The family resides in Tarzana - the opposite of stereotypical Hollywood glamour and an unsuspecting home base for someone who has established himself as poet laureate of the world's porn capital, LA's San Fernando Valley.
It's that unpretentious attitude that governs his films. Anderson's body of work puts him in a class with his most obvious influences: Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese. But he's still the same voracious movie lover who famously dropped out of New York University's film programme shortly after one of his teachers besmirched Terminator II.
Since, Anderson has built a career surfing from disco-era sex potentates (Boogie Nights) to turn-of-the-century, homicidal oil barons (There Will Be Blood), henpecked schlubs (Punch-Drunk Love) to crypto-Scientologist swamis (The Master).
If any themes run through the director's body of work, they concern gross abuses of power and the need for familial love - whether through blood ties or unorthodox arrangements.
So it's easy to see what drew the director to his latest source material. Inherent Vice - Anderson's seventh film and the first complete adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel - canvasses matters of heart and handgun with offbeat humour.
It seems poised to become Anderson's most misunderstood film, just as surely as it seems poised to become an instant cult classic.
The film is an innately weird sell, with its abstruse narrative, copious dope and subversive themes. Sure, a star-studded ensemble cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon and Josh Brolin) gives it some A-list appeal. But the detective neo-noir is overtly complex, slyly political and psychedelically crooked. Anderson knows it might not be the most inviting combination.
"No one wants to go to the movies to see history lessons," he says. "No one wants to do homework. People want to laugh."
The film is set in 1970, as malevolent tides lap around Larry "Doc" Sportello (Phoenix), a perma-fried PI with shag-carpet sideburns. He's hunting for an ex-girlfriend named Shasta, a heroin junkie-turned-informant (Wilson) and a missing acidhead Jewish developer last seen guarded by a phalanx of neo-Nazis. Every detail is meticulous, from the faded glow of heat-warped film stock to the sleazy space-age neon in the title sequence.
Inherent Vice's strengths draw from gifts shared by both Pynchon and Thomas Anderson. Few can construct such singular worlds; even fewer can so lovingly humanise and lampoon their characters at the same time. "I always go back to that great Pynchon line - 'Keep cool, but care'," Anderson says, also noting his admiration for the subversive attitude of another influence, experimental filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. "I fall in with Pynchon and Downey Sr.: Be funny first," he continues. "You can be profound, but don't get caught being deeply profound, literary or emotional."
If such a thing as destiny exists, it's clear Anderson's was to write and direct films. He was raised in Studio City. His father and his industry friends encouraged his precocious talent - already salient when the 18-year-old, who had been kicked out of multiple LA private schools, made the short mockumentary The Dirk Diggler Story in 1988. "One of my childhood friends is in the LAPD, and every picture of us as kids has him in a military uniform and me with a camera in hand, filming him doing some tactical mission," Anderson says. "That's what we both always wanted. It's so strange. There's no accounting for anything. His brother is nothing like him and my sisters are nothing like me."
In Inherent Vice, with Brolin's "renaissance detective," he's created a repressed LAPD warthog as villainous as anything in Training Day, L.A. Confidential or the department's 1990s Rampart scandal. And true to Anderson's aesthetic credo, "Bigfoot" Bjornsen is savagely funny.
"He's curious about the human condition and what makes people tick," Brolin says of his character. "He's not full of affectations. He knows who he is and what he's interested in exploring. He's the genius brother you want to follow and say, 'I want to do what he's doing.' "We didn't improvise much on Pynchon," Brolin adds. "Because why would you?"
All conversations with Anderson eventually lead back to Pynchon. This isn't unusual for anyone promoting a major adaptation, let alone one from arguably the world's preeminent reclusive genius. However, Anderson seems in thrall to Pynchon. ("Pound for pound, he's the best. No one else puts words together as concisely and beautifully.")
Rumors abound of a Pynchon cameo in Inherent Vice. But Anderson quickly intercepts any questions about that. Nor does he want to betray the famously private author's trust by revealing his actual input. There's clear kinship, though, in the two men's visions.
The director notes the "fertile ground" of transitional eras. Inherent Vice "mucks through the crushing paranoia and stoned fog of post-Manson Los Angeles in the way Boogie Nights did to the white-lined excesses of the early-1980s.
"Everyone's asked: Why this book?" Anderson says of the 2009 novel. "I've said, 'this was the easiest one,' but what really appealed to me was the thought that Pynchon's in his late 70s and still harbouring regret and pain about this era. He's still looking back ... still pissed off. That's worth something." A publicist enters the room and holds up the "one question more" finger. So here goes.
"What do you hope this is worth?" Anderson pauses for a second and purses his lips. He answers elliptically about the movie's plot - about how families reuniting might make people vaguely hopeful, about how it feels to really miss people, about how he hopes Inherent Vice makes people laugh. Ultimately, he circles back to the original text.
"Pynchon talks about 'those little kid blues' that haunt Doc. That's such a great line," Anderson says, still in reverence. "You know what, too? In some art school-project way, I hope that this leads people to discover Pynchon and stick with reading him."
Who: Paul Thomas Anderson
What: Inherent Vice
Where and when: Screening New Zealand International Film Festival, the Civic 8.15pm tomorrow night
- Washington Post-Bloomberg
