Interview: "Boogie Nights Director's Prodigious Rise"

San Jose Mercury News, Written By Margy Rochlin
October 20th, 1997


With his uncombed hair, rumpled attire and dry Beavis laugh, Paul Thomas Anderson could easily pass for just another glib twentysomething. But those who know the director of ''Boogie Nights'' say that beneath the baggy vintage shirts he favors beats the heart of a boyish enthusiast who worships his cast.

''He's so in love with everything you do,'' says Gwyneth Paltrow, who starred in Anderson's first film, ''Hard Eight,'' and would also have been in ''Boogie Nights'' except ''it would have killed my grandfather.''

Anderson credits his late father, Ernie Anderson, for his first tutorials in the cinematic arts. The two watched movies on television together, and the elder Anderson, a one-time horror-show host who switched to the more lucrative specialty of doing voice-overs, explained some of the intricacies of what was made to look easy.

''He taught me to be obsessed with timing,'' says Anderson, who recalled viewing the 1940 classic ''His Girl Friday'' and listening to his dad snap his fingers as Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell delivered their lines. ''It made me pick up on the rhythm of how people speak, how scenes should be cut.''