‘We got this!’ Paul Thomas Ander­son and Alana Haim in conversation

Locals just call it ​‘The Val­ley’ – the glam­orous region nes­tled between the Los Ange­les Basin and the San­ta Susana Moun­tains. It’s a place best known as the home of Walt Dis­ney and Warn­er Broth­ers stu­dios, and – more noto­ri­ous­ly – has been the atom heart of the adult enter­tain­ment indus­try for some 30 years, until the advent of the inter­net ush­ered in its decline.

The San Fer­nan­do Val­ley is also the neigh­bour­hood where Paul Thomas Ander­son grew up, pro­vid­ing a rich source of inspi­ra­tion through­out his career. Val­ley-set works include Boo­gie Nights from 1997 which charts the rise and fall of porn star Dirk Dig­gler (Mark Wahlberg), swift­ly fol­lowed in 1999 by the epic ensem­ble fres­co, Mag­no­lia, and then after that in 2002 the off­beat roman­tic com­e­dy Punch-Drunk Love. After 2018’s Phan­tom Thread led the direc­tor to fog­gy Lon­don town, he returned to the famil­iar warmth of Cal­i­for­nia sun for his lat­est, Licorice Piz­za, an effer­ves­cent sto­ry of boy meets girl set dur­ing the sum­mer of 1973.

The Val­ley is also home to Licorice Pizza’s lead­ing lady, Alana Haim, whose moth­er coin­ci­den­tal­ly taught the film­mak­er art in ele­men­tary school. Bet­ter known as the youngest mem­ber of all-sis­ter folk-rock trio HAIM, this is Alana’s first pro­fes­sion­al act­ing role, and she announces her­self as a cocky, mag­net­ic screen pres­ence play­ing direc­tion­less twen­tysome­thing Alana Kane, whose chance meet­ing with fast-talk­ing teen entre­pre­neur Gary Valen­tine (Coop­er Hoff­man) marks the begin­ning of a beau­ti­ful friendship.

Draw­ing on ele­ments of arcane Hol­ly­wood his­to­ry as well as anec­dotes from his own friends and col­leagues, Anderson’s film is a wry, sun-drenched por­trait of youth in revolt. The San Fer­nan­do Val­ley is as much a part of its DNA as the all-killer-no-filler sound­track and the effort­less­ly charm­ing per­for­mances from its stacked ensem­ble cast.

LWLies: What’s the first place you’d rec­om­mend to some­one spend­ing a day in the San Fer­nan­do Valley?

Paul Thomas Ander­son: If you were to con­sid­er the Val­ley start­ing in Bur­bank, Bur­bank has Warn­er Bros, and then right next door is Uni­ver­sal… So you’re start­ing on these two epi­cen­tres of film pro­duc­tion, then you take Ven­tu­ra Boule­vard, which is the main artery that runs through the San Fer­nan­do Val­ley. I would just start on Ven­tu­ra and slow­ly cruise west. On the left-hand side you’ll see the old Du-par’s din­er, which is now a fuck­ing Sephora.

Alana Haim: So sad…

PTA: Just a lit­tle bit fur­ther down to the left, you’ll see the Stu­dio City The­atre built in 1940, which is now unfor­tu­nate­ly a Barnes & Noble. Well, we like Barnes & Noble so we’ll sup­port that, but we wish it was still a movie the­atre. Con­tin­u­ing west past the mini malls, you can stop at the Wed­ding­ton golf course, for a quick lit­tle bit of that, or a lit­tle ten­nis. You can get to Cold­wa­ter, where the great Tail o’ the Cock used to be.

AH: Don’t for­get Art’s!

PTA: Oh, Art’s Deli, I’m sorry!

AH: We can go back, that’s okay.

PTA: I don’t wan­na do the whole tour! You can get to the inter­sec­tion of Van Nuys and Ven­tu­ra and see the loca­tion where the three Haim sis­ters walk down the street in the ​‘Want You Back’ video.

AH: That’s true. I also worked in a shop on Ven­tu­ra Boulevard.

PTA: Yeah? Oh fuck it, I don’t know. You would see a mini mall that looks kin­da gross and not that attrac­tive, but with­in it is the most incred­i­ble sushi restau­rant that you’ve ever been to in your entire life, run by a Japan­ese mas­terchef who’s decid­ed that the San Fer­nan­do Val­ley became third to Tokyo and Kyoto as this place where Japan­ese food is spe­cialised. You would not know it, but you have to look for it. But I mean, fuck, it’s just a suburb.

AH: Yeah, we try to glam­ourise it but it is just a suburb.

Do you feel like the San Fer­nan­do Val­ley that we see in Licorice Piz­za has changed beyond recognition?

PTA: There’s a hor­ri­ble thing that hap­pens every cou­ple of months where you dri­ve by a beau­ti­ful old ranch home, and the next day you go by and it usu­al­ly has green fenc­ing around it, and it means that it’s going to be demol­ished and they’re going to build these hor­ri­ble three-storey cook­ie cut­ter hous­es. Like any­thing, less and less of the past remains. But if you squint, you can still see what it looked like back then.

You men­tioned the ​‘Want You Back’ video. One thing in Licorice Piz­za is that there’s a lot of walk­ing and running.

AH: Two things that I’m appar­ent­ly very good at.

Yeah, it’s a con­tin­u­a­tion of a thread that start­ed a long time ago, in both the HAIM pro­mos and Paul’s films. There’s a lot of peo­ple walk­ing around, which seems kind of anti­thet­i­cal to the geog­ra­phy of Los Ange­les. Are you try­ing to sub­con­scious­ly sub­vert that nar­ra­tive, maybe repo­si­tion LA as a walk­ing city?

PTA: That’s a tall order. I do like it – I had an expe­ri­ence recent­ly where a very hard­core New York­er was com­ing over to my house and they post­ed up in a cof­fee shop about a mile away from where I live. They looked at their phone and thought, ​‘Well, I’ll just walk from here to his house.’ It was a clas­sic New York­er mis­take. There was absolute­ly no way. Even though it may say it’s only a mile, you’re just not going to make it: it’s 100 degree heat; it’s up hill; it’s windy roads – it’s just not gonna work. So no, we’re not try­ing to change the nar­ra­tive, but there’s a cer­tain point through mak­ing a film, where hav­ing peo­ple dri­ving around runs out of gas. It’s more cin­e­mat­ic to have peo­ple run­ning and walk­ing. The real­i­ty is that there’s more dri­ving, but no one wants to see that.

AH: You know, it’s real­ly fun­ny. That walk­ing kind of came nat­u­ral­ly to me.

PTA: I have my own answer about this, but I want to hear what you say first.

AH: I think walk­ing with my sib­lings… we’ve heard it’s real­ly hard to make walk­ing seem nat­ur­al when you’re on cam­era, and I nev­er real­ly knew that. In music videos we’re walk­ing to the beat and we have music play­ing. One of my favourite mem­o­ries was when we were shoot­ing the open­ing scene of the movie, where I’m walk­ing and I’m in the Tiny Toes out­fit, and Paul had played me Nina Simone’s ​‘July Tree’ right before I was going to walk, so I had the beat in my mind. He was like, ​‘You can do this!’ Appar­ent­ly that’s very hard for some peo­ple, but not hard for me.

PTA: There’s noth­ing to it except that when you’re mak­ing a video and you have no mon­ey, what else is there to do? You need some­thing to hap­pen. You need some action. You have no time so it’s cheap, quick and cin­e­mat­ic. Just fuck­ing walk.

AH: I mean, damn. You’re real­ly peek­ing behind the HAIM cur­tain. But I will be walk­ing in music videos till the day I die. I will say, though, walk­ing and run­ning in this film is very impor­tant ​’cause it got me out of my head. When you’re focus­ing on some­thing like that, you don’t think about what you’re say­ing, you’re exhaust­ed and that was some­thing that actu­al­ly shocked me. Paul would always be like, ​‘Go run,’ and I’d be like [sighs] ​‘Okay, I’m gonna run.’ But the thing is, it’s super impor­tant to how me and Coop­er were able to do it, because it got us out of our heads in the best way.

There’s a visu­al par­al­lel between the end of Licorice Piz­za and the air­port scene in Punch-Drunk Love. Is there is a con­nec­tive thread run­ning between all your films set in the Valley?

PTA: There must be, but none of it is by design. I can’t under­line enough, not by design. There’s no cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse that I would be strug­gling to cre­ate, there just isn’t. You end up repeat­ing your­self acci­den­tal­ly some­times, nev­er on pur­pose. Or per­haps you do realise after you’ve writ­ten some things, ​‘Well, I have done that before, shall I try to do some­thing else?’ And you think, ​‘Yes, you should try to do some­thing else,’ and then you can’t come up with any­thing else so you say, ​‘Well I’m not gonna do any­thing else, this is what I’m gonna do. Fuck it!’

It worked the first time!

PTA: But real­ly, you’re always serv­ing this sto­ry, then the sto­ry at a cer­tain point is tak­ing care of itself. I can’t stress enough that there’s a lot of work that can go into the first half of a script gen­er­al­ly. You’re cre­at­ing these char­ac­ters, you’re cre­at­ing the sce­nario, you’re putting the pieces togeth­er, you’re try­ing to get it to flow, but there’s a cer­tain point – you hope – when it is mov­ing down a hill and all the things that you’ve cre­at­ed are tak­ing care of them­selves. They’re speak­ing back to you in the end.

From ​‘Jessie’s Girl’ in Boo­gie Nights to ​‘Get Thee Behind Me Satan’ in The Mas­ter, Paul Thomas Ander­son has always had a knack for choos­ing the right track for the right scene. Not only that, the part­ner­ship between Ander­son and com­pos­er-musi­cian Jon­ny Green­wood, which began with There Will be Blood, has yield­ed some of the finest con­tem­po­rary film scores around. Giv­en Licorice Pizza’s ​’70s set­ting, it’s only appro­pri­ate that the sound­track fea­tures the likes of Paul McCart­ney and Wings, The Doors, Dono­van and David Bowie as well as a few new com­po­si­tions from Green­wood. HAIM’s musi­cal his­to­ry is fit­ting too; pri­or to form­ing the pop­u­lar girl group they are today, Alana and her sis­ters Danielle and Este were part of a band with their par­ents cov­er­ing Van Mor­ri­son and Bil­ly Joel songs at wed­dings and com­mu­ni­ty events. Their dis­tinc­tive sound owes much to the pop music of the ​’70s, notably Fleet­wood Mac.

HAIM is very influ­enced by the music of the 1970s. Do you remem­ber where that start­ed for you and your sisters?

AH: Liv­ing in LA, you’re always in your car and my par­ents only let us lis­ten to this radio sta­tion called K‑Earth 101 which they pret­ty much only played ​’70s music. Well, when I was younger it was the ​’50s, ​’60s, ​’70s – when I got a lit­tle old­er they start­ed get­ting into the ​’80s and I think now they’re up to the ​’90s. I heard NSYNC on K‑Earth 101 which is shock­ing to me.

PTA: That’s 30 years ago Alana. Thir­ty years ago.

AH: But we were always so obsessed! All the con­certs I went to when I was younger… my first con­cert was The Eagles. Some peo­ple like ​’em, some peo­ple don’t like ​’em. I love them. But I’ve always loved that era and it seeped into me and my sis­ters when we start­ed mak­ing music for ourselves.

Is there a par­tic­u­lar band that was the dri­ving force which made you think this is some­thing we want to explore musically?

AH: There’s so many, not just in the ​’70s. I was in a cov­er band with my par­ents so that also helped. We did a lot of San­tana, we did a lot of Van Mor­ri­son, Bea­t­les, Rolling Stones. Bil­ly Joel made its way in there too. I mean, I love Jack­son Browne, I love Joni, Fre­da Payne… It’s just what I grew up with.

PTA: When you say ​’70s music, there’s an assump­tion that this is some wild niche. We all col­lec­tive­ly, in the whole fuck­ing world, are look­ing back and going, ​‘Oh my God, look at this jack­pot and this incred­i­bly fer­tile time, this music that’s last­ed for so long that wasn’t just good then but is good now.’ Any­where in the world right now you put on one of these songs that you’re talk­ing about and every­body knows it and every­body likes it. It’s not even your style or taste at a cer­tain point, it’s like no, no, no, the whole world is down with–

AH: Joni.

PTA: Joni. It’s not like, ​‘How did you get into Square­push­er?’ It’s so world­ly. It’s amaz­ing how long… well, it’s not amaz­ing how long this music has last­ed. Like, it’s fuck­ing obvious.

AH: It’s just fuck­ing good!

Do you lis­ten to music when you’re writ­ing your scripts? I was real­ly inter­est­ed by how much pop music is in this film com­pared to your last few which were more heav­i­ly scored.

PTA: Yeah, it had been a minute since I had a sto­ry that would work with that use of music, the last few sto­ries were depen­dent upon Jon­ny Green­wood and what he would bring to it. It seemed pret­ty clear that the best way to tell this sto­ry was to utilise songs of the peri­od, songs that Alana and Gary would be lis­ten­ing to. Songs that would be on the radio. To not be afraid of dig­ging even fur­ther back, using Nina Simone or using the Bing Cros­by and Andrews Sis­ters’ ver­sion of ​‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Pos­i­tive’ because that stuff would still be lin­ger­ing on the radio. Believe it or not, a lot of radio broad­casts that I found from that time, depend­ing on the sta­tion, weren’t shy about play­ing songs that were 20 years old – the K‑Earth 101 of the day. So you didn’t have to just feel an oblig­a­tion to play what was on the radio in 1972, you could be a lit­tle bit looser.

You just have to ask your­self, ​‘Is it okay to use David Bowie?’, ​‘Is it okay to use Paul McCart­ney?’ Because I’ve seen films that are will­ing to pay for that song but don’t deserve it because they’re cheat­ing. They haven’t done the work with the char­ac­ters and every­thing else that has to be there, to earn the priv­i­lege of hav­ing a Paul McCart­ney song or a David Bowie. I ego­tis­ti­cal­ly do feel like we worked real­ly hard and I felt like we were wor­thy enough to use those songs and you ben­e­fit from it, obvi­ous­ly. We ben­e­fit from putting our­selves in col­lab­o­ra­tion with those artists, and pre­tend­ing can get you up to a point, ​’cause it helps an audi­ence to feel some­thing. But an audi­ence will turn on you if you turn that up as a way to fill the void, if you haven’t engaged them with your characters.

Increas­ing­ly it feels like songs have been put in films because they got the licens­ing rights, but it doesn’t serve a purpose.

PTA: I just remem­bered there was an Onion head­line I saw the oth­er day, some­thing like, ​“Young screen­writer plays ​‘Cher­ry Bomb’ as sub­sti­tute for female char­ac­ter devel­op­ment”. That’s funny!

That’s exact­ly it!

PTA: I’ll play ​‘Cher­ry Bomb’ – that way I won’t have to fuck­ing fig­ure out any­thing else about her character.

I was real­ly thrilled to see Tom Waits in the film.

AH: A dream. He is a dream. He is incred­i­ble and real­ly came in with the best spir­it and we need­ed it at that point ​’cause we were a cou­ple of months into the shoot­ing and he’s just such a pres­ence. He’s fuck­ing Tom Waits. I mean, he walks into a room you’re like, ​‘Fuck, that’s Tom Waits!’ He’s the coolest dude on the plan­et and he’s so tal­ent­ed and, on top of every­thing, he’s an incred­i­ble actor.

PTA: He’s a pres­ence but he isn’t. What I mean by that is, for being a liv­ing leg­end, he’s not suck­ing the air out of the room, or mak­ing you feel that you’re around a liv­ing leg­end. He’s a very prac­ti­cal and prag­mat­ic per­son who just hap­pens to be Tom Waits and he’s there to do a job. The amaz­ing thing about him is, pret­ty quick­ly, you’re in the busi­ness of work­ing with him and he’s in the busi­ness of try­ing to do a good job as an actor, all the while being so incred­i­bly cool.

AH: Yeah, the coolest.

PTA: You are just hold­ing on for dear life. Try­ing to not dis­ap­point him. He’s such a col­lab­o­ra­tor, so ter­rif­ic to work with, and it’s a dou­ble as well. It’s not just Tom Waits, you’ve got Sean Penn and Tom Waits. There was a moment where I saw the two of them and I thought, ​‘This is Christ­mas for me!’ I’ve got the two of them in a scene, togeth­er, with Alana in the cen­tre of it look­ing baf­fled, three mar­ti­nis in.

AH: That’s real­ly me hold­ing on for dear life, like, ​‘How did I get here?’

You’re like­ly to hear peo­ple refer to Licorice Piz­za as a love sto­ry – not just con­cern­ing the rela­tion­ship between Gary Valen­tine and Alana Kane, but in a more ethe­re­al sense: love of your home­town; love of movies; love of being young, direc­tion­less and unfail­ing­ly alive. While there’s often a creep­ing dark­ness with­in the metic­u­lous worlds Ander­son forges, there’s a sun­ny opti­mism to his lat­est work, and this warmth extends to the way he incor­po­rates ele­ments of Hollywood’s star-flecked history.

Sean Penn’s char­ac­ter is inspired by William Hold­en, and you have Bradley Coop­er as Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­er Jon Peters and Ben­ny Safdie as LA City Coun­cil­man Joel Wachs. Gary is inspired by a friend of yours, Gary Goet­z­man, who is also a film and TV pro­duc­er. How do you approach fic­tion­al­is­ing real peo­ple in a way that’s respect­ful, but also gives you cre­ative freedom?

PTA: You move a goal­post around a lot is how you do it. William Holden’s one of my favourite actors, and I didn’t want to ask Sean to do an impres­sion of William Hold­en. So it can be an East­er egg, or you can see the par­al­lel and that’s fine, but he doesn’t have to fill those shoes or do that. Most of the time, whether it’s a sto­ry, a real life per­son, a char­ac­ter from a book – shit – an ani­mal, you can point an actor in a direc­tion towards some­thing to use in their por­tray­al. Gary Goet­z­man went to the Ed Sul­li­van show to per­form with Lucille Ball, but I didn’t think doing a Lucille Ball impres­sion would be the right thing to ask of an actress, so you just steal all the best bits. It’s an instinc­tu­al deci­sion, I suppose.

Out­side of the Val­ley many peo­ple don’t know Joel Wachs, but he real­ly was a city coun­cil­man who worked for almost 30 years. The deci­sion to use his actu­al name is if any­body took two sec­onds to look around and dis­cov­er some­thing about his life, I think they’d find it incred­i­bly inspir­ing and ful­fill­ing because he was a won­der­ful guy. Back to a ques­tion that you asked ear­li­er, if you had been in the San Fer­nan­do Val­ley, par­tic­u­lar­ly Stu­dio City or Sher­man Oaks up until the ​’90s, it looked very much the same. A lot of the rea­sons why is because of Joel Wachs. He was very strong about devel­op­ment, dis­al­low­ing devel­op­ment to change it. The sec­ond he wasn’t the city coun­cil­man, things did change for the worse, so I always admired him for that.

What did Jon say when you told him Bradley Coop­er would play him giv­en their past dis­agree­ment over A Star is Born?

PTA: He thought it was ter­rif­ic cast­ing. Maybe he wished it had been Brad Pitt but he was okay with Bradley Coop­er [laughs]. I think he was very excit­ed. He’s a good-natured guy at this point, in my expe­ri­ence with him. It was not even remote­ly close to this wild man pro­duc­er. He was a big softie.

There’s a moment we see in the trail­er where Jon’s smash­ing some car win­dows which isn’t in the actu­al film. How long was the first cut?

PTA: Not too much longer. That was a very quick moment after Gary and Alana dri­ve off from the gas sta­tion that we went back to Jon Peters, so that scene that you see, it was only real­ly about 15 to 20 sec­onds. The rea­son we didn’t leave it in the film is because it would’ve been the only moment that you weren’t with Gary or Alana. That’s chang­ing the point of view of the film… for a good laugh, maybe? But not real­ly worth it in the end. But it’s the kind of thing that can go well in the trail­er. You get the ener­gy of it and the feel­ing of it but in the body of the film it doesn’t shift to anoth­er point of view which I think is impor­tant to keep. We didn’t have that many scenes that we cut out. It was prob­a­bly only about three or four, so maybe the longest the film ever was two-and-a-half hours. Maybe we cut about 15 min­utes out of it. The hard­est thing was cut­ting down the Tail o’ the Cock sequence to a man­age­able size. There was more stuff in there.

Phan­tom Thread is about the same length as this. Are your films get­ting short­er intentionally?

PTA: You’re imply­ing that my films before were bloat­ed, oversized…

AH: How dare you!

Of course not! I guess all films are about two-and-a-half hours nowa­days, right?

PTA: Mar­vel movies are two hours and 45 min­utes now. It’s crazy. When I was a kid, action films, adven­ture films were nev­er longer than 100 min­utes. I sup­pose as I do this more it’s con­stant­ly ask­ing the ques­tion, ​‘What can we get rid of?’ Short­er is bet­ter. I don’t remem­ber think­ing that as much when I was a kid mak­ing movies. I wasn’t ask­ing myself that ques­tion but it’s become a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion now, I think for the bet­ter. Until some­body says, ​‘You might want to leave that best part of the movie in, you know. I know you don’t need it but…’ That can hap­pen too. You can get a lit­tle scis­sor happy.

As some­one who works on film and is com­mit­ted to the cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence, do you ever feel pres­sure to modernise?

PTA: I’m prob­a­bly at the place where they think, ​‘He doesn’t know how to do any­thing else, don’t both­er him’. I was at the den­tist the oth­er day and the woman was about to clean my teeth and she was like, ​‘Have you seen that new Michael Keaton movie?’ and she meant Dopesick. I said, ​‘But it’s not a movie, it’s a lim­it­ed series’, and she said, ​‘Yeah what­ev­er, it’s a movie’. It made me feel like a dinosaur. I make these films and they come out and they go in the the­atres, but peo­ple are con­sum­ing things dif­fer­ent­ly. They don’t real­ly see it the way that I see it any­more. So, is your ques­tion: do I feel old? Fuck­ing yeah, a lit­tle bit.

Alana, HAIM have such a dis­tinc­tive sound. Have you ever expe­ri­enced pres­sure to change the way you do things in line with what’s popular?

AH: You know, me and my sib­lings are very lucky that we’re very intim­i­dat­ing. It’s real­ly hard to go against three peo­ple. We usu­al­ly win. We’ve always been very adamant about doing what­ev­er we feel and I feel like you can kind of see that in our records. No two sound the same. They’re always evolv­ing, always want­i­ng to switch it up. But it’s always on our terms. It’s nev­er some­one telling us, ​‘Maybe you should try some­thing else’.

PTA: If some­body said that they don’t get a vote.

AH: Yeah, we’ve got this! That’s how we’ve always been and it will nev­er change, we’re way too crazy about it.