There was no love lost between Paul Thomas Anderson and Burt Reynolds on the set of “Boogie Nights.” The rising young filmmaker and the veteran actor clashed on what would become Anderson’s celebrated, breakout picture, and Reynolds has made it clear he didn’t get along with his director.
“Personality-wise, we didn’t fit. I think mostly because he was young and full of himself,” he said back in 2015. “Every shot we did, it was like the first time [that shot had ever been done]. I remember the first shot we did in ‘Boogie Nights,’ where I drive the car to Grauman’s Theater. After he said, ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ And I named five pictures that had the same kind of shot. It wasn’t original. But if you have to steal, steal from the best.”
Despite the moments of heat between them, Anderson even offered Reynolds a role in “Magnolia,” which he turned down. In fact, the actor didn’t even bother watching “Boogie Nights.” For his part, Anderson admits there was friction on the set, but that it was an anomaly for what was an otherwise mostly smooth production.
” I think that when Burt and I kind of got into it, it may have been the day before or the day after [his scene where he fights with Mark Wahlberg‘s character], but it was a really tense three days on the set of ‘Boogie Nights.’ The other 57 days were really fun and a lot of laughs, but there were three tense days there in the middle where Mark was fighting with Burt, or in the film,” he said on “The Bill Simmons Podcast.” “Looking back, it was really in the nasty part of the movie, too, when really everything’s kind of going wrong.”
Anderson adds that sometimes, the kind of scene being shot affects the mood on set, and he says that might’ve been a contributing factor. Or, it was simply just the result of a long shoot in a close quarters.
“It was the middle of summer, it was really hot, and we were all stuck together in that house for a long time, and things were just — they were heated,” Anderson said.
The filmmaker’s latest, “Phantom Thread,” is cinemas now. Listen to the full talk below.
