Quotes

I have a feeling, one of those gut feelings, that I'll make pretty good movies the rest of my life. And maybe I'll make some clunkers, maybe I'll make some winners, but I guess the way that I really feel is that Magnolia (1999) is, for better or worse, the best movie I'll ever make.

My dad was one of the first guys on the block to have a VCR. So along with all the videotapes that I would rummage through, I would find porno movies. Not that it twisted me into some maniac or anything. I was watching porno from age 10 to 17. I had an interest in it.

I had older brothers and sisters who were doing drugs and playing rock music and doing all those insane things. I was watching.

You can really see a strong and distinctive line between '70s and '80s porn, not just in the quality but in the spirit behind it.

Today's movie villains often remind us of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart and that's as cool as it gets. There's something comforting if they're hip and cool. They're not entirely real, or not entirely threatening, so it might be a little easier to swallow if they remind us of traditional movie villains.

I watch [Steven Spielberg] movies, and know: Those are fairy tales. I understand what he does. And I make a film on cancer and frogs - however I want that many spectators nevertheless! I find that is a good goal, and I consider it a weakness of mine that I haven't reached it yet.

All I wanna try and do is sing "Melancholy Baby", y'know, but then it starts to come out like "The Star Spangled Banner" half the time.

[on the meaning of Magnolia (1999)'s ending] Oh, how I hate it, when directors are supposed to explain their films. I only say this much: If I had had more cash, I would have let it rain cats and dogs.

[on the popular belief that Daniel Day-Lewis is indifferent or not completely committed to remaining an actor] That is an amazing misconception. Daniel loves acting so much that it becomes a quest for perfection. People don't know how Daniel can do this job the way that he does it, and my feeling is, I just can't understand how anyone could do it any other way.

[on researching for There Will Be Blood (2007)] After a few trips to Bakersfield, where they have museums devoted to the early oilmen, I started to get a sense of the film. The museums are largely trailers with a lot of oil equipment lying around the yard. Back in the day, enough people had cameras and they took a lot of pictures. Oil fields were an interesting thing to photograph, and that research made it easy to put the pieces of their times together.

[on buying a copy of Upton Sinclair's "Oil!", which he adapted into There Will Be Blood (2007)] I was homesick and the book had a painting of California on the cover.

All of life's questions and answers are in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). It's about greed and ambition and paranoia and looking at the worst parts of yourself. When I was writing There Will Be Blood (2007), I would put "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" on before I went to bed at night, just to fall asleep to it.

I remember the bad outfits my parents dressed me up in and my Beatles haircut but I never watched The Brady Bunch (1969). The Partridges? I hated their music.

No matter how many times you do it, you don't get used to the sadness - for me at least - of coming to the end of a film.

[on Stanley Kubrick] We're all children of Kubrick, aren't we? Is there anything you can do that he hasn't done?

On Stanley Kubrick: It's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It always seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with. Singin' in the Rain (1952) in A Clockwork Orange (1971) - that was the first time I became so aware of music in movies. So no matter how hard you try to do something new, you're always following behind.

I really subscribe to that old adage that you should never let the audience get ahead of you for a second. So if the film's abrasive and wrongfoots people then, y'know, that's great. But I hope it involves an audience. If not, that's my fuck-up.

Well I'd really love to work with Robert De Niro, because he's still the most talented actor out there. Maybe he makes some bad choices, which can be frustrating. On the one hand, you want to say, 'What the fuck's going on?' On the other, you can't get mad at him for wanting to work, because most actors would be murderers if they weren't working.

[on Robert Altman] I knew him pretty well, off and on for about 10 years, but I had gotten to know him particularly well in the last three or four years. I got to watch Bob navigate that film, and I watched how good he was at evading questions, in the best way. He was really good at not committing himself too early to something. He didn't impose his will early. He loved to work with people. He loved to see what they came up with. He would give things time to settle, to rise or to fall, and watching him do that was a great lesson in patience. Because at the end of the day, he invited everybody in to work on this film, but he ended up getting exactly what he wanted, and everyone else felt that they had been part of it, because they had. They really made the film with Bob. How he did that was a lesson to me.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

[on Inherent Vice (2014)] It has great paranoia, which you must have if you're doing a Pynchon book. But most of all it seemed to be a way to address something that's prevalent in all his books; that outlandish spirit, the humor, the nostalgia - that kind of sweet, dripping aching for the past.

[on writing realistic dialogue for characters who are using cocaine] I've done a lot of coke and had those insane conversations.

[on Joaquin Phoenix] He's like a dog that will fetch the ball over and over and over again. You can throw it down the cliff, you can throw it into the snow, you can throw it in the ocean, and he will go get the ball and bring it back. And he will curl up in your lap and keep you warm by the fire. He's the best dog I've ever had.

When writing ain't working, research. When research ain't working, sleep. Getting away is so valuable. I didn't know that for years and years. I used to bang my head against the wall, trying to fix a problem. No one ever grabbed me by the shoulder and said, "Maybe you should go for a walk." [2018]

I love Big Daddy (1999). Big Daddy (1999) had Sensitive Sandler; there's a scene in it where he's screaming at his father over the telephone that I used to rewind over and over. That's when I really thought, 'I have to find this person. I have to work with this person'.

[press conference for Punch-Drunk Love (2002) at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival] The other things that were going on besides the pudding concept, for me, was wanting to make a romantic comedy, and particularly wanting to work with Adam [Adam Sandler] and Emily [Emily Watson]. Those were the three main things; the fourth would be to make a 90 minute movie to try and save everybody a little bit of time in their day! Those were the things that springboarded me to want to write a movie, and I had the thought of Adam and Emily and they seemed like a handsome couple to me.