Steven Spielberg heaps praise on Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’
Steven Spielberg has lauded Paul Thomas Anderson for his latest directorial effort, One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The film is gearing up to release later this month and has received glowing praise so far from its advanced screenings, not least from Spielberg. While moderating a Q&A session with Anderson at the Directors Guild of America theatre in Los Angeles, he called the movie “insane”.
According to The Film Stage, Spielberg exclaimed: “What an insane movie, oh my God,” before adding, “There is more action in the first hour of this than every other film you’ve ever directed put together. Everything, it is really incredible.”
According to the director, what makes the movie so special is “a concoction of things that are so bizarre and at the same time so relevant, that I think have become increasingly more relevant than perhaps even when you finished the screenplay and assembled your cast and crew and began production.”
Based on the novel Vineland from 1990 by Thomas Pynchon, the film depicts DiCaprio as a faded former fighter who is forced to save his teenage daughter when an old enemy of his suddenly reappears and puts her life in danger.
Starring opposite him in the supporting cast are Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, who is making her debut on the big screen.
Elsewhere during the Q&A, when speaking of the long process of creating a movie out of a novel, Anderson explained: I loved that book. I loved it, and I loved it so much that I thought about adapting him. But the problem with loving a book so much when you go to adapt it is that you have to be much rougher on the book to adapt it. You have to kind of not be gentle. So I struggled for years to try to adapt it.”
One Battle After Another will be released in cinemas on September 26th.
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