Paul Thomas Anderson

PTA: Yeah, for sure. I mean… I’d just lost my dad, and I wrote a movie. It was like that. I remember talking to an oncologist on the phone, who was essentially telling me that there was no way my dad was going to make it — and one of the first things that popped into my mind was — ‘you’re telling me that frogs are falling from the sky.’

There are filmmakers whose work is inextricably linked with a locale—Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese are inseparable from New York, Nebraska is owned by Alexander Payne, Federico Fellini transformed our vision of Rome. Los Angeles, of course, has been the backdrop of thousands of movies since the silent era. We think we know it, but it takes an artist to help us see it anew. In such films as Boogie Nights,Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love—all set in his beloved Valley—and in his latest, Inherent Vice, set in L.A.’s South Bay, Anderson leads us down side streets we’ve never taken, arriving at destinations where we’ve never been.