It is 10 years since Paul Thomas Anderson first left audiences and critics dumbstruck and confounded with his breakthrough film Boogie Nights, when he was just 27. How could such a pipsqueak of a director, they asked back in 1997, create a masterpiece that wowed right from its opening sequence: an audacious five-minute tracking shot that swoops and swirls through the nightclub of the film's title in joyful synchronization to the dance music of the 1970s.
He has astonished ever since. Magnolia, the next out of the blocks, was an even bigger, more complex and yet richly evocative film that belied any attempt to categorize it. He was 31 by then, but still people marveled at how one so young could conjure up such accomplished work. Anderson appeared to have found his style - the repertory film in which a multitude of characters and plot-lines are interwoven. But then in 2002 he bamboozled us again. He threw out the repertory technique and opted instead for a radically scaled-down and linear story in Punch-Drunk Love. It ran at a conventional 90 minutes - half the length of Magnolia - and though the film was anything but conventional, it left many fans delighted, others disappointed.
This year we are seeing the release of his fifth feature, There Will Be Blood, and it feels like an important moment. At 37, he's no longer the precocious youth. He has proved himself to be a director of formidable imagination and ambition, but we're waiting to see what he will do with such gifts. Will he have the resources to amaze us one more time?
It has to be said that the figure of the man sitting in front of me when we meet in a hotel in New York does not generate huge confidence. Others have remarked that Anderson in person looks weirdly fragile for such a titan of the cinema, but today he's beyond fragile. He is a wreck. He's unshaven. His brown shirt is more crumpled than linen fashionably should be. His posture is crumpled too. When later I play the tape of our conversation back, the first sound he makes that I hear him utter can roughly be transcribed as "Ooooooh" - a guttural, heartfelt expression of pain.
But, to be fair, it is the morning after the premiere of There Will Be Blood and Anderson is, by his own admittance, worse for wear. Even so he is swaddled in an almost visible happy glow. The previous night, he tells me, represented the fulfillment of a childhood dream: to have his film shown at the New York Ziegfeld cinema. "I'd always wanted it, dreamed about it. It's a palace, a great old movie palace. I dare say we won't be making a big oil epic any time in the future and you think, 'Fuck! Hopefully it can play in a place like that.' It was massive, and we turned it up real loud."
What he describes as his "big oil epic" has been making waves even before it opened in America on Dec. 26. The LA Film Critics Association gave it four awards including best picture and director, and it was nominated for two Golden Globes. Not bad going, I say, in an attempt to cheer up the suffering figure before me. "Yeah, you get it into your head that they don't matter, but then they give these awards to you and you love it," he says.
The inspiration for There Will Be Blood came to him a few years ago when he was in London. He says he had been feeling homesick for California's San Fernando Valley where he grew up and which famously forms the backdrop to all his earlier films. He had started writing a script about two warring families - a conceit that he liked, but he was struggling to know how to develop the story. He was browsing in a bookshop in Covent Garden, London, when he saw a book with the word "Oil!" in bright red letters on the cover. It was the 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair set in California at the turn of the century among oil prospectors scrambling to buy up the fields. It rang instant bells with him; not only as a piece of his own local history, but as a perfect backdrop to his story about fighting families.
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