By Roger Ebert / rogerebert.com (Oct 19, 1997)
Proofreading: Issac
The translation was first published in "Iris"
Paul Thomas Anderson made perhaps the best movie of 1997, and at the age of 27, he's getting the attention a young director hasn't had since Quentin Tarantino's hit. His "Boogie Nights," about six years of rocky experiences in the porn industry for a group of disparate personalities, is the year's most acclaimed film -- a hit at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals -- and now Showing nationwide.
Although the film's subject matter is quite sensitive, "Boogie Nights" is not a pornographic film; erotic elements provide the backdrop for this traditionally structured Hollywood story in which an unnamed boy (Mark Wahlberg) is killed by a pornographic film director (Berberberg). Reynolds), and becomes a star with the encouragement of a veteran actress (Julianne Moore)—until his ego and drugs bring it all down.
Beyond that, the film is all about filmmaking. It captures the homey vibe of the set, like any film since Truffaut's Day Is Night. The film's focus isn't on sex, but on loneliness and despair, with lots of humor interspersed, some dark, some lighthearted.
"Boogie Nights" is Anderson's second feature film. When I saw his debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996, I thought he must be a natural filmmaker.
Las Vegas, starring John C. Reilly and Philip Baker Hall, tells the story of an old gambler who teaches gambling to a bankrupt child in Nevada. The characters played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson are involved, and as the story unfolds, the hidden relationships of the characters are gradually revealed. This movie is fascinating.
Riley and Hall also played a major role in "Boogie Nights" - Riley was the hero's friend and Hall was the backer. The big-name cast also includes actors such as William H. Macy (the car salesman in "Frozen") and Don Cheadle ("The Devil in Blue").
On his way from Los Angeles to the New York Film Festival, Anderson stopped in Chicago for a few hours, and on a perfect day in October, we sat outside and talked about how quickly he has accomplished so much.
Q: Actually, you made a short version of this movie when you were a student, right?
Anderson: Hmm. When I was 17, I made a half-hour short film called "The Biography of the Cannon King Di Ge". I was very influenced by "Viva Rock" and it stuck in my head like it was telling me to "see it as a documentary". I came across an article in Current Affairs about (porn actress) Shauna Grant, and it told the old-fashioned but true story of an Iowa girl who took the bus to Hollywood to find her dream .
Q: So it's basically a Hollywood story, except it's about the pornographic film industry.
Anderson: It's a Busby Berkeley movie. It's old-fashioned because it's true.
Q: This period of making R-rated movies is over before you can experience it.
Anderson: A lot of people from that period were still alive, you know, although they might not have been happy when they first started out. They once gained a little dignity by shooting film movies, but now they are all garbage videos on the assembly line. Of course, there are still people who consider themselves mavericks and the occasional pornographic film shot on film. It's really a big selling point - while the public doesn't care much about it, you know what I mean.
Q: I interviewed Gerard Damiano. He's probably the best porn film director ever, and once upon a time he believed he could make art films about sex. The advent of home video in 1979 shattered this illusion. The golden age of film in the industry was from 1969 to 1979.
ANDERSON: We now have sci-fi, murder mystery, westerns, and possibly "sex movies" . . .
Q: If you were to make a porn movie, the sex scene would derail everything else, wouldn't it?
Anderson: There's a movie called "Amanda in the Night," which is closer to the scope of an erotic art movie, and it's also very similar to some of John Holmes' earlier work, not only in structure, but -- you can see the difference. characters have sex in different ways. I think sometimes when you see a character in a movie, you wonder what their sex life is like. I hate totally unnecessary sex scenes, but there are movies where I do want to see what a movie character looks like in private.
Q: The pornographic film industry is like a shadow of the mainstream film industry. They also have porn movie awards, their own industry magazines, and their own stars.
Anderson: It's all about making movies. When you enter the set of a porn movie, there may be a shock for a minute, but after that it's like any other set. All you think about is, set up the machine and focus. They have ceremonies to celebrate what they do; otherwise who else is going to celebrate them?
Q: I guess one of the characters in the film is a mafia?
ANDERSON: His name is Floyd Gondolin, played by Philip Baker Hall, which is hinted at in the movie.
Q: I've heard that the Mafia doesn't get directly involved in the film industry, but they use porn theaters to launder money. They might have sold 1,000 tickets and then they said they sold 10,000 tickets. That way they can launder a lot of money.
Anderson: As far as I know, it's not clear how deep the Mafia is in the film industry. I don't have a direct answer. I think they stepped in for a while, but apparently not anymore.
Q: Acting in porn is, in a way, an extreme method act. If method actors recreate that emotion by recalling an emotional event, maybe porn actors have something in mind that excites them . . .
Anderson: The latter is much more difficult. Some people tell me their souls have long gone to Cloud Nine to look like they're enjoying themselves. Many of the performances are rigid and dramatic. But great sex in porn is probably one of the best shows ever.
Q: Rumor has it that Burt Reynolds didn't like the movie. He's already wasted most of his career with Ace, Cannonball and Cops and Truck Robbers, doesn't he know he gave one of the best performances of his life in this movie?
Anderson: I haven't spoken to him since we finished the movie, so I don't know what he thinks. He is a good man. He has a good heart and is a good actor. He once said to me, "I'm an actor first, and a celebrity second." It's a bit like Jack Horner, who has always insisted he's a director.
Q: Aside from sex at work, these people have little to no daily sex life. They seem to burn out their sex drive on set, don't they?
Anderson: I know a lot of people who have sex before work or not, and people who don't have sex 24 hours a day. There are well-planned sex scenes in the movie where we get to see how Julianne Moore and Mark Wahlberg's characters have sex, which in my opinion suffices to say what that usually looks like.
Q: One of the sex-obsessed characters is William H. Macy's wife, played by porn star Nina Hartley.
Anderson: She's still a porn star. She made a lot of money by doing porn and lecturing. She is a sexologist and registered nurse and her sexology lectures are wonderful and weird.
Q: If I remember correctly you are only 27 years old? That means you were 25 when you made Las Vegas. You seem to be bypassing the film school process?
Anderson: Yeah, almost. I went to NYU for a few days, but I had a bad attitude. I signed up just to get enough information to speak ill of the bad things I knew. I made a short film and then joined the Sundance Director's Lab and started working on "Sidney," which would later become Las Vegas. The funny thing is, I had some money from gambling, and my girlfriend's credit card, and my dad saved $10,000 for me to go to college, but I said, "Listen, I'm not going. This 20 Minutes are my college."
Q: Las Vegas has a quality I've longed to see in a movie: it knows a lot and tells me a lot. I learned how to take $150 to convince the casino to give me one night's compensation.
Anderson: Before I went to Sundance, what I wrote was just one long scene: John and Sidney sitting in the car and Sidney telling John there was a way, it would cost $50 or $100 Eat and sleep well for several days. Then I went to Sundance, and Richard La Gravens (writer of "Last Dreams") said to me, "Why isn't this scene in the movie? You just explained to me a great con! Why don't you show it?"
Q: I saw this film in Cannes two years ago and liked it very much. But then everyone thought it was a story like "Desperate Mandarin Duck", "The Last Temptation" and "Western Red Rock", and the distributor didn't know the movie in hand. Some of the great movies recently made in the US were not understood by the studios and were dumped on cable and video sites.
Anderson: For me, it was a wake-up call: making a good movie is only half the job. The other half deals with the administrative affairs of the film company. The company that paid me didn't like the movie I made, so I did a test screening first. I mean, a movie like Las Vegas can't be tested. When the feedback card came back, you would see someone asking where the action was and why Gwyneth Paltrow didn't have a nude scene, so the studio thought of giving up. You'd think the budget for the film was so low that they would at least try to recover the cost. But they thought it was a good little experiment, like a guinea pig in a cage.
Q: Going back to "Boogie Nights" - do you think people who are offended by its themes will have any problems? If a movie gets an NC-17 rating, it can't be shown in many theaters or chains. Your movie is R-rated (Translator's Note: Under seventeen must be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian), and any theaters say they won't show it? Like Blockbuster dropping certain movies even though they're rated R?
Anderson: The main reason I couldn't make an NC-17 movie on a contractual basis was Blockbuster.
Q: Some people think it's amazing that you can get an R.
Anderson: In the end we only cut out 40 seconds. There's one or two things that still bother me a bit, but that's not enough to affect the story, so I don't mind. One of the most important things we have to deal with is the scene where Macy first finds Nina Hartley in bed with a man. The Motion Picture Association of America says I can't have characters act sexually and talk at the same time. So I told Nina, "Just move and stop and say a line."
Q: Los Angeles is full of people who want to make movies. They always ask, "How do I start? How do I do it?" You have successfully found a path to your goal. What would you say to someone who wants to be a director?
Anderson: I can't do anything else, and certainly won't do anything else. "No" is not an option for me. I have to do this or I will die. I can be a director because I can write scripts - that's the point. If you can write a script, you have a lot of leverage in your hand. They desperately need material. Very necessary.
Original link:
https://filmmakermagazine.com/110797-backwards-continuity-is-not-a-category-is-it-script-supervisor-steve-gehrke-on-tenet/
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