Paul Thomas Anderson

You know, you don't walk down the street and somebody say like, wow, there he is, you know, or your dad's a baseball player.

He's like,

Well, you know, there's no recognition to it really.

But that's what he loved about it so much was that he could just kind of have this independent life coyoteing around town and, you know, doing his work and getting paid for it.

making films and making television you know television back then was like you know anybody can do it you know right movies was like this this gold ring like not everybody gets to make movies you know right so you started to experiment with little home movie and it's not an uncommon story right and no it's the same exact story as everybody else but i had the and i had the the

the camaraderie and that which is so crazy now i mean i look around my my life right now and i see my relationship to all the people in dark rooms that i work with engineers and things like this when it's the entire process of making a movie and you're like this is exactly what my dad did you go to a dark room each day and you know try and make something happen and the and the friendships that that he had with those guys i i look back and i think

I was really inspired by it.

I always just thought that's what a friendship was.

He was very close with all these technicians and guys that he worked with.

So those are the people that were around our house.

Well, the only people that don't need to be there are like studio executives and producers.

And, you know, what I learned probably from my dad, it was like, whoever's, whoever's, you know, kick all the people out of the room that are not completely, completely essential to the project.

You know, you learn pretty quickly who isn't, you know, they scatter.

That's a really good question because I think you're right that the story of, you know, the filmmaker with the 8mm camera and then onto the video camera, it's like there's a million of them and that's generally how everybody starts.

But the writing part always excited me because I liked it.

I think I got lucky that I liked it.

I liked putting paper into a typewriter and typing out ideas and I...

I liked seeing it on the page.

I liked looking at that idea.

I don't know, from an early age, I've always liked writing and formulating things on paper.