Unlike his peers Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, or David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson never spent a formative period in the music video coal mines, crafting eye-popping images for '90s buzz bands and pop ingenues, as his public woodshedding was limited to his little seen but promising debut film Hard Eight. But shortly after the release of his career-making second film Boogie Nights, Anderson demonstrated that he could keep up with the Jonzes just fine with his debut clip for Michael Penn's "Try."

Anderson has kept it in the family ever since, only making clips for people he's already worked closely with, including Michael Penn, Aimee Mann, and Jon Brion, or his friends Fiona Apple and Joanna Newsom, rarely showing much interest in what had been in fashion on MTV (and later, in pop music at large). (Well, except for that brief period when he and Apple were an item and Apple was still interested in being a pop star, of course.)

Paul Thomas Anderson's videos fit firmly within his cinematic body of work and are filled with his auteurist touches.

His videos fit firmly within his cinematic body of work and are filled with his auteurist touches, such as his signature meticulous art design, exacting color palettes, and a preference for lengthy, unbroken takes. Above all, Anderson always attempts to create an elliptical narrative that reflects the emotional content of the song while offering a different, often unguarded, way of looking at familiar icons.

Anderson recently directed the video for "Daydreaming" by Radiohead, whose guitarist Jonny Greenwood scored his last three films. To mark the occasion, we've looked at Anderson's high profile side hustle, so come along and watch Tom Cruise brood, float along with Fiona Apple, and let Joanna Newsom show you around Greenwich Village.

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Michael Penn: "Try" (1997)

Weird as it is to consider now, in early 1997 Michael Penn was arguably doing Anderson a solid by scoring his breakout film, so Anderson's first music video feels like him paying back a favor to the future Mr. Aimee Mann. Anderson shot it while on break on from editing Boogie Nights, and cast members Philip Seymour Hoffman, Thomas Jane, and Melora Walters all make appearances. (Such is Hoffman's charisma that you sort of want an entire movie about the schlubby guy in a concert t-shirt handing Penn a guitar.) Even in his debut outing, Anderson stays close to his signature style, as the entire three-minute clip was filmed in sequence without any cuts whatsoever.

But this is still notably a first effort, for while the technical virtuosity and the chaotic background players feel very much Paul Thomas Anderson, the highly saturated blues and purples and dramatic, flickering lighting feel very Late '90s BuzzBin. This clip got next to no MTV airplay, but it was included on the Boogie Nights DVD, which means every budding film snob in the tail end of the Clinton Administration watched it at least once.

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Fiona Apple: "Across the Universe" (1998)

In the '80s and '90s, videos for singles from movie soundtracks followed a rigid formula: the artist plays the song while random (often very random, bordering on arbitrary) clips from the film this is all meant to tie into are thrown at the audience all willy-nilly-like. (Rewatching the video for a beloved single while knowing nothing about the attached film is a bewildering Modern Problem.) That's not how Anderson does things, of course. Unlike the Penn clip, this video, released when the children were desperate for whatever new Fiona Apple they could get, received serious MTV rotation and arguably outclassed Pleasantville, the solid if precious those-were-the-days film the single was ostensibly meant to promote.

In full Team Player Mode, Anderson kept it thematically appropriate by setting the maelstrom in a 1950s dinner while still employing his beloved long takes. This clip also features his love of emotional contrasts, using random, thoughtless violence as the backdrop for the delightful image of a floating, love-struck Apple, so blissed-out that she doesn't look that annoyed to be flipped upside down halfway through. It's also worth pointing out that the Beatles are probably the most covered band of all time, and this is one of their most covered songs—often egregiously so. Apple managed to make none of that matter for four minutes and thirty seconds.

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Fiona Apple: "Fast as You Can" (1999)

Apple and Anderson were basically Kim and Kanye to pretentious '90s college kids. (Guilty.) While it's adorable that they wanted to make art together and mix their work and home lives so tightly, it is a bit odd in retrospect that Anderson made several clips from an album that featured several songs about how much Fiona Apple loves and needs Paul Thomas Anderson and how Non-Paul Thomas Anderson Men only let her down.

By the time this video was released, MTV was strictly the province of Britney, boy bands, and angry white rappers, which made this clip seem like a transmission from some other planet entirely. One of his goals with this clips seems to be demonstrating that he's perfectly capable of doing something other than sustained takes, here using a series of quick edits and a rapid series of the sort of oft-kilter and often technically "wrong" close-up shots that only someone very skilled at framing an image could dream up. Also, Apple must have really loved him back then to let him include that closing shot of her insane looking smile.

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Aimee Mann: "Save Me" (1999)

You have to know the tropes to mess with the tropes, and this clip from Aimee Mann's soundtrack for Magnolia seems like a willful inversion of the common film tie-in video formula mentioned above, featuring scenes shot exclusively for the clip (and all of them exactingly composed as anything from that exactingly composed film) wherein Mann serenades the characters while they contemplate their isolation. (She was on hand for much of the shoot, and at the end of the day, Anderson asked the actors to stay in character while she did her thing.)

Magnolia is in many ways a musical based on the songs of Aimee Mann, and "Save Me" functions as the Greek Chorus, stringing together the sprawling cast of characters and externalizing the repressed anguish of their uniquely lonely lives. This is the rare bonus musical clip that actually deepens the themes and understanding of the film to which it's attached.

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Fiona Apple: "Limp" (2000)

The runt of the Apple-Anderson litter, this is the least memorable clip the pair produced together. While it would be tough to make a clip that matched the controlled fury of Apple's incised kiss-off, this one never feels like more than just boilerplate alt-culture "weirdness." There's a few memorable sequences (including the high-speed puzzle-solving sequence), and Power Suit Mode is a good look for Apple. But the quick edits and speeding-up and slowing-down effects all feel like Anderson was, strangely enough, cribbing from the Marilyn Manson playbook. Did he get overbooked and let someone else edit this thing?

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Fiona Apple: "Paper Bag" (2000)

Now that's more like it, Paul. This Bugsy Malone-style clip for Apple's defeated waltz is a smart and playful manifestation of the song's main idea: all the men are gone, and Apple (and most modern women) are left stuck with a bunch of children. In this case, they're nattily dressed boys with some nifty choreographed dance moves, but children all the same. Rewatching this clip, it's clear that Apple, Anderson, and his wife Maya Rudolph owe it to the world to revive the lost art of the full-length feature film musical.

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Jon Brion: "Here We Go" (2002)

This one is a bit of an outlier. Jon Brion scored Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has produced wonderfully ornate albums for Apple, Mann, and Elliott Smith, and he's also worked with Kanye West and Of Montreal. He also made a smart L.A. sad-sack album that was criminally never released but is worth tracking down.

This clip is a tie-in from the Punch-Drunk Love soundtrack, and though the song features vocals from Brion, he doesn't appear. Instead, Anderson, who had Brion on set writing music as the film was shot, edited the clip together using alternate takes and unused scenes. It flows together well, of course, and demonstrates how much Brion's rhythms influenced the final form of the overall film. But while it's always nice to revisit this film's singularly intoxicating design, on its own terms it's strictly for PTA and Brion completists.

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Fiona Apple: "Hot Knife" (2013)

It's heartening that even after breaking up and Apple making an album that didn't not play like her calling Anderson a big old jerk (or, you know, a soul-killing monster), these two are still friends and collaborators. Hell, they're so cool that it's not even that weird (until you think about it) that Anderson directed a video for a song that is basically Apple bragging that her new man is so awesome that she is going to fuck his dick off. Anderson makes her look more boldly sensual and strong than he ever did back in the day, and his use of three- and even five-part split screens smartly mirrors the song's swirling vortexes of looped backing vocals.

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Joanna Newsom: "Sapokanikan" (2015)

In the past few years, Anderson has become even more formally innovative to the point of avant-garde. (Or obtuse, if you found Inherent Vice a bit hard to follow.) So it's not too surprising he would be drawn to Joanna Newsom, one of the most love-it-or-leave-it artists out there.

This video finds the long-awaited return of the patented Anderson Long Take, here often used in service of his trusty Slightly Off Close Up, as Newsom takes us on a spritely tour of New York's Greenwich Village, a sly nod to the location of the Native American village that the song's lyrics explore. Anderson and his camera can barely keep up with Newsom throughout the shoot, as though her energy and boundless curiosity are too potent to capture. Also, it's a bold move for them to walk by the IFC Center, because 99.9% of the people who see movies there would instantly start crying if they walked out of the theater to see Paul Thomas Anderson shooting a Joanna Newsom video. (Guilty.)

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Joanna Newsom: "Divers" (2015)

If "Sapokanikan" found Anderson grounding Newsom's tendency towards whimsy in his fetish for gritty '70s style realism (or artifice highly manipulated to feel "real") then "Divers" finds Anderson completely giving himself over to her aesthetic, shooting her in a fantastical shire. There's always been a certain amount of Renaissance Fair in her visual presentation, but as with her music, she embraces it so open-heartedly that it feels churlish to crack jokes.

That said, the opening image of her superimposed against a mountain is borderline Awesome Airbrushed Van territory, but her guileless performance and the beauty of the melody dare you to roll your eyes. While it's strange to see Anderson work in this mode, it does give him license to indulge his love of pure color as an aesthetic end in and of itself. The burst and blooms near the five-minute mark, in particular, are worthy of a MOMA installation.

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Radiohead: "Daydreaming" (2016)

Fun fact: Paul Thomas Anderson also likes music not made by singer-songwriters. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood has provided atonal strings and swarms of pure dread for Anderson's last three films, and the pair went to India together for the little-seen deep cut documentary Junun, but this is the first time Thom Yorke gets to join in on the fun. More than anyone else working in their fields, both Radiohead and Paul Thomas Anderson excel at zeroing-in on very specific emotional states (usually some very precise shade of alienation) that the rational mind cannot diagnose, but art can recognize, which makes them an inspired pairing.

The exact idea of the video—Yorke wanders through his life unable to find what he needs, wondering where it went wrong—is a bit of a too-literal interpretation of the dazed heartbreak of the lyrics, but it works. It's likely to Anderson's credit that Yorke gives a credible, layered performance here, looking increasingly frustrated as each doorway leads him farther from what he's looking for and conveying a quiet sadness each time the people he encounters don't even bother to look at him. These two should have been making video magic at least 15 years ago, but here's hoping they team up to tackle "True Love Waits" next.

Michael Tedder Michael Tedder has written for Esquire, Stereogum, The Village Voice, and Playboy, and is the founder of the podcast and reading series Words and Guitars.

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