Boogie Nights

Ok, for those of you who know me, you know that I have always been a big fan of the film Boogie Nights, and more specifically a HUGE fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. I have to say out of all of the directors working in the industry today, he is by far the most influential on my career.

Well, I watched Boogie Nights again for, probably the nine millionth time, but this was the first time I watched it with PTA's commentary, I don't know why, but I never really like watching commentaries, because most of the time I find it more distracting than anything. It doesn't matter who's talking, who's commentary it is, I would just rather be watching the film. 90% of the time I end up just turning it off and watching the movie. Well, I made it through the entire commentary, and I can't say it was anything spectacular, the best part was when PTA asks for a cigarette at the end. But it definitely gave me hope.

I felt some sort of weird connection to PTA as he was talking about his experience with his first movie Sydney. Since we finished shooting A Life Less Gone, I always joked about how we should call it Hard Eight because of how it has completely changed from my original vision. The original script that Adam wrote created such a huge buzz around Hollywood that we had actors' agents coming out to meet us at the auditions, telling us how original, and inspiring the script was. We had several named actors attached to the film, and to see it go from that, to what it is now, really frustrates, and disappoints me.

I think the is the first time I've spoken freely about this, but I think everyone should know that I'm not happy with the outcome. The film seems to be getting some good reviews from unbias people, but it's been going on several months of festival submissions and we haven't heard anything back from anyone, and it's getting frustrating, to have put this much time and effort into something.

And who knows, my version may not be any better, but at least I know my version is the version I wanted to make, and if I sent out my version, and didn't get into any festivals then I'd know that at least I did it my way, and that I could be happy with the end result, and I would know that I failed on my own terms.

So, this question goes out to PTA, what the hell did you do? How did you cope? What got your through it? And how did you manage to not give up?