Paul Thomas Anderson

Paul Thomas Anderson is an American director and screenwriter who has been assessed by the admins of this site as ISTP.

Quotes

 * “Acting is the hardest job in the entire world. By far. Harder than ditch digging.”
 * “You have to be a brat in order to carve out your parameters, and you have to be a monster to anyone who gets in your way.”
 * “I actually enjoyed the struggles that we had trying to shape 'Blood', to get the pacing right, the rhythm of it.”
 * “How do I respond to criticism? Critically. I listen to all criticism critically.”
 * “My initial response to getting sick is, (a) I’m angry, because I don’t want to be slowed down, I want to have all my wits about me. And (b), pretend I’m not sick and refuse any kind of help, because to admit I need help would be admitting I was sick.”
 * “Sewing by its very nature requires a kind of patience and focus that I don’t have, but I have it for sure in other ways.”
 * [On the filmmaking process:]“It’s very practical work. Good luck being artistic.”
 * [On dropping out of film school]: “My film education really came from watching other movies.”
 * “I had older brothers and sisters who were doing drugs and playing rock music and doing all those insane things. I was watching.”
 * “People don't know how Daniel [Day Lewis] can do this job the way that he does it, and my feeling is, I just can't understand how anyone could do it any other way.”
 * “We're all children of Kubrick, aren't we? Is there anything you can do that he hasn't done?”
 * “Oh, how I hate it, when directors are supposed to explain their films.”
 * “The scripts that I write for [my actors] are very clean, very clean of a lot of flowery explanation of what they're supposed to be feeling. It lets them do they're job and allows them to just act.”
 * “The only direction I should really give to an actor is 'keep it simple.'”
 * [Charlie Rose]: “What does this take out of you, making a movie like [“Magnolia?”]
 * [Anderson]: “A lot of weight, physically...”
 * [GQ]: “'Phantom Thread' is a portrait of a demanding, creative, often cruel person who organizes his life, and the lives of others, around his work. The potential parallels to, say, a film director are not hard to notice—something Anderson acknowledges and disavows at the same time.”
 * "When we're isolated, it becomes very difficult to know how much of your pain is specific to you—how low or high your threshold is for feeling sad or melancholy or just plain blue compared to other people."