Paul Thomas Anderson spent two decades circling Vineland before making his Best Picture winner
One Battle After Another began as a Thomas Pynchon novel its director loved too much to adapt. Paul Thomas Anderson set it aside, merged a car-chase idea with a story about a female revolutionary, and ended up with his costliest, highest-grossing film, shot on a camera format barely used since the 1960s.
Anderson had wanted to film Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland since the early 2000s but feared his devotion would stop him reshaping it. The finished script keeps the book's father-daughter core and little else. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a burned-out former militant, living under a false name with his teenage daughter, who is forced back into action when a vengeful military officer, played by Sean Penn, reappears sixteen years later. Benicio del Toro plays a karate teacher who shelters them, and Chase Infiniti, in her first film, plays the daughter.
Finding Infiniti took six months of callbacks, camera tests and chemistry reads with DiCaprio and Regina Hall. Casting director Cassandra Kulukundis had been told to consider anyone aged roughly 12 to 25, trained or not, and narrowed the field once she saw how physical the part would be. Infiniti, a former kickboxing trainer, still spent months learning karate and mixed martial arts to do her own stunts.
Shooting ran across California from January to June 2024 under the working title BC Project, starting with eleven days in Humboldt County, where the crew attended a Eureka High School prom and cast students as extras. In Sacramento, clearing a homeless encampment for filming caused controversy, and Ronald Reagan's former governor's mansion stood in for a sinister secret society's headquarters, a nod to Pynchon's fixation on Reagan. Production paused for about two and a half months while del Toro finished a Wes Anderson film. Cinematographer Michael Bauman shot 75 to 80% of it in VistaVision, strapping the bulky cameras to cars and running handheld rather than keeping them on tripods.
Warner Bros. released it on September 26, 2025, after a premiere on September 8. It cost $130 to 175 million and earned over $213 million worldwide. At the 98th Academy Awards it drew 13 nominations and won six, including Best Picture, Best Director, Penn's supporting role and the first Oscar ever given for casting. It also took six BAFTAs and four Golden Globes.
Source: One Battle After Another
