Paul Thomas Anderson

But on the other hand, I think, possibly, I think it was...

We laugh about it now, but he regrets missing the experience and doing it.

But yeah, that's true.

Well, I did like short treatments and shot lists and things like that.

But really, funny enough, that when I was 16, just about to turn 17, I wrote a short film that was called The Dirk Diggler Story.

That was what Boogie Nights became.

And it was like a 20, it was like a 23 or 24 page script.

But I did it

in the format that was popular at the time.

And all I had was this sort of bad video camera.

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?