Welcome to #FlashbackFriday, where we look at past moments with filmmakers, actors, etc. and highlight something in cinema history that’s fascinating, amusing, perhaps something you never knew or have seen, you name it.
For today’s #FlashbackFriday, we dug up an old interview with (an incredibly young) Paul Thomas Anderson. Throughout the years, Anderson has made quite the name for himself since his humble beginnings growing up in Los Angeles. His films explore various circumstances of human connection and interaction. Each film is aesthetically different from the next taking audiences to different worlds. What remains the same, is the underlying search for purpose and relationships built out of meaning.
Anderson’s work is quite reflexive as far as humanity goes. You would think, just by watching his films, that PTA must have been quite the student. The rub is, however, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker never went to film school. In an archived interview, the writer-director talks about his views on film school. Without hesitation, he says, “Film school is never an option. It seems to me to be a waste of time and a waste of money, in all honesty.”
That seems a bit harsh, right? Plenty of great filmmakers have attended film school. Paul Thomas Anderson continues to explain his opinion, saying, “My film education really came from watching other movies. There’s a scary mentality, I think, in film schools…I walked into a film class about screenwriting and the opening line was, ‘If you’re here to write ‘Terminator 2‘ just leave now.'”
The filmmaker has a fair point. Who is it that can determine a filmmakers education? Only the filmmaker. It’s a fairly philosophical, ‘manifest your own destiny’ sort of take, but also a powerful one. Paul Thomas Anderson has made a handful of the best films of the 21st century. And if he says watching movies is the best way to learn how to make them, then we’ll be watching his for a long time to come.