"Hello?"
says a male voice.
"You
may call me Paul," says the male voice.
Etiquette
apart, both are correct: the speaker is Paul Thomas
Anderson, the face (or, in this case, the voice) of
New Hollywood the guy who has managed to get
New Line to stump up for not one, but two three-hour
movies. First there was Boogie Nights,
now there is Magnolia,
which screens here today.
Even
more interestingly, Anderson consistently casts a
lot of people many Old Hollywood directors would be
happy to get. Plus, in the case of the critically
lauded and Oscar-touted Magnolia, Tom
Cruise.
Anderson
who has described his new film as essentially
a small and intimate movie, except that "it took 200
pages and 90 days to get the right amount of small
and intimate" is unabashed about the whole
180-minute thing.
"I
regard the three-hour movie as a genre in its own
right," he says. "There are westerns, comedies, action
movies and then there's the three-hour movie.
I tell people they should go and see them because
it costs the same amount of money to get in as it
does for a two-hour movie."
And
he is emphatically not impressed by recent comments
from a renowned industry observer to the effect that
Anderson was a pretty smart guy who had, however,
never learned how to tell a story in under three hours.
Which, the implication went, was not very grown-up
of him.
"And
he's never found a studio at which he could be successful,"
says Anderson,
with a quick comeback that suggests he may have said
this before. On the other hand, most of his comebacks
are pretty quick, so perhaps he hasn't.
"I
was told a story once about him going onto the
set of a Hal Ashby movie and Ashby walking off and
refusing to start shooting again until he had left,"
Anderson continues.
There
is, as you may infer, little love lost between the
Old Hollywood and the New.
Fortunately,
Anderson has a supporter in the form of New Line
production chief Mike DeLucca, who put his weight
behind Anderson's Boogie Nights, his
first three-hour feature, and did the same for Magnolia.
The
latter, meanwhile, which ought to get a few Oscar
nods come tomorrow, features not just modern Hollywood
royalty in the form of Cruise, but Old Hollywood
aristocracy as well, in the redoubtable shape of
Jason Robards.
Taking
its title from the street off which most of the
characters live, Magnolia tells a
series of overlapping stories which have to do with
the need to find the human values behind the deceits
and rampant ambitions of life in the San Fernando
Valley, that former orange grove turned endless
smog-bleached suburbia.
Anderson
himself was born there in Studio City in 1970 and
has always considered himself a film-maker: "I just
had to wait 20 years before I officially got the
job," he says.
At
the core of Magnolia are the efforts
to bring together a dying father (Robards) and his
estranged son (Cruise), who is a guru in the sexual
self-actualisation business (he gives seminars whose
catch-phrase is 'respect the cock').
But
there are a lot of other characters, too, played
by such Anderson regulars as Julianne Moore, Philip
Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C Reilly
(Anderson seems to prefer actors who, like him,
have more than one first name).
"The
number of characters just grew," he says. "I have
a good habit or a bad habit of not
letting anybody go by."
And
anyway, working with actors is his greatest joy.
Well, most actors. Not Burt Reynolds, who was in
Boogie Nights and who is the only
actor ever to have refused to do what Anderson asked
him to do. "I've never had that before, not from
any real actor," says the director. "He put everyone
through so much. He's so mean."
"And
Tom Cruise?" I ask quickly, my People magazine instinct
surfacing.
"He
isn't mean. He's my dreamboat," says Anderson.
Interestingly,
it was Cruise who first approached Anderson after
seeing Boogie Nights. Or rather, his
agent called Anderson's agent. They met in London,
where the director was promoting his new film and
Cruise was shooting Eyes Wide Shut.
Anderson
went away and created Cruise's character
TJ Mackey. The script was completed, Anderson called
Cruise's agent and said, "OK. I'm ready." Then,
he recalls, "it was like one of those Hollywood
stories: he called me the next day."
Given
the support he has had from DeLucca and now Cruise,
does Anderson think perhaps he is blessed in some
way? Or does he have a secret?
"Yes,"
he says, laughing happily, "I have a secret, and
I'm not sharing it."
With
Tom Cruise and Magnolia, fortunately,
he has been more generous.
The
director of Oscar-hopeful Magnolia and champion of
'New Hollywood' talks
to Nick Roddick about three-hour movies, Burt Reynolds and
Tom Cruise.