TORONTO -- Maverick Hollywood filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson sips a fine white wine and gobbles down a plate of greasy french fries smothered in ketchup. He swears like a sailor on shore leave and is as sweet and good-natured as Bambi.
We're sitting in a back room of the bar at the swank Toronto boutique hotel The Windsor Arms and Anderson, with his tousled hair and vaguely sleepy look, is dressed casually in battered jeans and a rumpled white shirt that probably has never been tucked into his pants.
Looks are deceiving. This is the genius who, in the past seven years, has made some of America's most daring, innovative, intellectually risky and visually dynamic films: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and now Punch-Drunk Love. The new film opens Friday in limited release, including in Toronto, after appearing to much acclaim (but some minor nay-saying) at the Toronto film festival.
Punch-Drunk Love is dark and brooding, at odds with its supposed positioning as a romantic comedy. It is prickly and eccentric. It is provocative and hypnotic. It is everything that cinephiles admire and Hollywood marketing teams hate: A film which cannot be neatly packaged, labeled and sold as a product tie-in with burgers and candy.
Yet Anderson cast gross-out funnyman Adam Sandler in the leading role, opposite the sublime English siren Emily Watson. But, instead of indulging the superstar comic with scenes awash in his usual juvenile jokes, he plumbed the depths of Sandler's psyche to explore the anger, the angst and the ache for love that only he saw hiding there in the train wreck of his comedy sketches.
"I just got such joy from his stuff," Anderson tells The Sun about his unbridled admiration for Sandler, particularly for his Saturday Night Live routines and three of his most popular movies: Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer and Big Daddy. Anderson loves the pattern in the humour.
"It can be so f---ing goofy," Anderson says, salting the phrase with one of his favourite words, the F-adjective, which will be translated into "effing" from now on.
"But then it can be so filled with rage. It goes right from when he's the goofball -- and you can't help yourself, you giggle at how effing stupid and silly it is and just funny for no reason -- to when he's really intense and really angry and really scary and still effing funny. I thought, 'Oh my, this guy, there's a lot going on here!
"It just struck me that I could get stoned and watch this stuff and howl, or just marvel at how intense and odd it all was. That's what really hit me."
So Anderson was seized with the idea of Sandler, the idea of putting him into a flashy blue suit, the idea of making his character an obsessive compulsive who could not function in love or in the real world. He seized upon the idea of channelling Sandler's energy into collecting thousands of containers of junk food to capitalize on the frequent flier miles they would generate in a promotion (that notion came from a Time magazine article about a California civil engineer, David Phillips, who scored 1.25 million miles by buying 12,150 cups of pudding for about $3,000, an air travel bargain that made a mockery out of the true-life promotion).
The fictional character's bizarrely routine existence is thrown out of whack when he meets a sexy, if eccentric woman played by Emily Watson. He is also thrown into chaos when he has to go home and interact with his gaggle of overbearing sisters, who bring out his inner demons.
Anderson figured Sandler could do all that and still maintain the creative impulses that make him so popular with mainstream audiences (no matter what critics say about him).
So he went and met Sandler on the set of Little Nicky. They went to dinner together and Anderson was in awe of Sandler's persona in public, his ability to interact with his legion of fans.
"This is only validating what I thought was the truth when I was on the couch thinking it," Anderson says of finding Sandler so intriguing. Equally important was teaming him with Watson on screen.
"The best," Anderson says of Watson. "God, she is the queen. I wish she could be here (at the Toronto film fest) but she's doing a play in London, which is such a drag because she's the engine behind this whole product. She is the key, the warmth and the class, without any pretension. You want to be great when Emily Watson's around. You want to do it right."
Anderson's own fans already think he always does it right. Magnolia is a masterpiece, even if it did mystify many people with its rain of frogs, an inspiration from the Biblical plague that makes sense if you work it out and look up passages in the Old Testament that are sign-posted on screen.
Anderson also has a common, trashy side, such as his interest in pornography that led to Boogie Nights and inspired the phone sex that drives Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love (routines Anderson says were from personal research).
The Hollywood-born, 32-year-old Anderson is the son of Ernie Anderson, who once was a minor celebrity in Cleveland under the name Ghoulardi as the host of a TV show which ran horror flicks. Anderson has always gone his own way. He dropped out of film school at New York University and used his tuition money to fund a short debut film, Cigarettes And Coffee, in 1993. His first feature, Hard Eight, was released in 1996.
Ask him why he makes movies and he answers, with a wry smile, "To get attention."
Pressed further he says, "It's ego -- I've got something to say. The impulse is probably equal parts being really angry about things and being absolutely in love with a lot of things. I have so much interest in things and so much to say and, having a big mouth, you know, I ..."
His "big mouth" is expressed on screen, in his movies. But, right this moment, it's being stuffed with fries, which will be washed down with a delicate, refined white wine.
More Artists
