Paul Thomas Anderson

So I realized it wasn't gonna look good.

It wasn't gonna look like a movie.

So I wrote this thing that was about 23 pages long.

And it was interviews with people looking back at the life of this guy, Dirk Diggler.

Oh, A Current Affair was a very popular show at that time.

I don't know if you remember that.

But they would always have these insanely overdramatic, you know, and it was so preposterous that it was so trying to find a way into the story that I thought was interesting, which is the pornography that had surrounded me my whole life, living where I lived.

Like, it was so obvious what was around me.

And then writing it in this format was like a doable thing.

Like, okay, I can get somebody and do an interview with them, you know?

I mean, it's a format that's still at work, you know?

But at the time, it was really like the most...

convenient and plausible way into a story with the equipment that you had at hand did you have you transferred that from from v8 was a vhs uh you know it was eight millimeter eight millimeter video so a high eight i think have you transferred it to something that'll last and are we ever going to see it hopefully not hopefully it's somewhere no it's it's it's transferred within an inch of its life it's available i think it maybe it's on youtube i'd have to look oh really

Yeah, I'm not sure.

Wow.

It's not terrible.

There's still some jokes that are the same and things and some pieces that, you know, remained in Boogie Nights.

You know, what was great about that was that what I didn't even realize at the time in terms of the writing, in terms of really learning how to write, was that I'd created this kind of these fictional characters in this fake documentary, right?

And then I realized what I had to do was adapt that, adapt these fake lives into a movie.

And I spent the next, well, probably about 10 years doing that.