Although it wasn’t brought up a single time in Warner Bros.’ CinemaCon 2014 presentation last week, they will indeed be releasing Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice on December 12th of this year and today we have a few hints at what we might be able to expect. PTA fan site Cigs & Red Vines picked up a few interviews with star Josh Brolin, who has been open to discussing the “absolute f*cking chaos” of last year’s production.
First up, he sat down with The Independent, saying, “I just did a movie for P T Anderson that I didn’t understand. The writing of Thomas Pynchon is so Shakespearean. It was crazy, chaotic but really, really gratifying.” He added, “We took it I think in a direction that the book doesn’t necessarily go, hoping it will work.” A hint at what direction that may be comes from a Cigs’ source, who notes that Jonny Greenwood, having completed the score, reveals that it’s “more romantic” than his last two collaborations with Anderson, There Will Be Blood and The Master.
That’s not all Brolin revealed regarding the production, as he goes on to tell Yahoo, “More than any woman I’ve ever worked with, I absolutely fell in love with Joaquin Phoenix. [He’s] the most wonderful human being and actor.” Diving into an example, he says, “Joaquin and I would do these scenes together and Paul would say, ‘This time do it with the table upside down, and you guys get under the table and I’m going to put a blanket over you, and I want you to whisper your lines. And now this time, no lines and no dialogue at all, and I want you to just dance your dialogue. Whatever that next line is, I want you to create a movement that’s going to be what that line of dialogue was going to be if you spoke it.’ It was just craziness, you know, but really fun. After that, we’d go back to the scene and it would be fed by all those other things that you can create something magical. But you have to do some pretty weird things.”
With a cast also led by Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Jena Malone and many more, we’ll have to see exactly what those “weird things” are, but we do know the film follows Larry “Doc” Sportello, a pot-smoking detective on a kidnapping case in 1970′s Los Angeles. To wrap up, since it is April’s Fool Day, why not check out a respectable fan made poster from the film below as we wait the next eight-plus months.
Update: Cigs & Red Vine have a shot of Greenwood in the composing bay, with what’s technically our first look at the film behind him.
What do you think of Brolin’s comments?