Spielberg the first to praise Anderson’s One Battle After Another
According to CinemaDrame News Agency, at the premiere of One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio said that the limit of method acting for him is drug use. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film had an aggressive marketing campaign, but its first reactions have been promising. Benicio del Toro previously said that the director is in his “best form” with this film.
The story follows former revolutionaries who reunite after 16 years, when their enemies return, to rescue the daughter of one of their members. This $140 million film is a modern adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineyard and is Anderson’s most expensive project to date. The cast includes Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Alana Haim, Wood Harris, Chase Infinity, and Regina Hall, with Michael Bauman as cinematographer and Jonny Greenwood as composer.
DiCaprio told Variety that his character, Bob Ferguson, seems like a man who “sits at home smoking marijuana all day.” Asked whether he relied on method acting for the role, he said: “No, when it comes to that, I don’t do method acting. I can’t. I can’t perform.”
He had earlier told Yahoo that one of his “most difficult” roles was in The Revenant: “I can name 30 or 40 sequences where I did some of the hardest things of my life. Whether it was wading into a frozen river, sleeping in an animal carcass, or the things I ate.”
Steven Spielberg praised One Battle After Another during a Q&A session with Anderson at the Directors Guild of America theater in Los Angeles.
He told Anderson: “What a tense film, my God. The action in the first hour of this film is more than in all the other films you’ve directed combined. Everything about it is truly extraordinary. It’s a mix of things that are utterly strange and at the same time deeply connected to reality, perhaps even more so now than when you finished the script, cast the film, and began production.”
Spielberg compared the film to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, saying: “I haven’t seen a film whose tone relates to Dr. Strangelove. It creates a kind of absurdist comedy that is taken very seriously because it reflects today’s events, what happens every day across this country. But it reaches a point where you want to laugh, because if you don’t laugh, you’ll scream: ‘It’s too real.’”
He continued: “I enjoyed laughing throughout the screening, mostly nervous laughter. But the way you give us those moments of laughter, and then the way you end it, is fascinating.”
On social media, other early viewers, including a Men’s Health writer, also praised Anderson’s film. Brett Arnold, podcast host, called it Anderson’s “funniest” film to date but admitted he cried at the end.
A Slashfilm critic described the film as “the American nightmare in VistaVision,” writing on X: “It’s filled with many horrifying yet familiar images. One of the year’s best!”
A New York Times critic wrote that Anderson could win the Oscar for Best Director with this film.
One Battle After Another will be released on September 26.
