Phantom Thread shines with careful polish, but Anderson admitted that the effect did not come easily. "If anybody looked behind the scenes at just how chaotic and disorganized it was to get it to feel this controlled," he said ruefully. "This is not false humility. There's a level of kind of amateurishness around it all"—around every film Anderson's made, he said—"that's just kind of hilarious to look back at and think about the way that it did turn out." After Day-Lewis's termites line in New York, Anderson was quick to reassure the audience: "We're all okay now."

Phantom Thread is in some ways the least complicated, most straightforward story Anderson has told in years—a throwback to the more intimate films he began his career with. He made his first film, Sydney, about some earnestly lost people trying to get it together around a casino in Reno, when he was only 24; the studio he was working with took the film away, tried to re-cut it, and retitled it Hard Eight. Anderson decided nothing like that would ever happen to him again. This was the period—of publicly raging against studio bosses and demanding final cut, which he received on Magnolia—when the phrase "enfant terrible" started showing up in profiles of him. "I think I had such a terrible time on my first film that it made me so overly protective of myself and the film that going into the next couple of films, I felt a strong need to box the world out or box anybody out who wasn't directly involved," he said. "And being probably very scared of getting hurt or of failing or having anybody hurt me or my film. So I'm sure that that equaled a lot of…behavior that I wouldn't repeat—hopefully not repeat, for sure. But at the time it was probably the only way to survive."

“I think movies will be just fine without him around,” Anderson said of Harvey Weinstein. “He just met the right Quentin Tarantino, that’s all.”

Anderson has long acknowledged that Boogie Nights is somewhat autobiographical, and not just because it takes place in the San Fernando Valley. Like the members of the improvised but close-knit porn clan in the film, Anderson grew up in a large blended family, son to a voice-over actor and TV host named Ernie Anderson and a woman named Edwina, whom he's never said much about and with whom he has a sometimes complicated relationship. (The porn part he only witnessed from afar, in a neighborhood house he was fascinated with but didn't dare enter.) Today, Anderson sometimes jokes that he found out what Boogie Nights was about when the studio, New Line Cinema, came up with a marketing plan for the film. "I remember them saying: Oh, this is about family. And I understood what they meant. It was: Now we have to tell the world this isn't about porn. I couldn't tell you at this point whether, at any point during the writing of it, I thought, This is a story about family. I think those kinds of things, those kinds of phrases, those kinds of sayings, are not something that genuinely occur to anybody that is sitting down to write a story."

But he'll more or less concede that Magnolia, which includes a subplot about the death by cancer of a quiz-show producer played by Jason Robards, is partly a memorial for his father, who died in a similar way, and partly a tribute to Fiona Apple, whom he was dating at the time and whose ambivalent stories about being a young musical prodigy find an echo in the character of a washed-up former child game-show champion. Punch-Drunk Love depicts a badly damaged individual who gets back on his feet by falling in love, and it came out not long after Rudolph and Anderson got together.

After Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson didn't make a film for five years. When he did, the frame had widened: Suddenly, for reasons that are not entirely clear even to Anderson, the films became about way more than the emotional lives of people living in the outskirts of Los Angeles. There Will Be Blood, released in 2007, tells the story of American capitalism's rise through the lens of an oil prospector and his broken relationship with his son. That film is one of the two or three best to be made in this century, and Anderson followed it with a series of wide-screen epics that, like There Will Be Blood, tell stories about America and all the weird sad twisted stuff that birthed us. The Master (2012) was about two lost men searching for meaning and freedom via a cult-like religious sect in the aftermath of World War II; Inherent Vice (2014), like the Thomas Pynchon novel from which it was closely adapted, is about the bummer sellout of the idealistic '60s dream by the forces of greed and evil.