elements together. He has lived with the characters for a long time and admits to a degree of Stockholm syndrome, even when it comes to the thuggish colonel.
“I like everyone,” the director says. “I probably should dislike Lockjaw more, but I feel for his broken heart. He’s erratic and behaves badly, but it’s sad. Perfidia’s story breaks my heart, too: someone with good intentions who loses sight of her values, caught up in vanity and postpartum depression.
“There’s a line she says that sums it up: ‘Every revolution fights tyranny but usually ends up eating itself.’ That theme runs through the work we’re adapting – and is, sadly, true.”
In Anderson’s films, driving scenes and car chases are a state of mind. In Boogie Nights, cruising through the San Fernando Valley is inextricably linked to the characters’ fortunes and failings: cars become mobile stages for egotism and disconnection. In Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler’s character, Barry, chaotically skittles around the freeway, the journeys mirroring his internal instability and desire to escape the emotional repression of his many-sistered family. Inherent Vice similarly features near-aimless cruising that echoes the hazy, drug-addled paranoia of Joaquin Phoenix’s protagonist, with driving often used to blur time, memory and plot.
One Battle After Another ups the ante and takes to the hills – many hills: perhaps no film has embraced the car chase more enthusiastically since the French Connection series.
“I’m from California, so I practically live in my car,” Anderson jokes. “Cars are life where I’m from. I haven’t had many opportunities to indulge in that love before. This was a jackpot, a dream come true. I’m a big fan of car chases and car films like The Sugarland Express, Vanishing Point, Mad Max.”
While preparing for his Oscar-winning turn as the frontiersman Hugh Glass in The Revenant, DiCaprio famously slept in animal carcasses, ate raw bison liver and endured freezing conditions. For his performance in Dead Man Walking, Sean Penn stayed in character and met death-row inmates.
These seasoned players, and a third Oscar-winner in Benicio Del Toro, are joined here by the newcomer Chase Infiniti. Anderson was briefly concerned that his young star might be intimidated. He laughs at that idea now.
“Acting styles are never that different. It’s more about different people and approaches,” he says. “Sean’s minimal, just wants to get to work. Leonardo loves to talk endlessly during prep, but once shooting starts he’s all in. Benicio is a mix: says he has no ideas, then comes up with hundreds of mostly amazing ideas – maybe 199 great ideas and one bad one.
“With Chase I was worried she’d be nervous, but I was being condescending in my thinking. She’s amazing and confident. On set you have to be sensitive to how people are feeling, especially with physically demanding roles. Chase spent months rolling around in handcuffs and zip ties. That all takes a toll. Seeing her finally take charge of her character was magical.”
Anderson was born into show business. His father, Ernie Anderson, was a well-known voiceover artist and, as “Ghoulardi”, the host of late-night horror films on a TV station in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1960s; in the 1970s and 1980s he was the voice of the ABC network.
Growing up in Los Angeles, with direct access to the entertainment industry, the younger Anderson was exposed early to the mechanics and mythology of Hollywood. This proximity shaped both his fascination with image-making and his scepticism toward the entertainment machine.
He has a story about returning to Cleveland with his dad after the family had relocated to California and realising that Ernie Anderson – or, rather, Ghoulardi – was a celebrity. Does he have his own Ghoulardi, a film or character that follows him around?
“I get asked about different movies wherever I go,” he says. “I think the most magical moments are unexpected – like in El Paso, when we were shooting One Battle After Another, a young Latino kid came up to me and said Inherent Vice was the best movie he’d ever seen.
“You never know who your films reach or how they reach them. But moments like that make it all worth it.”
One Battle After Another is in cinemas from Friday, September 26th
