1.
Filmmaker: At this point the majority of your
movies are period pieces, and, with the exception of Boogie Nights, they all
take place before you were born, or at least before you were really conscious
of what was going on around you. How do you form your ideas about how a
specific era is supposed to look and feel? Do they come from other movies, or
photographs, or your own imagination, or does the look grow out of the
research?
2.
Anderson: It’s all of the above. There Will Be
Blood almost felt like a science fiction movie because I didn’t know anybody
who was alive at the time – for something like that you’re counting on
photographs to guide your way. Inherent Vice is the near past, so many of the
people on the crew were alive. You’re always trying to make it real and
authentic, whether you’re referencing images from the period or your own
imagination, or in this case the book – not that there were a lot of
descriptions in the novel of the interiors. But sometimes what happens is you
get something that’s very authentic and honest to the period but it just
doesn’t fit – especially in this era, when there’s such a lack of taste.
Something can be right but so outrageous that it’s distracting, and you have to
monitor that – if it’s accurate but it looks like you’re trying too hard, you
have to find another way. The thing is, you always go into a movie with strong
design ideas in mind and then they always fade away and you end up going with
the thing that’s simple. Simple always seems to work out well.
3.
Filmmaker: Aside from things like the costumes
and production design, I felt like you and your cinematographer made a lot of
choices involving lenses and film stock and things like that that really helped
evoke the period.
4.
Anderson:
There are never-ending conversations that go on about those things. They
never, ever, ever end! In this case, I was using a lot of lenses I had used on
the 35mm portions of The Master. One lens that we used is a lens from 1910 or
1911 that we put a modern housing on. It’s from an old Pathé camera that we
first used on Magnolia. We kept this lens with us and used it on There Will Be
Blood. I love it so much I tend to overuse it, though Robert [Elswit, the
cinematographer on all of Anderson’s features aside from The Master] doesn’t
like it as much. We had a set of lenses that we used on The Master that I was
familiar with that I thought would work really well, because I had gotten to
know them – I know the imperfections, that one lens is a little cooler or one
drops off a little here or one is softer. Robert and I talked about making the
film feel like a faded postcard; you want it to look like a movie from 1970,
but you don’t want it to feel like a pastiche. I had a bunch of film in my
garage that was improperly stored – it was 10 or 15 years old – and we shot
some tests with it, and one of two things would always happen. Either it
inspired us, because the blacks were very milky and the colors were a bit faded
in a great way, or it was damaged beyond repair and you got no exposure at all.
We wanted to use it but you couldn’t really depend on it at the risk of not
getting anything, so we would use it here and there and a couple of the shots
made it into the movie. More importantly, it served as a kind of inspiration
for us to say, “This looks great, how can we use our modern film stocks and
lenses to try to replicate that kind of look?”
5.
Filmmaker: I want to ask a little bit about how
your style has evolved. Your early movies were strongly characterized by that
‘Scope aspect ratio you favored, with a very graphic use of the wide frame. On
your last couple movies you’ve gone 1.85 and narrowed the canvas a little. What
factors determine your choice of aspect ratio?
6.
Anderson: On The Master it was just a gut thing,
I saw it that way in my head. I was actually seeing it in 1.66, an even boxier,
more European aspect ratio. It probably has to do with the fact that most of
the movies I watch are 1.33, they’re older movies. On The Master, somehow it
felt more accurate to the period. And then I just kind of got into it. You
know, we were watching these Robert Downey Sr. movies last night, and those
were either 1.33 or 1.66, and I love the way those look. There are advantages
either way, and you just kind of pick which weapon seems to fit. For Inherent
Vice, I was kind of obsessed with the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics, and
those panels are more of a box. If it had been ‘Scope it would have been the
wrong feeling for this. Too big.
7.
Filmmaker: It’s interesting that you bring up
watching older films, because although a lot of people talk about ’70s films
like The Long Goodbye and Night Moves in relation to Inherent Vice, for me it
owes more to the classical studio movies of the ’30s and ’40s. Like those films
it’s very dialogue driven, which is something I love, but I’m wondering if it’s
a challenge as a director to strike the right balance between keeping the movie
from becoming visually static without getting in the way of the performances
and the writing.
8.
Anderson: The only thing I ever really look at
in movies is the actors. Obviously there are great movies with great production
design and that kind of stuff, but… it probably comes from my first movie,
where I realized early on that I didn’t have any money and I was telling a small
story, but what I did have was these great actors, which ended up being the
most important thing you could have. I remember talking with Jack Fisk on There
Will Be Blood about needing money to do special effects, and he said, “We’ve
got the best special effect there is, we’ve got Daniel Day Lewis!” And he was
right. A nice two-shot with two actors performing great dialogue, that’s a
staple of the movies of the ’30s that I love the most. I don’t fetishize ’70s
movies the way some people do. I love them, but my models are those ’30s films,
and I’m always trying to emulate that. Sometimes you can’t – sometimes you try
to get things in one shot and you realize you’re forcing the staging, and you
have to own up to the fact that it’s not working. You always have to keep an
eye on it to make sure that your visual ideas aren’t affectations, and that
you’re not just adhering to some kind of dogma. But when you can make that kind
of thing work naturally, it’s just the best.
9.
Filmmaker: There are a lot of dialogue scenes in
Inherent Vice that you let play out with minimal cuts. It reminded me of what
Preston Sturges did in that shot in The Lady Eve where Henry Fonda and Barbara
Stanwyck flirt for something like four or five minutes without a cut. When you
shoot something like that, are you getting the more conventional coverage to
play it safe, or do you just know you have it in the two-shot and leave it at
that?
10.
Anderson: It depends. Sometimes, just in case,
I’ll get that coverage, or I’ll shoot it in case we need something to get into
the scene before we let it play out, but most of the time you can just kind of
feel that it works best playing in one. Look, cuts are great, and they’re
exclusive to movies, but when you have a lot of dialogue with ping-ponging back
and forth, staying out of the way is always preferable.
11.
Filmmaker: Another thing Inherent Vice has in
common with those ’30s movies is a real attention to detail in terms of the
supporting cast. People who come on screen for just a couple of scenes are
really well cast and beautifully defined. You’ve got a lot of stars here, but
then there are also people like Hong Chau and Sasha Pieterse and Katherine
Waterston and Joanna Newsom who haven’t done a ton of movies – and they’re all
absolutely fantastic. Tell me a little about how you cast, and how you strike
that balance between huge, known stars and newcomers.
12.
Anderson: Believe me, it did not escape me that
this was an opportunity to hire a bunch of great people. You have to be
careful, because you can get into this Towering Inferno thing where every part
is a big actor, but a big appeal of doing the movie for me — and this is kind
of a Pynchon staple — is that the book offered the opportunity for so many
great supporting parts. Everything in the book was juicy, even if it was just a
couple of lines. So you have to figure out where it’s helpful to have someone
like Benicio del Toro come in and deliver some information, and where it’s a
great opportunity to bring in someone new. I didn’t know Sasha’s work on Pretty
Little Liars, she just came in through the usual channels through the casting
director I work with. For the part of Jade, there were something like ten great
actresses I had never heard of, because young Asian actresses just don’t get
the opportunities that they should. But Hong was clearly the best – she might
have been nervous, but it didn’t show. Then you have someone like Michelle
Sinclair, who as an adult film star goes by the name Belladonna – she’s just so
easy on the eyes that I felt like she fit the description of that character in
the book perfectly – and Jefferson Mays, who’s a great theater actor. So you
have all those people, who maybe haven’t been in as many movies, but it’s also
helpful to an audience to have very recognizable faces because there’s so much
information and so much crazy shit going on. They can take it in a little
easier if they’re watching someone they recognize, or someone they associate
with a certain type. At the end of the day it’s just about who’s good and who’s
right though, because you can cast stars in roles they’re not appropriate for
and it’s not fair to anybody.
13.
Filmmaker: I was excited to see Jeannie Berlin
pop up in the movie, and it made me wonder if The Heartbreak Kid was an
important film for you, or if you’re an Elaine May fan.
14.
Anderson: I love Elaine May. I love Elaine May
deeply, with passion! The Heartbreak Kid was less important to me than other
Elaine May movies like Mikey & Nicky and Ishtar, or even The Birdcage,
which she wrote. Where she was really important for me was in the stuff she did
with Mike Nichols – those albums are like bibles around my house, I listen to
them all the time. I really cast Jeannie because of how much I loved her in
Margaret; she’s so delicious in that. It was funny, I met Elaine May at the New
York Film Festival because she came with Jeannie Berlin, and my heart got
broken when I was introduced to her and she looked at me and said “Who are
you?” I wanted to crawl under a rock!
15.
Filmmaker: I want to shift gears and ask about
the music. When you have a piece that’s using a lot of source music, like this
or Boogie Nights, where do you start in terms of choosing songs? Do you just
start pulling records off of your shelf and seeing what hits you, or do you
have to research the music of the era, or what?
16.
Anderson: The book had a lot of great references
to music, but I secretly had my own kind of stash that I really loved. That
said, I would never have been aware of the Marketts song “Here Come the
Ho-Dads” if it wasn’t for the book. I’m a Neil Young freak, so there’s that. It
seemed like a good opportunity to use his stuff. Can is also something I love,
and it’s been used in movies here and there, but I thought that track had such
great energy and paranoia that it would be a great starter. It’s kind of
impossible for me to look back and trace where things came from though, with
that revolving door of iTunes and plucking things out of my memory, or not
having any good ideas and getting lucky and hearing the right song on the
radio. You have to trust that the movie gods will feed the right thing to you
in some way. You never really know how things are going to fit until you place
them in there, and it’s always interesting to see how they can slide into
another scene or maybe begin a little earlier. That’s the most enjoyable time
in editing, placing that music and seeing where it takes you.
17.
Filmmaker: Did the movie evolve a lot during
editing? I would imagine it would be tough to figure out how much or how little
information to give an audience, where to place voiceover narration, etc.
18.
Anderson: It changed less in editing than you
would think, because there was so much rewriting going on while we were
shooting – and we were editing more as we were shooting than we ever have
before, because the piece was so highly complicated. Leslie Jones, the editor,
was there the whole time assembling scenes so that what was working and what
wasn’t working really came into focus. We made key choices about the shape of
the movie while we were in production, so that by the time we got to post the
major building blocks were really in place and it was just about figuring out
how much voice-over is too much, getting the music in there, picking takes,
asking when is a good time to get ahead of the audience, when’s a good time to
let them catch up — the regular old-fashioned choices you make in the editing
room. On this one too, there were times where we were laughing hysterically and
then we’d show it to friends and there’d be crickets, so you have to take that
stuff out. But the way we did it, reshaping the movie as we went with Leslie so
heavily involved during shooting…I didn’t really stop to think about it until
now. It’s really strange.
Jim Hemphill is the writer and director of the
award-winning film The
Trouble with the Truth, which is currently available on DVD and iTunes.
He also hosts a monthly podcast series on the American Cinematographer website
and serves as a programming consultant at the American Cinematheque in Los
Angeles.
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