Why you should never tell Paul Thomas Anderson you hate a movie: “Don’t say that”
We live in an era where Letterboxd has put the power of being a critic right in our hands, such that anyone can go see a movie, take one step out of the cinema and hit a star rating, instantly deeming a piece of art good, bad or middling.
However, if he has his way, Paul Thomas Anderson would cut through all that, although, perhaps after the release of One Battle After Another, he might have changed his mind. The director’s latest offering stormed the reviews, settling in at a positive 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 4.3 average on Letterboxd, almost instantly making it his top-rated movie, beating out Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood as his now most-loved offering.
In this, the question remains whether it is his most loved or simply his newest, as reviews often come along with a proximity bias, meaning that people generally seem to have the strongest opinion of something they’ve seen more recently. That can be a positive thing, leading to a glowing five-star review simply because in the afterglow of the credits, it seemed like a masterpiece, or it can lead to a trigger reaction, delivering a scathing review before any actual processing has gone on.
Anderson has no issue with reviews that hold nuance or prompt a discussion, but what he does take umbrage with is the broad comment that a film was ‘bad’, and, in his eyes, the word should be banned in the movie world.
It was John Krasinski who learnt that as he dove into a takedown of some movie or another, but in the presence of the wrong audience, recalling to The Telegraph, “I’ll tell you a big life lesson. Paul was over at my house, I think it was my 30th birthday party, and I had just seen a movie I didn’t love. I said to him over a drink, ‘It’s not a good movie’.”
It wasn’t that Anderson begrudged him having an opinion; it was simply the intensity of it in an industry already so intense, as the actor explained, “He so sweetly took me aside and said very quietly, ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that it’s not a good movie. If it wasn’t for you, that’s fine, but in our business, we’ve all got to support each other’.”
So really, Anderson’s ‘no bad movies’ crusade isn’t an egotistical thing or a mission to wrap filmmakers in cotton wool so they never hear a bad word said about them. Instead, it’s about being aware that already, the film world is brutal without people from within that world making it harder.
“The movie was very artsy, and he said, ‘You’ve got to support the big swing. If you put it out there that the movie’s not good, they won’t let us make more movies like that’,” Krasinski relayed as Anderson reminded him that even offhanded opinions hold power, and especially those coming from other actors and creatives.
The director’s ‘no bad movies’ rule becomes a good one in that light, wherein it’s not that he’s saying no one gets to have an opinion or wants to strip the critic role from the people’s hands, but instead, he is simply asking people to be more open to nuance and consider how a staunch, harsh, black-and-white take might lead to a duller film world.
