Film-maker Paul Thomas Anderson talks about Inherent Vice, his new nostalgia noir based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, in which a stoned private eye hits the trail of his ex, and leads a homage to 70s California

Paul Thomas Anderson may seem unimposing in the flesh – slight, bearded, a little dishevelled – but as a film-maker he is a giant. Having once described his critically acclaimed 1999 feature Magnolia as “for better or worse, the best movie I’ll ever make”, the writer/director went on to film Punch-Drunk Love, which picked up the best director award at Cannes, and There Will Be Blood, which Time magazine compared to “the greatest achievements” of DW Griffith and John Ford. Fellow film-makers are equally impressed: Ben Affleck has likened Anderson to Orson Welles, while Sam Mendes calls him “a true auteur”, one of a small group of directors “who I would classify as geniuses”.

Such accolades place Anderson among the pantheon of cinematic greats. But right now, he’s telling me about an obscure old porn movie he found in the projection booth of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute (“I’m not saying this was Redford’s porno collection… maybe it was”) and explaining how it provided inspiration for the Rollergirl character from his 1997 breakthrough hit, Boogie Nights. “There was a girl on rollerskates,” he enthuses while hastily munching room-service in a London hotel, “and the plot was that she’s rollerskating down the street and stopping at each house, looking in the window, and watching everybody fuck. That was the plot. And that’s where I got Rollergirl from!”

Taking inspiration from sources both high- and low-brow is something of which Anderson is proud. As a child, his household was one of the first on the block to own a VCR, making him both fiercely cine-literate and unashamedly fan-ish from an early age. Talking movies with him is a treat, the conversation leaping from obscurities such as the 1980 asylum-set psychological thriller The Ninth Configuration (about which we discovered a shared obsession when we first met in 2002) to such detective classics as The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, both of which cast long shadows over his latest work, Inherent Vice.

Adapted from the 2009 novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon (whose Gravity’s Rainbow has been described as “the post-modern novel”), Inherent Vice is a stoner mystery/comedy set against the evocative backdrop of 1970 Los Angeles, with a vast ensemble cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro and many more. Steeped in woozy post-Manson paranoia, it’s a snaky tale of sex, drugs and missing persons, an end-of-an-era California dream of conspiracy and corruption, with a blitzed-out sense of humour (Anderson cheekily cites the Zucker brothers, makers of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, as a touchstone) and a hallucinogenic air of spiralling chaos. Watching it feels like getting stoned on celluloid while reading Raymond Chandler and listening to the Fugs. Asleep.

“I am a gigantic Pynchon fan,” Anderson enthuses, “and I’d long had this dance in my mind where I’d be thinking about doing [Pynchon’s previous, vastly complex novels] Vineland or Mason & Dixon. But those would have been impossible tasks.”

“Inherent Vice was possible, and it seemed perfectly to encapsulate a lot of things Pynchon has talked about over the years in a number of different books. It’s the third book he’s written about California. It has great paranoia, which you must have if you’re doing a Pynchon book. But most of all it seemed to be a way to address something that’s prevalent in all his books; that outlandish spirit, the humour, the nostalgia – that kind of sweet, dripping aching for the past.”

At the centre of Inherent Vice’s shambling narrative is Larry “Doc” Sportello, a casualty from the 60s who spends most of his time attempting to unravel an increasingly labyrinthine plot with the help of large quantities of dope. “He’s just too good a character to put down,” says Anderson, who cast Joaquin Phoenix to play the lead after they had worked together on The Master (2012). “I mean, I just love Doc. Is he an especially brand new character? Not really, no. But he’s on the case. He might not exactly know what the case is, but he’s on it. And there’s something so endearing about that. I knew there had been stoner private investigator movies before; no one’s ever gonna do better than The Big Lebowski, right? So I spent a long time trying to talk myself out of doing this. But ultimately it was all about Pynchon. And by the time I’d finished talking myself out of it, I’d written half of the screenplay and it was too late!”

Of the five Oscar nominations Anderson has received to date, three are for his screenplays (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood), although he remains solidly self-deprecating about the “craft”.

“Getting to do Inherent Vice felt like being given the keys to your dad’s car – ‘Hey kid, don’t crash it or fuck it up’. So I just put the novel on a cookbook holder, flipped it open, and basically started to just pluck out the dialogue, to go, ‘OK, this is the character’s name, and this is what they say’. That’s how good screenwriters are! But it became a technique for finding my way through the octopus tentacles of the novel. Once I’d started that, it seemed pretty clear what could come out and what needed to stay. And amid it all, it’s a story about a guy looking for his ex-old lady. So I just told myself to keep remembering that.”

I remind Anderson that he’s been quoted as praising Pynchon’s writing (of which he is clearly in awe) for its perfect blend of fart gags and profundity. “Well, that’s Pynchon, isn’t it?” he cackles. “And somehow it ends up being so deep, meaningful and soulful. I don’t know how he does it. There’s not many people that can do that – have that many jokes and that much humanity. Usually one or the other wins out. But Pynchon’s got it all.”

One thing Pynchon doesn’t have is a public profile. He is famously camera-shy (even his fleeting Simpsons cameos placed a cartoon paper-bag on his head), and Anderson seems determined not to throw any light on his rumoured involvement with the movie. Although Joaquin Phoenix has stated that Anderson talked regularly with Pynchon, my questions about meeting the author are met with uncharacteristic evasion.

“He doesn’t meet people,” Anderson deadpans. “I don’t know if he even exists.”

So you don’t know what he thinks of the film?

“I can only hope that he’s happy it…”

But you didn’t deal directly with him?

“No, no, no. I just… I just stay out of it. I just try to work with the book, you know, and to treat the book as a collaborator.”

He looks me in the eye, daring me to try again. I mention the rumour (confirmed by Josh Brolin) that Pynchon visited the set and can in fact be glimpsed in the movie.

“Well, that’s like those stories about B Traven [the mysterious author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, who believed that “the creative person should have no other biography than his works”]. No one ever knew who Traven was, and these pages would supposedly appear under [the director] John Huston’s door with notes and stuff. Or they’d be on the set and look over and there’d be a guy with a hat and sunglasses, and they’d all be going, ‘Is that B Traven? Is that him?’ So it’s all very mysterious to talk about Pynchon, but I tread delicately because he doesn’t want anything to do with all this, and I just have so much respect for him. I hope I can be like him when I grow up.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Thomas Anderson photographed in London last month by Pal Hansen for the Observer New Review.

Inherent Vice is a deliciously washed-out portrait of LA, conjured by Anderson with regular cinematographer Robert Elswit, who won an Oscar in 2008 for There Will Be Blood.

“I had a kind of faded-postcard idea for this movie. And then I got lucky, because I had all this film stock in my garage from back when I made Magnolia, in 1999. It was heat-damaged and faded, and we started shooting tests with that, and it looked great. The blacks were sort of milky and everything looked instantly of the era, without being pastiche-y. It ended up that we used that stock for only a couple of shots, because it was always a gamble shooting with it – you could just fuck it up and not get anything at all. But the mission came to be to try to recreate that look using different lenses on modern film stock, playing with the way we timed it, the way we printed it. That was the key.”

It seems relevant that Inherent Vice is set in 1970, the year Anderson was born, and I wonder how much growing up in Studio City influenced his work. Did that environment seep into his system from an early age?

“Well, it’s true that I’m from Studio City and Robert grew up in Santa Monica, so yes, I guess it’s in our DNA. But you know, my sisters grew up in the same house that I did, and they have no interest whatsoever in doing what I do. So I don’t think it’s environmental. I mean, if it was, how do you explain the fact that you grew up somewhere completely different and yet your obsessions with weird little movies like The Ninth Configuration are exactly the same as mine? I think it’s more like a disease; you’re born with it, and that’s your lot.”

There’s definitely something diseased, or rather deranged, about Inherent Vice, which takes absurdist delight in its meticulous madness. How that madness was achieved remains a source of controversy. When the film played at the 52nd New York film festival, the Guardian reported that “the on-screen confusion appears to have been mirrored on the set itself”, with co-star Jena Malone asserting enigmatically that “the logic becomes the chaos and the chaos becomes the logic”. What was all that about?

“Oh man, I don’t know!” says Anderson, with a hint of exasperation. “It’s misleading to imagine that it was about improvisation, because we weren’t improvising at all with the dialogue – it’s straight out of the book. It’s more that this was the first time we had worked outside of ‘the family’ [a shorthand for Anderson’s regular troupe of players which over the years has included Julianne Moore, John C Reilly, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman]. So people like Josh Brolin came into it and thought, ‘This is fucking chaos!’ But we were like, ‘Is it?’ We thought it was completely natural!

“It was the same thing with Owen Wilson. After a while I started to become very self-conscious about it. But to me, ‘chaos’ is the Apocalypse Now set, not five people in a room trying to make sure we’ve got the best thing possible. It’s more like we were just floundering around a little with something that felt good.”

Is it true that Anderson told Owen Wilson to think about his character, double-agent Coy Harlingen, as basically Zoot from The Muppets?

“Ha! Well, I was trying to think of ways that he could look, and there’s a little description in the book – white overalls, pink shirt, cowboy boots… that’s all. And I was trying to think of great sax players through the ages, and Zoot came to mind. He has that great bucket hat. And his nose kinda looks like Owen’s — you know, that big nose that Zoot’s got, right? So it’s a little bit Zoot, and it’s a little bit from a great photo I found of [the late Beach Boy] Dennis Wilson. You’re always looking for little hooks that you can latch on to – a haircut, a piece of wardrobe, something like that. As for Doc, we really stole his look from Neil Young circa 1970, with the mutton chops. Some of the wardrobes on Doc are a straight rip of him. I don’t think you can make a movie about this period and this culture without looking directly at him.”

When I mention that, for reasons too complicated to explain here, Neil Young once taught me how to tune a ukulele, Anderson’s reaction is delightfully ebullient (“What? No fucking way! Wow! So now you can just basically die anytime, right?”). He’s similarly effusive about composer Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist who was robbed of an Oscar nomination for his brilliant work on There Will Be Blood on a spurious technicality (parts of the score featured “pre-existing” material). “Oh, the fix was in, wasn’t it?” Anderson says, slyly. “They just couldn’t stand the idea of a guy in a rock band with moppy hair being that good, I suppose. But hey, no sour grapes.”

Greenwood proved a key collaborator on Inherent Vice, despite Anderson originally telling him that “I won’t need that much music – which of course equals ‘I’m going to need a lot of music’. When Jonny first read the script there was all the stuff in there from the book about the Arpanet, which was like the original internet computer. So he started out doing some more electronic stuff, as if these sounds were coming out of the computer. But then these other ideas started to present themselves – orchestral ideas. It’s now getting to the spot in my relationship with Jonny when I can maybe mention a thing or two but really just leave him to his own devices. He’s always the first viewer, too.”

Some years ago, when we were doing an on-stage interview in London, Anderson told me that he sometimes felt his movies were best viewed as musicals. In a now iconic scene from Magnolia, the disparate cast are seen spontaneously singing along to Aimee Mann’s Wise Up, while Punch-Drunk Love (still my favourite Anderson film) finds Adam Sandler picking his way through the wreckage of his emotional life with the aid of a mysterious harmonium.

“Well,” he says, “those movies you mention are musicals in the sense that the music is woven so strongly inside them. I think that’s probably true of There Will Be Blood too. But starting with The Master, I was working on things that had a little more dialogue. You know, there’s music in there, but the film isn’t structured like a musical. This was more a matter of just driving to the set each day and listening to some stuff Jonny had sent me, or listening to Can, or Neil Young [both feature on the soundtrack] over and over. That’s what we were trying to do – to make a movie that felt like a Neil Young song, that has that sweet sadness to it.”

For all its anarchic sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, Inherent Vice does indeed possess a “sweet sadness”, a quality enhanced by the fact that Anderson’s partner, the actor and comedian Maya Rudolph, makes a small but significant appearance. “Maya and I don’t avoid working together,” Anderson says, “but there just hasn’t been much opportunity before. So we squeezed her in here. And you know that we’ve got her mom [the late Minnie Riperton] singing in Inherent Vice, too? It’s a moment that makes me well up every time – as we’re looking at Maya, you hear her mom singing this song, Les Fleurs… it makes me so warm and fuzzy.”

I wonder whether being a a parent himself (he and Rudolph have four kids, aged from one to nine) has influenced his film-making.

“I can only presume so,” he says, “but I’d be hard pressed to say how. I don’t have any desire to make ‘kids’ movies’. But it definitely changes your work habits. Also, it’s been really hot and dry where I live recently, to the point that everyone is really scared about drought. You know, it’s not raining in California any more – for obvious reasons. And I remember reading Cormac McCarthy talking about writing The Road. He was in this motel room in El Paso with his son, and he was looking out the window while his son was sleeping when that story [about an apocalyptic natural disaster] came to him. So I was playing the other day with the kids and it was 102 degrees. And I got nervous in a way that I have never been nervous before. Like, what the fuck are we doing? You know, what are we leaving them? And it made me deeply, deeply sad in a way that was new.

“So yes, everything’s different. But everything’s also better. My life is much better now that I have kids. Somebody said that if you’re making something and you have a kid, you realise that your best work is done. And it actually frees you up to be a little bit looser in your work. You know that your masterpiece has already been made – nothing’s going to touch that. It doesn’t mean you try any less, or you’re any less invested, but you’re just working in a different level because you’ve already done your best work.”

Inherent Vice is released nationwide on 30 January

FILMOGRAPHY: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gwyneth Paltrow in Hard Eight. Photograph: Allstar/COLUMBIA/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar



Hard Eight (1996)

Anderson always preferred the original title, Sydney, for his first feature, a neo-noir thriller starring Philip Baker Hall as an ageing gambler who becomes a mentor to a young man who has lost everything (John C Reilly). Gwyneth Paltrow co-starred as the alluring Clementine in a film that Roger Ebert found himself “watching for the sheer pleasure of the acting and the dialogue”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boogie Nights. G Lefkowitz Photograph: G Lefkowitz

Boogie Nights (1997)

Expanding on his early short, The Dirk Diggler Story, Anderson’s breakthrough movie was a Scorsesian romp through two decades of the porn industry, inspired in part by the true-life story of John Holmes. Boogie Nights revived Burt Reynolds’s career and put Mark Wahlberg on the movie-star map, while the screenplay earned Anderson his first Oscar nomination.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Magnolia Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext Collection

Magnolia (1999)

A series of intersecting stories form the backbone of Anderson’s magnum opus, which blends brilliant ensemble performances, heartbreaking musical sequences and a bewilderingly apocalyptic plague of frogs. The film’s three Oscar nominations included best original song (Aimee Mann’s Save Me) and a second screenplay nod for Anderson.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Punch Drunk Love Photograph: PR

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

After the weighty sprawl of Magnolia, Anderson refined his focus with this brilliantly unhinged and beautifully concise love story, boasting an eye-opening performance by Adam Sandler in what remains his most remarkable role. The sound of Shelley Duvall singing He Needs Me from Robert Altman’s Popeye provides a defining musical note.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Photograph: Allstar/MIRAMAX/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Inspired by Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, this epic tale of money, power and family cast an Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis as prospector-turned-oil-baron Daniel Plainview, with explosive results. Time hailed it “one of the most wholly original American movies ever made”; it earned eight Oscar nominations including best director, adapted screenplay and film.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master. AP Photograph: Uncredited/AP

The Master (2012)

Drawing on the real-life story of Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, The Master boasts a career-best performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman as the charismatic charlatan who establishes a strange new religion. Joaquin Phoenix is the second world war veteran for whom “the Cause” offers a new purpose in life, his dreamy/nightmarish experiences enhanced by Mihai Mălaimare Jr’s shimmering 65mm photography.