Paul Thomas Anderson Talks ‘Phantom Thread,’ Daniel Day-Lewis & Borrowing Your Netflix Account

It struck me immediately that you said you didn’t want to make a movie about a man. This movie is about a woman, but I’m sure some don’t see that.
Look, the danger and great excitement of Daniel being in the film is that he’s a very, very strong presence and audiences are used to seeing him front and center, but the reality of this film, is that it’s something quite different. And sure, he’s in it and it revolves around this universe and house that [Reynolds has] created, but it’s [Alma’s] film. It starts with her and ends with her and she’s the one that guides us through it and that’s a very hard thing to describe to people if Daniel Day-Lewis is in the film.

It’s a nice subversion of the “great man” trope, though I don’t know if that was a conscious decision.
Sure, I thought about that, talked a lot about that for sure.

People talk a lot about the kind of two halves of your career, sometimes as if the movies were made by two different filmmakers. It strikes me that the way you use music and score was a bit key in that shift.
Mmm… maybe. It’s the stories. I don’t know, I think music’s been such a critical component of all the films.

Right, but I mean the way the scores have been more unusual and unusually made starting with “Punch Drunk Love.”
Right, well certainly there’s been less songs. And I suppose in “The Master” there was a lot of songs we used, but those songs are 70-80 years old so they kind of occupy a different thing. [long pause].

I guess what I’m getting at it, is the films, early on, used to be more precise and fast, and the newer ones feel more exploratory and intuitively made.
Well, I wish you could see just how sloppy it all is behind the scenes. It takes a long time to get that feeling of [laughs] precision or sloppiness. I don’t know… [laughs].

I’ll switch gears. There’s a tendency to see “Phantom Thread” as a little autobiographical or personal. The creation of art, the pursuit of any endeavor and being great at it, can be taxing on relationships and that’s a pretty core idea to the film.
I dunno. I’m pretty far away from the idea that you have to be completely self-consumed and like Reynolds Woodock to live this creative life. That’s a pile of horseshit to me. My life is not like that, at all. But I do always find myself amused by people who do live that way. I wouldn’t want to live around it.

And yet, that’s certainly the character you created, along with exploring that cost.
Certainly. And the cost, that’s really just him up his own ass. That’s just a ridiculous character trait that’s really fun to dismantle. That [quality of], “I need quiet at breakfast” and don’t butter your toast a certain way and all that kind of stuff, the joy in that is just how preposterous it is. To think you could get away with that and live a satisfied life, man, I don’t know, you’ve got to break a curse. And you must be cursed if you think you’re going to get away with something like that.

I’m curious what comes first when you’re rooting around in this story — dressmaking or the inscrutabilities of love?
That was all the stuff, for sure. It was all about the power dynamics between two people in love. Look, in any relationship there’s the question of who is driving the car. There’s always the criticism from the passenger about how the driver is driving the car. They’re going too fast, they’re going too slow, they should have parked in that spot. “Why would you park in that spot when there’s one available right here?” When the driver is in the passenger, the criticism inevitably flips to the other driver [laughs].

This is just age old. It’s men and women, it’s how we perceive each other and how we need each other and how we knock heads against each other. It’s the stuff that great screwball comedies are made of. All those films that we love and cherish, still, fuck, 70s years later? They’re still speaking to us. They’re not going out of style because shit, they got it right. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

No, they don’t and it seems like you’re… trying to make them that way or evoke that idea?
Trying to be as good as those films? Hell, yeah. That’s what we should all aspire to. We should absolutely try to be that good. You don’t have a chance in hell, but shoot for it, for sure.

I mean less of ambition and more about sensibilities and taste. The grammar of your filmmaking these days seems more in tune with that rather than the modern vernacular.
Right, that’s the stuff that I love. Look, that’s the stuff that I watch. That’s the stuff that I get off on.

What do you watch?
[Makes an exasperated noise at all the limitless things he could mention; long pause]

TCM [Turner Classic Movies]?
Woo boy, TCM! If TCM isn’t on then I guess it’s the news if some natural disaster is happening, but it’s TCM, man. Something about TCM and those films speak to me. I don’t even need to love a film that I’m watching as long as it’s old [laughs]. It’s strange, I don’t know.

Does that naturally seep in then?
For sure. I think my instincts, like when I step onto a set, because of the training I have had watching these films, is generally asking myself, “How can this play in hopefully one, but no more than three shots?” Because if you look at most of those films, the coverage is a master shot that’s really well staged, without many cuts, and if there is coverage, it’s very simple close-ups or overs. That is the most basic, classical, old-fashioned style and again, I always find myself walking onto set and asking myself, “What is the simplest way to do this?” And inevitably in this day and age that can get kind of dull or you have to find something that can spice up a story and those moments are needed and you want those. It’s a modern movie, so things can’t just play out like they might have 70 years ago… [trails off with a long pause].

Anyway, when you’re in the groove of making a movie, about three weeks in, the last thing you’re thinking about is other movies. You’re just looking for a good place to put the camera and a practical way to get on with it and see what is gonna happen in those actors faces. You’re after it, like a dog.