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She’s in her mid-twenties, with a thwarted life but an inner intelligence that’s also magnetic. He falls for a girl, Alana Kane, played by Alana Haim. His patter, his bravado, is amazing for somebody fifteen years old. He starts a water-bed business and then a pinball palace. One is Gary Valentine, played by Cooper Hoffman, a teen-age guy who is incredibly charismatic for his age. “Licorice Pizza” centers on two characters. So why am I struggling to try to learn something that’s beyond my grasp or that doesn’t speak to me? At some point, I probably read that I should “Write what you know.” That’s a good place to start. I could do the research, learning more about these people in this industry, but it was familiar to me. When I was first writing “Boogie Nights” when I was a teen-ager, there was a terrific story in my own back yard. And the suburbs seemed to always come in for a beating. And, famously, there’s the story from “Chinatown” of how water was diverted from the Valley.
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Its primary reason for existing, at one time, was farmland. I mean, the San Fernando Valley-what is it? It’s a flat space between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Santa Monica Mountains. It’s funny-I wonder if Johnny Carson might’ve contributed to that because he would always say, “Beautiful downtown Burbank!” It may not be beautiful. What was the joke? What is the Valley in a spiritual sense and in terms of the landscape of your youth? When I was a kid, I’d listen to late-night radio and watch late-night television, and everybody from California would make jokes about the Valley. The Valley is not the prettiest place in the world, it’s not the most cultured place in the world, I understand that, but it’s home.
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After London, when we were making “Phantom Thread”-it was a dream of mine to be able to work there-but when I got back home, I was just so thrilled. Whatever ambition you have to spread your wings, I always find myself returning here. Maybe that’s L.A., maybe that’s New York, maybe that’s London, maybe it’s Shanghai-whatever it is, I have to get out of here.īut I’m one of those people who loves to get away for twenty-four hours and then I start getting itchy and thinking about home. “Out of here” being over the hill, not in the San Fernando Valley. I can remember being a kid and thinking at a certain point, probably in my teen-age years, I’ve got to get out of here. It’s as simple as that: it sort of begins and ends there. And, since he has set “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” and, now, “Licorice Pizza” in that territory, I began the conversation by asking him why the place resonates so deeply for him. He was speaking from his home in the Valley. (Anderson made a film of Pynchon’s novel “ Inherent Vice.”) I spoke with Anderson for The New Yorker Radio Hour our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. His square was not indicated by his name but, rather, “Mason & Dixon,” a sign of his admiration for the reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon. I was reminded of that when I got on a Zoom call with him the day after seeing his movie.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tom Cruise, Melora Walters, Julianne Moore, and Joaquin Phoenix are among the veteran actors who have appeared in his best films, which include “Punch-Drunk Love,” “Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood,” “ The Master,” and “ Phantom Thread.”Īnderson rarely speaks to reporters. His first features-“Hard Eight” and “Boogie Nights”-came out when he was in his mid-twenties, and, ever since, he has been the sort of artist whose new work is always an event. He is a Valley kid, and he’s never really left those suburban streets. It’s been a long pandemic, and this was an exhilarating reminder of what joy is like.Īnderson is fifty-one, and he has been making movies since he was an adolescent. The fractured narrative is wised-up and sly, but also winningly sincere. It’s about the strangeness of being young, the experience of becoming a human being and shaping a self. Our choice for the night was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “ Licorice Pizza,” a film set in the San Fernando Valley of the nineteen-seventies. I love all of it: the coming attractions for horror flicks I’ll never see and for spy films I wouldn’t miss the chattering crowd the Brobdingnagian snacks the adhesive floors.
#THE VAST FIELDS OF ORDINARY MOVIE MOVIE#
A few nights ago, my wife and I went to our local movie theatre, a multiplex with huge screens and blaring sound systems. Slowly, cautiously, vaccinated to the nines, we are returning to some of the basic pleasures of ordinary life.