Tom Cruise in Magnolia

In this age when practically every emerging filmmaker is prematurely labeled an auteur, writer-director-producer Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the few whose talents actually fit the bill. Just ask Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and film director, David Mamet.

"I love Paul Thomas Anderson’s [work]," says Mamet, when asked about the contemporary moviemakers whose work catches his eye. "In his own way [he] is a genius of filmmaking. You can’t learn that in film school."

There is a ring of irony in Mamet’s enthusiastic endorsement of Anderson as an exciting, new voice in contemporary cinema. It wasn’t long ago that Anderson was just another unknown, aspiring film school student with ambitions that clashed with traditional academic conventions.

Like his friend and colleague, Quentin Tarantino, Anderson is self-taught; the impulse to channel his dreams and obsessions through a movie camera has dominated his life since he was a teenager. Anderson, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, played around with a video camera during the ’80s, and cranked out a 30-minute short, The Dirk Diggler Story, which spawned the idea for Boogie Nights.

After high school, the next logical step seemed to be film school. But two days of attending a screenwriting class at New York University was all Anderson needed to figure out that he was making a mistake.

The 30-year-old Anderson says he was angered by a professor’s dismissal of movies like Terminator 2 as being unworthy of serious study. Things came to a head with the first class assignment—to write a page of descriptive prose. Anderson lifted a page from Mamet’s script for Hoffa, and turned it in. The paper came back with a C-plus.

"I did it as a gag, knowing I was going to leave anyway. I just wanted to see how it would play out. It was just one more indication. If you leave soon enough, you can collect the tuition you’ve already paid. So I got the money and made a short film."

The short was Anderson’s Cigarettes and Coffee, which screened at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. The 28-minute film opened the door for him to participate at the Sundance Institute’s 1995 Filmmaker’s Lab. Anderson developed his story into the script for his feature debut, Sydney, later re-titled Hard Eight. And, of course, everything escalated with Boogie Nights, the tragic-comic epic chronicling life in the porn industry during the late ’70s and early ’80s which garnered three Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Screenplay

Like Robert Altman’s films Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993), Anderson’s latest feature, Magnolia, snares us in an elaborate web of interrelated stories linked by a preoccupation with longing, family and loss. The characters’ lives intersect on one bizarre San Fernando Valley day filled with a deluge of rain, emotional meltdowns and a deus ex machina straight out of the Old Testament.

Like the novels of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, nothing in Anderson’s work is completely random. According to the laws governing his cinematic cause-and-effect universe, coincidence and chaos disguise the elaborate patterns of an abstract cosmic order.

Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of Magnolia.

"I always had the title of Magnolia in my head even before I wrote it," says Anderson. And then a couple of weird things started to happen that verified the title for me. I did some research on the Magnolia flower. There’s a concept that if you eat the bark from the Magnolia tree it can help cure cancer.

"On top of that, there was a thing that I discovered called the Magnoia, a mythical place above the firmament where shit just goes and hangs out before it falls from the sky. Not to mention that Magnolia is a great street in the valley, and a great place to film."

Anderson’s excitement for filmmaking is contagious. He seems to get a rush from everything related to the process, from writing scripts to making his films without artistic compromise. But in conversation, he emphasizes his writing.

"You write who you are and what you know. But you also cheat and you write what you want to be. It’s a little embarrassing, sometimes, to be the guy that made the movie, knowing that I’m not exactly what I want to be."

It isn’t far-fetched to say that many of Anderson’s characters mirror the concerns and obsessions of their creator, whether it is the compassionate nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), or the awkward yet kind cop Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), who desperately wants to do the right thing.

"It’s a little embarrassing to say, ‘No, I’m not up to the moral place that someone like Jim Kurring is.’ I’m trying, and maybe by writing it down it’ll get me there faster."

The unseen narrator of Magnolia frequently chimes, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us." Talking to Anderson, the phrase strikes close to home. One can detect that the film’s narrative is a meditation on the filmmaker’s personal family history, transformed into fiction.

Obvious references to Anderson’s life center on his father, the late Ernie Anderson, possibly best known as Ghoulardi, the host of a Cleveland-based late-night horror TV show called "Shock Theater" in the mid-’60s. Throughout the film, Anderson evokes the memory of his father, who died of cancer in 1997, with bits of dialogue, such as game-show host Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) addressing his audience as "ladies and germs."

Not above recycling material from his early stabs at screenwriting, Anderson says the film’s game show, What Do Kids Know? was drawn from an early script about a corrupt game show, written when he was 19. His experience working as a PA on the now-defunct game show, The Quiz Kids Challenge, also came in handy when he sat down to write Magnolia.

When an actor is invited into the fold of the unofficial "Paul Thomas Anderson repertory company," one perk is having roles written specifically for you. Anderson says he feels obligated to write good roles for his friends.

"One of the most fun things about writing is making up the names," Anderson says. "Sometimes they come out by accident and later you decipher what it may have meant subconsciously. Sometimes you’re specific about it. In relation to the title, the majority of women are named for flowers. You’re writing and things happen like that."

Like many writers, Anderson has his own little rituals. Everything has to be just so before he sits down to write. And having music is essential for creating the mood.

For Magnolia, the filmmaker didn’t need to look further than a demo tape of new songs by his friend, singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. He took a phrase from the track, "Deathly," and built his screenplay around it: "Now that I’ve met you/would you object to never seeing me again." At one point in Magnolia, the film’s cast sings Mann’s song, "Wise Up."

Besides the creative boost from music, Anderson says his early morning writing routine only feels complete when he’s smoking cigarettes and drinking loads of coffee. No wonder he titled his early short, Cigarettes and Coffee.

Anderson credits his actors as important collaborators. In the intro to his published screenplay, Boogie Nights, he writes, "My function as a director is to be a good writer. My obligation as a director is to deliver the actors a good script, making my job...hanging out and watching them go."

Anderson’s actor-friends like Julianne Moore and William H. Macy, however, say he does a bit more than just hang out.

"When he writes and directs, he has that sense of purpose and vision," says Moore. "And it’s not one of those hit-and-miss things. He really knows what he’s going for."

Macy adds that a strong director’s ability to see and shape the "big picture" of a film is essential for actors to do their best work.

"One of the hardest things that I learned as an actor is you can’t do a great performance," Macy explains. "You can only do a great moment. A great performance is really in God’s hands, and the director’s—who are really the same person on the set.

"You see all this technical wizardry. His shots are becoming legendary, these long, sweeping shots. But each one advances the plot. And when the shot is done, he comes back to the moment. It makes you feel safe and taken care of." MM