Inherent Vice writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson is known for making ultra-serious, lately very complicated movies for film lovers. It’s highly unlikely, in this day and age of multi billion-dollar, summer blockbuster movies, that he’ll ever make one of the highest-grossing films of the year. As a result, some may assume this means the auteur looks down on superhero movies. However, this is not the case.
Turns out, Anderson is actually a big fan of superhero movies. Furthermore, he goes into detail explaining how they are essentially unjustly branded by people who don’t like them. When asked in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, what he thought of the current state of movies and the complaints about American filmmaking and the abundance of superhero flicks, he broke it all down for us.
"Ah, that's such a fucking crock of shit. I can't remember a year in recent memory where there were less complaints about the quality of movies. And what's wrong with superhero movies, you know? I don't know. You're talking to someone that enjoys watching those films. People need to get a life if they're having that discussion [laughs]. Those movies get a bad rap."
PT is known to be one of the great filmmakers of our generation. His dedication to the form and his willingness to push its boundaries are highly respected by critics and fans alike. When he popped onto the scene with his debut film Hard Eight almost 20 years ago, people immediately started taking notice. His followup films Boogie Nights and Magnolia showed his incredible talent for managing an ensemble cast, and their subsequent success with audiences practically made him a household name. In recent years, he has been putting a strong focus on the performance of his actors, beginning with There Will Be Blood (2007), which won Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar, then The Master (2012) and now with his latest, Inherent Vice.
When looking at the above-mentioned films, the latest titles in Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography, it’s fairly easy to see that he takes his filmmaking duties very seriously. I guess that’s why I'd always perceived that he’d only be interested in watching films of that nature. It’s very cool, however, that this is not the case. One can always appreciate open-mindedness when it comes something so broad as film. I mean, who doesn’t want to see what’s going to happen in Avengers: Age of Ultron or the next installment of Guardians of the Galaxy? That’s what is great about movies… sometimes you want hardcore, thought-provoking cinema and other times you just want to see incredible CGI , some explosions and a costumed lead saving the universe.
