American cinema's most disciplined dramatist of the post-Scorsese generation. Nine features in twenty-eight years and not a wasted minute.
Paul Thomas Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the son of TV horror-host Ernie Anderson. He dropped out of NYU's film programme after two days and made his first feature, Hard Eight, in 1996. His second film, Boogie Nights (1997), is the breakthrough — a Robert Altman-influenced ensemble piece about the late-1970s and early-1980s Los Angeles adult film industry that established Anderson as the most ambitious American director of his generation.
Anderson works slowly. Across thirty years he has made nine features: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza. He has never directed a film he did not write. He has worked repeatedly with the same crew — cinematographer Robert Elswit (his early films) and Mihai Mălaimare Jr., later himself; composer Jonny Greenwood (since There Will Be Blood); editor Dylan Tichenor; and a consistent cast pool including Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, and Joaquin Phoenix.
He has been nominated for eleven Academy Awards (Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay) and has won none. The standing absence of an Oscar is one of the running jokes of the contemporary Academy.
Anderson's early films — particularly Boogie Nights and Magnolia — are foundational texts in the contemporary use of long Steadicam takes. The Boogie Nights opening, which moves continuously from the parking lot of the Hot Traxx club through the dance floor and into the back rooms, introduces the entire ensemble in a single shot.
The technique was inherited directly from Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, both of whom Anderson has openly acknowledged as influences. What Anderson did in the 1990s was use the long take not as a virtuoso flourish but as a structural way to establish ensemble. The viewer learns where characters fit by watching them move through space together.
Anderson's recent films — The Master, Phantom Thread, There Will Be Blood — are structured around two-person relationships in which one person is trying, slowly and not always successfully, to dominate the other. Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell. Reynolds Woodcock and Alma. Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday.
The films are interested in what power feels like from the inside — the way control can erode under pressure, the way the weaker party can sometimes invert the dynamic, the way obsession can topple either party. Phantom Thread's mushroom-omelette ending is the most-quoted example: Alma poisons Reynolds, Reynolds eats the omelette knowing it's poisoned, and the film leaves the audience to decide whether this is love or pathology.
Anderson's career is unusually marked by repeated collaboration. Philip Seymour Hoffman appeared in five of Anderson's first seven films before his 2014 death; the absence is structurally felt in Anderson's later filmography. John C. Reilly is in four. Joaquin Phoenix is in three. Jonny Greenwood has scored every Anderson film since There Will Be Blood.
This consistency of collaboration is part of why the films feel sui generis. Anderson is not working with the studio system's pool of available talent; he is working with a specific group of people he's been making films with for two decades.
If you've never watched a Anderson film:
Robert Altman (the ensembles), Martin Scorsese (the Steadicams), Stanley Kubrick (the precision), Jonathan Demme (the warmth), and the New Hollywood of the 1970s broadly. Anderson has cited Network, Husbands, and Nashville as foundational.