Paul Thomas Anderson

And then it just keeps on going and you keep refining that through the editing and all that.

Well, it's the great joy of collaboration, particularly when you're doing it with somebody that you love and work with.

Like, for instance, on that film, I had never worked with Jack Fisk, who's one of the great production designers who started his career with Terrence Malick and David Lynch.

They kind of go back to their beginnings together.

Anyway, I contacted Jack Fisk and had written the script and I needed to kind of create... I needed a lot of help with making oil derricks and the recreation of an early California town and there was only one person that helped do that so it started a great collaboration.

Jack Fisk was...

you know, we were kind of trying to learn how to get oil out of the ground and really trying to be really, you know, do our research.

And he said the greatest thing.

He's like, you know, I found that if we can just get a children's book about this, it's really better than trying to really understand how to do it with all these kind of books that are this thick.

And it was one of these great lessons and like, yeah, get the children's book first and don't be, you know, because it'll have drawings, it'll be simple.

And it was like...

Wow, Jack Fisk gets the children's book first.

All right, that's really good advice.

But we had the incredible joy of going to scout locations together and find a place to make this film.

And I learned from him one incredible trick that I still try to make true is that the more you can have a location

where everything's close together, the more freedom you have.

Here's what I mean by that is that if you shoot a scene over here and you see it a few days later, you think that's the worst scene that we've ever done, we should really try to do it again, is that you can go do it again.

You kind of create your own backlog, you create your own universe and try as much as you possibly can to not move too much but to have a variety of different looks and things happening.

So that, I don't know, I'm lost in whatever your question was.

It was kind of like the collaboration.