Phantom Thread’s Paul Thomas Anderson on Daniel Day-Lewis’ retirement, the importance of Oscars and his fashion influences
Filmmaker insists he wouldn’t announce his own retirement, says Day-Lewis’ character in his new film is an amalgam of several fashion designers, and welcomes Academy Award nominations because they extend a film’s run
If you were looking for a song that summed up Paul Thomas Anderson’s delicious new film Phantom Thread, the writer-director has a suggestion: Mickey & Sylvia’s 1956 hit Love Is Strange.
“I would go with that one,” the 47-year-old filmmaker says with a smile when we meet in London’s Soho Hotel in late January. All the best love stories, he says, are the ones where the roses have thorns on them.
“I think it would be boring to make a movie saying ‘love is great’.” He pauses for a second. “Boring.”
Anderson isn’t known for treading conventional paths. His subjects are frequently epic (the California oil boom in There Will Be Blood; the birth of Scientology, or something like it, in The Master).
His ambitions are big (adapting the fiendish Thomas Pynchon for Inherent Vice). And his daring is without question; just look at his 1999 Robert Altman-inspired ensemble Magnolia, casting Tom Cruise as a sex guru and concluding with a biblical plague of frogs.
Indeed, the only film that comes close is 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, another tale of peculiar affections starring that most unlikely of screen couples, Adam Sandler and Emily Watson. Here, Anderson has the great Daniel Day-Lewis, his star from There Will Be Blood, and Luxembourg-raised newcomer Vicky Krieps.