The eight movies Paul Thomas Anderson urges every aspiring director to see
Paul Thomas Anderson is having a moment right now.
His latest film, One Battle After Another, is cleaning up at awards ceremonies across the board, which saw him recently picked up ‘Best Direction’ and ‘Best Film’ at the Baftas, and he has a very strong chance of doing the same at the Oscars, with the top prize all but sewn up. If he is victorious in either of those categories, it will mark his first individual Academy Award victory.
Fans of PTA have known about the director’s greatness for some time, one of those rare filmmakers who has turned his hand to multiple styles and genres and found success almost every time. After blowing audiences away with the epic, multi-faceted Magnolia, he returned to basics with short, romance-centred Punch-Drunk Love, both of which are now widely regarded as classics. He’s able to draw out incredible performances from some of the finest actors of all time, even if Quentin Tarantino doesn’t think so.
Though still relatively young in filmmaking terms, he turned 55 in 2025. Anderson is clearly a student of the game, having been in the directing business for over half of his life and was exposed to cinema at a young age through his father, the actor and TV personality Ernie Anderson. He clearly knows a thing or two about movies, so if you want to be like him, you need to follow his advice.
According to an interview conducted with USA Today in 1997, Anderson has one major pet peeve when it comes to aspiring filmmakers. “I wish people’s film vocabularies would go back further than three or four years ago,” he bemoaned. To illustrate this point, he spoke about two movies made long before he was born that still found a way to impact his work.
One was The Reckless Moment, a 1949 movie made by German director Max Ophüls, of whose technical innovations Anderson is a huge fan, praising his use of camera movements and long tracking shots. The second filmmaker in for some praise was another German, Ernst Lubitsch, whose two films Anderson name-checked: the operetta-inspired The Merry Widow, and The Shop Around the Corner, best known for being the other Christmas movie starring James Stewart. “His movies spiral out of control,” the filmmaker said of Lubitsch’s work, “But the characters are always saying exactly what you think you would say in the situation”.
If you want to impress PTA, then make some reference to gun violence in the title of your film, for he put both François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, and Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? on his list of must-watches.
Some of his choices are directly reflected in his output, wherein the opening tracking shot from Boogie Nights is clearly inspired by the one in Robert Altman’s Nashville, of which he is a fan, while Jason Robards and Robert Ridgely, who both starred in Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard, make appearances in some of Anderson’s films.
His final pick was Putney Swope, a satirical comedy about portrayals of race in the media, directed by Robert Downey Sr, and Buck Swope, a character from Boogie Nights, was named in honour of this film.
