These days, a shoot on a Paul Thomas Anderson film tends to involve a close knit bunch of people, sworn to secrecy, and indulging in wherever his imagination might go next. While not quite Terrence Malick in terms of jumping off script and going off to shoot the migration of a rare species of bird, Anderson does shoot a lot of film, and as fans found out with “The Master,” he leaves a lot on the cutting room floor. We’d wager that will be the same for his upcoming adaptation of “Inherent Vice,” particularly if Josh Brolin‘s words are anything to go by.
The actor recently chatted with David Poland (via Cigarettes & Red Vines) about his upcoming film, Jason Reitman’s “Labor Day,” but touched upon his experience working with PTA, one that sounds both unmoored, yet satisfying. “Paul Thomas Anderson, having just worked with him… [it’s like] let’s go this way, or let’s whisper the lines, and let’s actually take out all the lines and we’ll do it like charades once. Or, you know, like, hold him — put him on your shoulders and let’s do the whole scene like that. He’s all over the place,” Brolin said. “It’s just absolute fucking chaos every day, all day. Which is great, ’cause you feel like you’ve done something. But, you know, we’ll see how it turns out.”
And while that might seem like an indictment of the shoot, Brolin enthuses he likes the vulnerability that it provides, though he reveals that Anderson was wiped out by the end of shoot. “I see Paul, after this movie that we just did, and he was just exhausted, man. Exhausted. Like, he just took off and died somewhere, you know? Not literally, but figuratively,” the actor said, adding: “[He] crawled into an editing room. But he was into it. He called me in the middle of the night, goes, dude I’m working on this thing, it looks amazing, it’s so cool. It’s like a kid. It’s like being around a bunch of kids. That’s fun.”
Release date? Keep guessing. Remember, “The Master” was in post-production nearly a year before it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2012 (and secretly screened in various locations before the fest). So we wouldn’t necessarily bet on Cannes, and we’ll just have to be patient for now.