Paul Thomas Anderson’s guilty pleasure movie: “I’m a sucker for that stuff”
We often think, for good reason, that the greatest movie directors of the 21st century, such as Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve and Paul Thomas Anderson, exclusively watch quality arthouse flicks, but the truth is, everybody loves a guilty pleasure. Whether it’s a childhood favourite that remains one of your all-time favourites or a bombastic action flick that offers little ‘artistic’ stimulation, you never need to give excuses for why you like a certain movie.
Just ask Anderson, the celebrated filmmaker behind such modern hits as Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread. Despite working with some of the greatest actors of the 21st century and subsequently creating some of the era’s very best movies, Anderson still loves a silly guilty pleasure, once naming a throwaway sci-fi flick that even affected him so much that it made him cry.
While promoting his movie The Master in 2012, Anderson sat down with The Washington Post to discuss the ins and outs of his new film that starred Joaquin Phoenix as a veteran of WWII who returns home after the war with a renewed sense of aimlessness. During the conversation, the focus shifts to the fantastical concept of time travel, with Anderson being enraptured by the time and place of his own movie.
“Investigating another time when you might have lived is just inherently so hopeful and so optimistic and so sweet to me,” he told the publication, “You see it in all the things coming out of that time, whether it was music and the songs of that period — everything was about ‘seeing you again’ or ‘I’ll find you someday’. You’re talking about finding ways to go back in time and to pick up some lost piece — and that stuff is just food and drink to me”.
Of the wide variety of sci-fi time travel flicks, there was one guilty pleasure that Anderson was profoundly affected by: Barry Sonnenfeld’s throwaway 2012 sequel Men in Black III.
“Did you see Men In Black III?” he asked the interviewer, “It was [expletive] great…The time-travel stuff [made me] cry my eyes out. I’m a sucker for that stuff”.
Starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, when the first movie in the Men in Black franchise was released in 1997, it was beloved by fans, prompting a sequel in 2002 that was also beloved. Despite being released a decade later, the third movie was also a surprising hit, even if it lacked the tinge of nostalgia that the previous films bottled. Yet, efforts to make the series into a blockbuster franchise failed in 2019 with the poor Men in Black: International.
If anything could revive the franchise, it would be the much-rumoured mashup between Men in Black and the 21 Jump Street series, with both films telling the stories of maverick buddy cops. A script was penned for the movie by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, yet the film is sadly yet to see the light of day.
Take a look at the trailer for Men In Black III, Paul Thomas Anderson’s guilty pleasure, below.
