In the early '90s, before Infinite Jest and before Boogie Nights, David Foster Wallace taught a young student named Paul Thomas Anderson in an English class at Emerson College.
"David Foster Wallace, who was a great writer who was not known then, was my teacher; he was an English teacher. And I, you know, that was the first teacher I fell in love with," he told Marc Maron on WTF a few years ago. "I called him once. He was very generous with his phone number. He said, 'Call me if you got any questions.' I called him a couple of times. I ran a few ideas by him about this paper that I was writing ... on Don DeLillo's White Noise. And I'd come up with a couple crazy ideas. ... I just remember him being real generous at, like, midnight, the night before it was due."
Ahead of the wide release of his acclaimed new film Phantom Thread, Anderson did a Reddit AMA, during which someone asked what his favorite memory of Wallace is. And it once again involves DeLillo:
He turned me onto Don DeLillo. And he looked at us like we were all failing him....sweetly.
It's a lovely little memory of the late, great writer. Anderson shared a few other gems, including this tip on how to make writing on a script sound good when it's said aloud:
hmmmmmm. good question. what's it sound like when you say it out loud? it doesn't need to look good on the paper if it's a script....a novel maybe, but a script is just a temporary thing....good for the actors, not for reading....
And there's one observation that an eagle-eyed Reddit user pointed out: "There's a song credit at the end of Phantom Thread for a Jonny Greenwood piece called 'Puck Beaverton's Tattoo' (obvious reference to Inherent Vice) that doesn't appear on the release of either OST. Any story here? Just a left-over piece from [Inherent Vice]?"
Well, yes.....good spotting....it's an Adaption of an old cue....Jonny took it and played it with an orchestra - instead of his computer....we fleshed it out and made it sound spooky ....
He also dug The Last Jedi, which he listed when one fan asked what 2017 movies stood out to him.
Call Me By Your Name. City Of Ghosts. Wonder Woman. The Post. Lost City of Z. Star Wars. Baby Driver. I'm missing some and haven't seen a lot....I"m still catching up....
But the question that got Anderson the most excited was a really geeky technical question: "What made you switch between anamorphic lenses on your earlier films, and the spherical lenses on the later films?"
Nerd Questions! My Favorite! Well, the first time we shot spherical was on the Master...it seemed like a good fit, evoking the old 50s films like Vertigo and North By Northwest...large format films but in a boxy frame....it was a nice change from the earlier films....I wanna shoot scope again though...maybe next time...
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
