Paul Thomas Anderson Reveals Secrets of Stoner Odyssey ‘Inherent Vice’
Paul Thomas Anderson likes to take his time. Ask the 44-year-old director of Inherent Vice about adapting Thomas Pynchon‘s 2009 stoner-noir novel – in which a hippie-dippy private detective (played by The Master‘s Joaquin Phoenix) tangles with all sorts of Seventies Southern California types – or what he remembers about growing up in the Me Decade, and Anderson will thoughtfully stare out the window of his hotel’s lounge. He’ll run his hand over his gray-flecked beard. He’ll gently tap his coffee spoon. Eventually, he’ll smile widely and launch into an anecdote about the time he got his “weiner” caught in a white jumpsuit’s zipper when he was a kid. (Just don’t ask about whether he met or talked to the famously reclusive Pynchon; you’ll simply get silence.)
By the time Anderson’s done, you’ll realize there’s an answer embedded in those funky detours, the same way that you can pick out a family drama in his porn-industry epic, Boogie Nights; an old-fashioned romance in Punch-Drunk Love; and character studies about the self-made man in There Will Be Blood and The Master. You can see why Pynchon’s wacky, roundabout mystery was a good fit for Anderson, and how it eventually reveals what it’s really about – just like the filmmaker himself.
Do you remember the first time Pynchon’s work came across your radar?
It’s a little messy up here [taps forehead], but I think I tried to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow first, based on its reputation. I would not advise people to start with that one [laughs]. So then I reached for a thinner one, The Crying of Lot 49, and that just got me hungry for more. I remember hearing Pynchon’s name in high school, but I was a slow reader and a really slow learner. The schools I went to were very academic, and you were expected to be as smart as everyone else. I just wasn’t moving at that pace. But by my senior year, I started becoming serious about reading because it wasn’t a contest anymore, and that’s when Lot 49 and V. just floored me.
What was it about his writing that grabbed you?
It’s funny, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because I have such a different relationship with his writing now that I’ve gone through this experience. I mean, it’s challenging, which is fun. His writing . . . it just lifts me out of my seat. I read Vineland a couple of months ago, and there were sections where I felt like I was just floating. I got a high out of it.
Weren’t you originally thinking about adapting Vineland or Mason & Dixon before tackling Inherent Vice?
Well, no. I think I just said that in an interview. I never tried, really. They’re very difficult books. I mean, the story he tells of Mason and Dixon, of that line being cut through the Earth, has never been told in a movie. That would be a great one to do, though – maybe Lifetime or A&E could make it. Shit, I’d watch it! But Vineland? It’s just too intimidating. My brain’s not big enough.
This is the second time you’ve adapted someone’s work, after There Will Be Blood [based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!], and it’s the first complete adaptation of Pynchon’s work for the screen. Did you feel like, “I better get this right or I’m screwed”?
Yeah, this was different than Blood. Being too precious about anything is bad for your health, you know? So being too precious about his words, or being too precious about making it my own – either one of those sounds horrible, and kind of a mistake. [Pauses] There were definitely times during the process of doing this when I thought I was being overly protective about what he wrote. And that was not a good place to be. . . . The film actually became more fun to make when we weren’t doing that.