Where does Paul Thomas Anderson rank?

I concur with Bubbler. I think PT Anderson is the best American director of his generation. He was already one of my all-time favorites before There Will Be Blood clinched it for me. The best part is he's only 42 so we should enjoy at least a couple more decades of his art.

The scene at Rahad Jackson's house in Boogie Nights -- I'll probably never have an experience like that at the movies again in my lifetime. I have been fascinated in some way by every film he's made, and when you combine the visual prowess with his ability to draw great performances from his actors, he gets my vote.

 

Alma, is that really true about Spike Jonze and Coppola or just a dig at her because it's something cynical people assume, like Truman Capote writing To Kill A Mockingbird? I should have put Jonze and David O. Russell on the original list, btw. Mixed up Jonze and Kaufman, obviously.

I thought The Virgin Suicides was beautifully shot as well, but I didn't like Marie Antoinette and didn't catch Somewhere yet.

 

How many directors his age can do this?

 

Yup. I'm still a young man, but this is probably my favorite film sequence of my lifetime.

The part where the music first comes in is stunningly amazing.

 

Here is a link to Tarantino talking about There Will Be Blood and his friendship with PTA. After seeing TWBB, QT said he knew "I had to bring up my game."

 

He hasn't succeeded yet.

 

It sounds worse than I intended to write it.

Lost In Translation is a lovely film and Coppola deserves all the credit for it. She wanted Murray, and she got Scarlett, who I don't think can act much of a lick, but is quite perfect for that film. If we're talking about capturing a lot of the images of that movie, no, she didn't really do a lot of that. She kept a picture scrapbook of what she wanted in the movie, a lot of it is in there, and the crew sorta ran around getting what they could. Jonze was an assist, the DP, too, and that's not necessarily uncommon. Sam Mendes had a great amount of help from Conrad Hall.

I am not a fan of her last two films. There are folks who lovingly embrace Somewhere; I'm not one of them.

If you're talking women directors, Miranda July, Lisa Cholodenko, Patty Jenkins, The Sprecher Sisters, Nicole Holofcener, Tamara Jenkins and Kelly Reichart, among others, are good picks. And, of course Bigalow.

 

At my old show one of our producers interviewed PTA and asked him, "what is the best directing advice you ever received?"

PTA replied, "That's easy. And I follow it. On days we shoot, I am clean shaven and well dressed, because the studio chiefs who drop by the set want to know that you are professional and organized, so that you are spending as little of their money as possible. Then, when we are in post, I never shave, never bathe, and wear the same clothes for days. Again, it's so that when the studio heads drop by, they think you are working as quickly as possible to deliver their movie."

Brilliant.

 

They're very much doing different things. The Basterds movie has some terrific stuff in it. Great scenes. The basement bar sequence is such a spot on commentary/spoof/critique of German culture that I don't know what. But Tarantino chooses a kind of geek mythology as his prism, while Anderson's work is pretty real stuff.

FWIW, I've seen The Master and don't much feel the need to see it twice. I will for the sake of enjoyment eventually, but it's not, for me, a real hard movie to "get." Some viewers brought a lot of their own expectations into it, and they don't expect to see some decrepit, sex-mad drunk as the hero who must resist the wiles of the intellectual cult leader. They see the movie as a bunch of ugly people doing a bunch of ugly things. To which I say, well, yeah. Life. There it is. Pigs in crap. The mongrel (Freddie) and the maestro (Dodd) exchanging a bunch of fuck yous in adjacent jail cells, then hugging a few minutes later, then Dodd humiliates Freddie, then Freddie humiliates Dodd, and so forth.

PTA shot a ton of stuff that I don't think is in the movie, and found the story he wanted to tell, I think, in the editing room. In this, he's like a profile writer. There's a lot of great material, not all of fits into one tidy narrative without creating a holy mess, so he finds what works and what doesn't and creates the whole. This organic method is pretty hard to pull off.

If we're talking folks born since 1960, Soderbergh is at the top of the list. He works fast, he's adaptable, he often mans his own camera, and he deeply loves the art of it. I don't like all the movies he makes or choices he makes within them, but he's a credit to the industry. And he's willing to give people jobs and tell stories a lot of other directors would think are beneath them.

 

I'd add Debra Granik and Courtney Hunt to that list of American women.

And agree with Alma that it'd be tough to put anyone above PTA on a list of the best directors of the last dozen years.

I'd also argue that there was no more American director than Hitchcock once he moved to Hollywood; and I remain unconvinced that Mr. Eastwood belongs on the list of all-time best postwar directors.

 

Is there any CGI in scene?

If not, the brilliance of it just went up x10.

 

Having just checked - because we had the same conversation about Nabokov on another thread - while remaining a British subject, Hitchcock also became a naturalized American citizen in the mid-1950s.