Paul Thomas Anderson Remembers Falling in 'Love at First Sight' With Philip Seymour Hoffman

Paul Thomas Anderon and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 1999

Director Paul Thomas Anderson hasn’t usually been that chatty with the press when it comes to in-depth examinations of his movies. He’s been more open lately though during the promotion of his latest film, Inherent Vice that’s in theaters now.

Among the stops on his press blitz: Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, for which Anderson sat for nearly two hours of conversation and questions about his life and career. There is an enormous amount of material to sift through, so we’ve picked out just a few of the most interesting tidbits.

Related: Get Ready for ‘Inherent Vice’ by Watching 4 Classic Paul Thomas Anderson Interviews

First, the most heartbreaking: Anderson spoke about his close friend, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, with whom he made five films, including Boogie Nights and The Master. “I thought that when I saw him for the first time in Scent of a Woman, I knew what love at first sight was,” Anderson said. “It was the strangest thing, sitting in a movie theater and thinking, ‘He’s for me and I’m for him.’”

After growing up in the ’70s and ’80s watching Golden Age stars, seeing Hoffman up on the screen changed Anderson’s conception of a leading man entirely. ”I always thought Cary Grant would be in my movie, or Harrison Ford, but something happened when I saw him,” Anderson added.

On a lighter note, Anderson found Adam Sandler, his lead in Punch Drunk Love, while making 1999’s Magnolia. The only way he could get through that overwhelming experience, he said, was watching Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies and Sandler’s early comedies like Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison.

Related: ‘Inherent Vice’: What the Critics Are Saying

Speaking of Magnolia, Anderson admits that if he were making the drama today, he would streamline it’s three-hour running time. “I’d slice that thing down,” he said. “It’s way too f—ing long. It’s unmerciful how long it is."

Curiously, this isn’t the first time that Anderson has talked about how he’d pare down Magnolia if given the chance. In December, he told the site Wondering Sound that he’d consider cutting out the singing montage set to Aimee Mann’s song “Wise Up.”

“As for Magnolia, if I had a do-over for that, I might take the singing out,” Anderson said. “I know people like it, but I’m not sure the movie’s better for it. I could have gotten to them frogs falling a little faster without it.”

Another interesting bit of trivia: Anderson spent a year at Emerson College in Boston, where the late Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace was his English professor. Wallace was the one professor he really enjoyed, though their relationship was not particularly deep, consisting of just a few conversations outside the classroom.

"He was very generous with his phone number. He said ‘Call me if you got any questions,’ and I called him a couple times,” Anderson remembered. “I ran a few ideas by him about this paper that I was writing. I was writing a paper on Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and I’d come up with a couple crazy ideas, and I don’t remember the conversation well, but I just remember him being real generous at like, you know, midnight the night before it was due.”

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