The Only Paul Thomas Anderson Interview You Will Ever Need...

After New Year's resolving to waste less time online, I spent nearly two hours yesterday evening listening to Marc Maron's marvelous WTF interview with director Paul Thomas Anderson. (In my own defense, I've contracted a respiratory virus and have been a Dayquil zombie for the past few days, so I wasn't really capable of doing much beyond veging in front of the intertube.) Among the surprises revealed: while Anderson was a student at Emerson College (Boston) in the early 1990s, one of his English teachers was the not-yet-Charlie-Rosed David Foster Wallace (that's one for the 'Small World' file); Anderson's father was Tim Conway's straight man in the early 1960s, and Anderson grew up around the cast of the Carol Burnett Show; the elder Anderson was also a Cleveland, Ohio local TV personality who hosted horror movies under the name of 'Ghoulardi'; the reason why Anderson's first feature, Sidney, was released under the title Hard Eight (a good movie by any name); Anderson speaks at length about Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master and Inherent Vice, and he pointedly refuses to say anything about any personal contact he might have had with Thomas Pynchon. He also mentions that if he had a time machine, he would use it to travel backward a few decades and work with Sterling Hayden.