Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie “One Battle After Another” opens in chaos.
The sun is setting and the radical California revolutionary group the French 75 is raiding an immigration detention center along the southern border in Otay Mesa while Jonny Greenwood’s score is cranked to 11. We’re meeting the main players — explosives expert Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), the watchful Deandra (Regina Hall), the fierce, impulsive Perfidia (Teyana Taylor). Perfidia tells Bob to create a show and he obliges with a spectacle of fireworks and munitions.
Perfidia, meanwhile, finds the man in charge of the camp, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), lying on a cot. “Get up,” she commands, pointing her rifle at his crotch. He obliges. “Keep that d— up,” she yells, taking his cap and gun and marching him out of the room.
Going into “One Battle After Another,” which I first saw in July, I thought it might be Anderson’s attempt to rope in a wider audience, given that it was funded by Warner Bros., cost a reported $140 million and stars box-office A-lister DiCaprio. Anderson and I have talked a lot over the years about our shared love for great movies with broad appeal like George Miller’s “Mad Max” series and the road action-comedy “Midnight Run,” starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Perhaps “One Battle After Another” was his “Midnight Run.”
Five minutes into his movie is all it took to realize I was dead wrong.
“You really can’t resist putting in weird s— in your movies, can you?” I tell Anderson several weeks later at a Hollywood hotel where we finally sit down to talk about the film over a vegan lunch.
The director lets out a sustained laugh.
“Well, thank you,” he says, after collecting himself. “I think that’s a compliment.”
“I think it surprises audiences when it happens,” Anderson, 55, says of Perfidia’s confrontation with Lockjaw. “It’s a good feeling because we’ve got a real intense vibe going there for a second, some sneaking around the edges. We don’t really know what’s going on. And then suddenly, out of the blue, we’re in boner world. And you’re like, ‘Wait. We’re doing boners too?’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do boners.’ You have to let the audience know, hopefully in the first act, what the parameters of the playpen are going to be. And that was a clear signal that we’re setting up a real wide berth.”
The parameters of this film’s particular playpen also accommodate a sweet father-daughter story when, 16 years after all that initial action, we’re reintroduced to Bob, now a disillusioned burnout residing in Humboldt County with teenage daughter Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti) and paranoid that the past — namely Lockjaw — will show up at his door someday with a battering ram.
The movie also sports absurdist comedy and electrifying action scenes, as well as the tone and imagery (immigration raids, angry protests, surveillance helicopters) we routinely see played out today on news channels and social media. It’s operatic and intimate, haunting and hilarious. It could be his masterpiece. It’s no stretch to say that it belongs alongside Anderson’s best films: “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master” and “Boogie Nights.”
We’re sitting down a few days after the movie’s world premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre, which came on the heels of another screening at the Directors Guild that had Steven Spielberg interviewing Anderson afterward. (“What an insane movie, oh my God,” the “Jaws” director began.) Anderson is feeling overwhelmed by the generous response. It’s enough to lift him off the ground and keep him afloat for awhile.
“I probably shouldn’t say this, but here’s the reality that is humbling and keeps you from floating off into space,” Anderson tells me. “At one of those screenings, I did look over and there was a woman in the back row who was dead asleep. So you go, ‘Huh. I guess we missed one.’”
That woman was very much an outlier. In theater lobbies and receptions following last week’s screenings, conversations were animated and occasionally heated, much of the talk focusing on the movie’s depiction of white supremacists (there’s a secret society called the Christmas Adventurers) and military roundups of immigrants in the sanctuary city where Bob and Willa live. Benicio del Toro plays Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, Willa’s karate teacher running something of an underground railroad for the town’s refugee population. Parallels intended or not abound.
Is “One Battle After Another” the movie for our current moment? Anderson isn’t quite convinced.
“That’s the mistake, isn’t it, to think that anything has changed,” he says. “This story could be told 20 years ago. This story could be told in the Middle Ages. You could take this story and put it in space. It’s like the line Perfidia says in the movie: ‘Sixteen years later, and the world has changed very little.’”
“The biggest mistake I could make in a story like this is to put politics up in the front,” Anderson continues. “That has a short shelf life. To sustain a story over two hours and 40 minutes, you have to care about the characters and take those big swings in terms of the emotional arcs of people and their pursuits and why you love that person and why you hate this person. That’s not a thing that ever goes out of fashion. But neither does fascism and neither does people doing bad s— to other people. Unfortunately, that doesn’t go out of style, either. That’s just how we humans are.”
True enough. Still, that shot of the military SUV convoy on its way to an immigration raid — “Expect the local population to be sympathetic to the criminal organizations we’re targeting” we hear at a briefing — feels a little too familiar.
“I know,” Anderson responds. “But there’s a nice line when Leo says to Benicio, ‘I’m sorry I brought all this s— to your doorstep.’ And Benicio says, ‘Tranquilo. Tranquilo. We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years. Don’t get selfish.’”
“I’m not trying to diminish what’s happening right now,” Anderson says. “But I’m also trying to say that what’s worse is that it’s not going away. You could look back 20 years and find the same images. There are articles in the L.A. Times from 100 years ago showing this kind of stuff. The selfish part is for us to think, ‘Boy, look at what’s happening. I’ve never seen this before.’”
Anderson is happy to own the personal connection he feels to “One Battle’s” story, loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” that he’d been nibbling around the edges for a good 20 years, one that kept “nagging” at him. The main point of entry is obvious. Anderson has four children with his wife, Maya Rudolph: daughters Pearl, 19; Lucille, 15; and Minnie Ida, 12; and a son, Jack, 14. That provides a lot of “ammunition,” he says, for the story.
“If you’re a dad and you’re making a movie about a dad who’s desperately trying to find and protect his daughter, you are going to feel that deeply,” Anderson says.
But that wasn’t all of it. Twenty years is a long time to spend thinking about a movie. What kept nagging at him?
“It’s a good question,” Anderson answers. He stops and considers. “What nagged at me was getting the story right. Maybe I was enjoying the process too much. The risk if you work on something for a long time is that it gets past its due date.” Anderson did reach a point several years ago when he thought he was ready and started looking for a young woman to play Willa. Nothing came of it.
“I mean, the movies, they’re all personal, but boy, you know, sometimes you spend two years, sometimes you spend five, sometimes you spend 10,” Anderson says. “But you’ve got one life and you just committed a serious chunk to it. That makes it pretty f— personal.” His last movie, 2021’s “Licorice Pizza,” the loose and thoroughly lovable coming-of-age story set in a Nixon-era San Fernando Valley, came quickly, though like “One Battle After Another,” he had been daydreaming about it for years.
If you want to get a little cosmic about it — and Anderson is fine with that because he does believe in the movie gods — he was simply waiting for Chase Infiniti to be born. The 25-year-old Infiniti made a name for herself last year in the limited series “Presumed Innocent,” playing Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga’s daughter. “One Battle After Another” is her feature film debut.
“Finding Chase made it inevitable,” Anderson says. “Finding Chase made it: ‘Game on. There’s no stopping.’ I found the girl who’s the most important character to me.”
Why do you feel that way about Willa?
“You know, everybody in this movie is crazy for the most part,” Anderson answers. “Bob’s completely unreliable. Perfidia is completely unreliable. Lockjaw is nuts. Deandra is semi-reliable, soulful, trusting. But she’s lived her life. And here you have this golden egg. I think when Chase comes on screen, you think: Finally, somebody I can trust and invest in.”
What did your daughters think of the movie?
“They love it,” Anderson says. “They’re very close with Chase now.” He pauses. “Some of them don’t really love the blood and the guts that come up in the movie. They’re a little bit young for that.”
Has Minnie Ida seen it? She’s 12 now.
“Oh yeah. She’s seen it multiple times,” Anderson says. “I mean I work at home. They know everything that goes on. It’s the fabric of our home.” That Tarzana home, which Anderson has described to me as “chaotic,” usually is a place where Turner Classic Movies runs round the clock and his standard poodle brings him the print edition of the L.A. Times “every morning.”
“The best part of my day,” Anderson says. “I have a coffee grinder next to the back door. The dog usually sleeps with the kids. I hit the coffee grinder” — Anderson makes the sound of beans whirring around — “and the dog comes running. Waits at the door. Open the door. Finish the coffee grind. The dog comes back in with the paper. Boop. I’ve got my L.A. Times and pour my coffee.”
Anderson’s beard is whiter than the last time we talked. The prescription glasses are a permanent feature now. But “One Battle After Another” doesn’t feel like a summation. With its frenetic energy and relentless urgency, it feels in many ways like a new beginning. Anderson says that three things are inevitable: middle age, complacency and the tendency to look at the next generation with disdain.
“The math is a stone-cold fact,” Anderson says. “But to look at the next generation and think, ‘You’re doing it wrong because you’re not doing it like I did’ is a classic mistake to make. The world changes. There’s a new dance craze and you just don’t understand the music. I don’t share that sentiment obviously. I might not understand everything, but I’m filled with an overwhelming hope that this next generation can conquer the mistakes that we have made.”
And if you’re looking for a message from “One Battle After Another,” there it is.
“I am an optimist, dummy that I am,” Anderson contends. “And I believe that with the power of their beliefs, the power of their phones …” He trails off.
What’s your relationship to your phone? He deflects the question initially, offering something better.
“You know, I can remember thinking about making a short film when I was starting out and — I still feel this way — making short films is the hardest thing you can do. Look at me. I can’t make a movie that’s shorter than two hours and 40 minutes to save my life. I remember reading about Stanley Kubrick being obsessed with Ridley Scott and the commercials he made and that kind of economy of storytelling. And now you see some of the most inventive things being done in 10 or 15 seconds. And I’m like, I can’t get out of the gate in 30 minutes.”
You like a nice long ramp, I affirm.
“I do like a good ramp and it’s what I’ve invested my life in to try to tell stories that way,” Anderson says. “But there’s a whole other way to impart ideas that I would be completely incapable of, but have no less admiration for. Things that are as inventive as hell and f—ing funny. And you know, it only took 15 seconds of time to put a smile on my face and I’m on to the next one.”
I feel like you’re confessing that you enjoy a good scroll through social media.
Anderson laughs. “I would never admit to the kind of …” He can’t stop laughing. “… really horrible addiction I have.” We’re both howling, sharing a mutual shame. “You know, a serious-minded man like myself, I would never get caught scrolling and watching people fall down or make funny dance things. But I do love it. I have to. I’m surrounded by it.”
Anderson has just about cleaned his plate of cucumber salad, pita and hummus, and I’m fixing to leave him to the joys of having his portrait taken.
“You ever get reflective these days?” I ask. “The kids are growing up. Your oldest is almost 20.”
He makes a face at me and lets out a sigh. “Are you reflective? Do you do that?” This is a thing Anderson does when he doesn’t like a question, usually one that asks him to, you know, reflect on something.
“I think I have the philosophy that if you just run as fast as you can headlong into the future, maybe you don’t have to turn around and look behind you,” Anderson says. “I mean, there’s nothing back there but the past.”
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