“I just had to use it”: the heartbreaking scene Paul Thomas Anderson wrote backwards
The recent release of the superb One Battle After Another directed by Paul Thomas Anderson has rightly had film fans rifling through his back catalogue to find more gems, and without doubt one of the most rewarding is the three-hour fantasy drama Magnolia from 1999, starring the likes of Tom Cruise and John C Reilly.
It’s a film that a lot of people have forgotten about, or saw at the time and filed under ‘well that was quite strange if quite good’, but due to Anderson’s growing reputation as possibly the finest director of the century, many have begun to rewatch and reconsider.
It has the fairly ordinary-sounding premise of a series of characters experiencing a random day in California, but over the course of the movie, these people are proven to be interconnected, each experiencing contrasting emotions and showing how they have been affected by past traumas, culminating in a memorable downpour.
Anyone who knows a bit about Anderson’s history will be aware how important and influential music has been on him, and Magnolia has one particular artist’s output at its core, that being American singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, whose songs not just run through the movie but inspired Anderson in making the film, appearing over the intro and eventually finding their way into each character’s voice.
An example of one song in particular informing Anderson’s writing of Magnolia came from Mann’s composition ‘Deathly’, which features the line “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing me again?”
Anderson was so taken by it that he put it as a pivotal moment in the script and wrote around it, a scene in which the words are delivered by a desperate drug addict to John C Reilly’s Los Angeles cop, who has become obsessed with her after meeting her at her apartment.
Anderson said of the line: “Pearls of wisdom. I couldn’t hope to write a line that good, that knowing. I just had to use it.”
It wasn’t an accident that Anderson stumbled upon Mann’s music; her husband Thomas Penn had provided the score for the director’s previous two films, Boogie Nights and Hard Eight, and Anderson’s thought process was that the musical themes would be integral to the movie in the same way that Simon and Garfunkel’s were to The Graduate 30 years previously.
On using the music to tie everything together, Anderson added: “The intent was to establish a singular voice, something to connect all these plots together. There are nine plots but only one story, I like to say.”
In the end, the film wasn’t a huge commercial success, although there was plenty of buzz about Tom Cruise’s role as a sexual guru, especially his use of the ‘c’ word, which was much more shocking back then, and indeed he was Oscar-nominated and picked up a Golden Globe award for his performance.
But Mann’s song ‘Save Me’ from the movie was also nominated for an Oscar, and another ‘Wise Up’, which is sung by all seven central characters at one point, was actually originally written for a different Tom Cruise movie, 1996’s Jerry Maguire.
In the four years between his 2021 movie Licorice Pizza and this year’s One Battle After Another, Anderson showed he has lost none of his love for music by directing two music videos for Radiohead spin-off band The Smile, and one for Haim, whose band member Alana starred in both aforementioned films.
