I’m curious about the moment you realize you wanted her to star in one of your movies. You’ve worked with Alana’s band, Haim, a lot. I think he did the right thing by just pretending I wasn’t that serious about it.Īlana and Cooper are at the heart of this film. Yeah, because I kept coming back and asking him again and again for details. Did Gary know all along that you were tracking these stories? There’s even a chapter about Gary and their trip to New York. She was a burlesque dancer whose specialty was a unicycle. Kiki Paige! She’s got a great biography called Kiki on One Wheel. But the source material was all these stranger-than-fiction stories Gary had told me over the years, like, “There was a time I went to New York to promote Yours, Mine, and Ours with Lucille Ball and I had a chaperone! Her name was Kiki Paige!” That’s a great story. I wrote chronologically, and it was a very easy story to write chronologically because I had the premise. Somewhere along the way of having this friendship with Gary Goetzman and this friendship with Alana, I got lucky enough to get these three things aligned in my vision at the same time, and it became clear to me that I needed to get writing. It was always sort of a screwball comedy premise. But every two to three months, I would think of this idea that I’ve had for about 20 years, which is: what happens when an 8th grader asks a grown woman out for a date and she actually turns up to it? That was the premise. Paul Thomas Anderson: Well, I had just been going about my business writing things and revisiting things that I’ve written over the years, nothing too out of the ordinary. In a recent phone interview, the director talks about the making of Licorice Pizza, the “unhinged” magic of Bradley Cooper, and more. I can’t say no to that because I spend too much time saying no about a lot of other things.” “That’s the nature of the game, at least in terms of the types of films I’m making with the studios I’m working with,” adds the director, whose previous movies include Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and Phantom Thread. But the powers that be want the film to be in the awards conversation, hence a November release. “I really wished that this was a summer movie,” he laments. The movie is jovial and sun-drenched, so much so that Anderson didn’t want to release it in the dead of winter. Gary’s charm and hustle, based on the real-life adventures of producer Gary Goetzman, a former child actor, is a fine match for Alana’s wry tongue and a lifestyle so aimless that she hangs out with teenage boys all the time. It’s an endearing, risqué tale about Gary, a 15-year-old boy ( Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Alana, a 25-year-old woman ( Alana Haim, of the sister-trio rock band Haim) who form an immediate, curious bond that borders on an inappropriate romance. He’s lived in this slip of Los Angeles for much of his life and set several of his genre-defying, rabidly obsessed-over films there, including his most recent-the ’70s-era coming-of-age story Licorice Pizza. “Where else would I be?” the Oscar-nominated writer-director exclaims when I ask. Paul Thomas Anderson is calling from the Valley.
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