Postcard: Los Angeles, from James Mottram

In the end, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master finished the awards season with an almost cursory nod, with just three Academy Award nominations (and zero wins) for its stars - Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams - while its director was ignored. But then perhaps it's no surprise. With the roots of its story embedded in the Church of Scientology, specifically its founder L. Ron Hubbard, the film was never going to sit easily in Hollywood, where several A-list stars are known practitioners of the controversial religion.

"I knew we weren't making a film about Scientology and I knew it wasn't a Scientology movie," argues Anderson, the bearded 42-year-old whose previous credits include Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. "I'm not dumb, but I was probably a bit naïve not to expect a kind of [reaction] … it's a word that causes such curiosity in people. People's eyes light up and they get very interested in it. And so we got that thing put on us early on and it stuck."

Set primarily in 1950, the year Hubbard's seminal book Dianetics was published, the film casts Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, a self-styled writer, doctor and nuclear physicist who runs a self-help programme called "The Cause". The inspiration is clear. "Hubbard to me is one of those great characters," Anderson says. "Completely full of life and energy, he wrote countless books, and was obviously brimming with ideas and, I dare say, a lot of compassion. But I can't really speculate too much on him. Ultimately, it's just a starting point."

Indeed, rather than a Hubbard biopic, it's really the story of two men - the Master (Hoffman) and his follower, Freddie Quell (Phoenix), a volatile, restless naval veteran. With Anderson returning to the theme of fathers and sons, one that has dominated his work since Hard Eight, his 1996 first feature about a gambler and his prodigy, what emerges is a battle of wills between two souls. Truly, from its scratchy Jonny Greenwood score to its old-school 65mm cinematography, it's unlike any other American film of the past year.

Anderson was partly inspired by John Huston's 1946 documentary Let There Be Light, a US government-funded account of soldiers coping with trauma and depression. "We did talk a lot about second world war vets, people who were suffering from severe trauma because of war - that was a big thing," says Hoffman. "Why these movements like this were coming into being at that time in America - because of dealing with a lot of the people coming out of the war, and who was going to treat them."