Takeaways from "On Cinema: Paul Thomas Anderson" Include How Charles Manson Ruined It for the Hippies, an "Interstellar" recommendation and a Grimes Music Video

Paul Thomas Anderson talks with New York Film Festival Director, Kent Jones, during his masterclass at the festval.
(Photo by Michael Iannucci)

Just a day after Paul Thomas Anderson's hotly anticipated new film, "Inherent Vice," premiered as the New York Film Festival's centerpiece, the revered American director took the stage at Alice Tully Hall to talk all things film in the festival's annual "On Cinema" masterclass. Topics of discussion ranged from "Inherent Vice" and influences to the revelation that Anderson has seen and highly recommends Christopher Nolan's upcoming "Interstellar." While my review of "Inherent Vice" is still on the way (it is a lot more to digest than I anticipated), here are some highlights of Anderson's masterclass:

On Neil Young's "Journey Through the Past":

“It just looks like my idea of heaven on a Saturday afternoon, cruisin’ around with your girl and parking with a brook nearby and taking a joint out and eating strawberries. I don’t know how it could get any better honestly.”

On how Charles Manson ruined the perception of hippies:

“There’s a passage in Inherent Vice the book (that didn’t make the movie), but it was this discussion between Bigfoot and Doc, and they’re talking about what happened with Manson and how it just fucked everything up for all these hippies because it used to be that the straight world would just look at them and think ‘Oh look how cute they are! They’re kind of like monkeys in a zoo; the husband is carrying the baby and the mom is paying for the groceries’ and everyone treated them like cute caged animals and then Manson came along and suddenly it was ‘Stay away, they might mass murder all of us’ so there was this shift.”

On Robby Müller's cinematography in "Repo Man" and its relation to shooting on film:

“I’m always trying to get night interiors to look like Robby Müller did and I can never do it. I don’t know how he did it. It doesn’t look like there’s any lights on; it looks like how it really looks. And there’s gotta be a million lights on! I just don’t know how he did it. It’s like a magic trick. He had a magic with it that I can’t quite figure out. It’s something to look for in his photography that he was a master at. There are people who are good at certain things and he was a master at night interiors, which can be very difficult.”

“I would hate to think that there won’t be more artists like Robby Müller out there knowing the art of movie lighting. To be good at movie lighting is like a life-long job; to be skillful at it; to be great at it. So skillful, and that skill was required from them because they were shooting on film. I don’t want to say anything bad here but the skill level has been diminished when you shoot at night and you don’t need to put any lights up because you don’t need to put any lights up. And I would hate to think that that is going to be lost; that the job of someone who can light a movie set would go away.”

(Photo by Michael Iannucci)

On doing movie lighting in post-production: 

“That’s fucking cheating!”

On plot and "North by Northwest":

“I never remember plots in movies. I remember how they make me feel. I remember emotions and I remember visual things that I’ve seen and my brain has just never connected the dots of how things go together. This movie ('North by Northwest') in particular was a huge help getting ready for 'Inherent Vice' because I knew there was just so much ground to cover and it was a bit episodic and there was sort of jumping from stone to stone to stone and sometimes these connected pieces were made in the book, sometimes they weren’t. There were various blind alleys and dead end streets and all that kind of stuff. It was a helpful reminder to go back to this film and feel that energy again and feel a kind of looseness.”

“If emotional logic is betrayed, then you’ve got a problem. There’s a fine line between ‘No fucking way!’ and ‘Yeah, yeah, I could see that happening.’ If you start messing with the plausibility of someone’s emotions, that feels against the rules a little bit.”

On Quentin Tarantino, the state of film shooting and Christopher Nolan's upcoming "Interstellar":

“Quentin’s a film nerd too, I suppose; it’s a small group of us that’s hopefully growing and sticking together. Quentin’s much more vocal about it though. He wants to tar and feather people over it. I think at the moment things are going around where genuinely there’s such concern and fear in the air about film not even being an option. There really is a movement among filmmakers right now to sort of desperately encourage filmmakers that are coming up, filmmakers that are around and are producing stuff right now that to, if you have a choice, please shoot film. Chris Nolan is sort of at the front lines of all this, I have to say. He’s made a beautiful film. Everybody should get out and see 'Interstellar' when it comes out. But don’t fuck around; go see it in IMAX. Brave the line.”

On the music video for Oblivion by Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes (directed by Emily Kai Bock):

“That gets me going. It’s fucking great. I just saw it and it made me hyper and it made me bounce around the room. I just wanted to bounce off the walls. Not just a great song (‘cause it is a great song) but when everything comes together perfectly; you have a great song, you’ve got this great performer; this great artist matching up with these visuals and everything clicks. Taking her into a real situation; taking this amazing performer into a real situation, and it’s spooky too. It gets you pumped up and makes you want to dance but there’s something spooky about it. It’s so graceful the way she does that. There’s a really good energy, but that kind of energy that starts to get a little bit crazy and a little fevered when you see some of the faces that she got. These kind of frat guys bouncing around and they seem all too real and all too date rapey. So there’s that danger lurking underneath it, but on top of it, it just kind of makes me want to dance.”

On composer Jonny Greenwood's work in "Inherent Vice":

“With 'Inherent Vice' he plays a little bit of guitar, which is nice; sort of a first. He’s sort of reluctant to pick up the guitar sometimes, but the movie called for it. There’s one piece in particular towards the end that he’s had for a number of years with no where to go and it found a really nice home in this film.”