Paul Thomas Anderson quit film school after just two days
For his first NYU assignment, Paul Thomas Anderson handed in a page of David Mamet's screenplay for Hoffa as his own. It came back marked C+. He walked out after two days, financed a short film with gambling winnings and a girlfriend's credit card, and became one of America's most honoured directors.
Anderson arrived on June 26, 1970, in the Los Angeles district of Studio City. His father, Ernie Anderson, was the voice of ABC and had played a Cleveland late-night horror host called Ghoulardi, a name the son later gave his production company. Closer to his father than his mother, Paul was pushed towards writing and directing. He shot his first film at eight and got a Betamax camera in 1982. As a senior at Montclair Prep, paid by cleaning cages in a pet shop, he shot The Dirk Diggler Story, a 30-minute fake documentary following an adult-film actor.
After studying English at Emerson College, where David Foster Wallace taught him, the NYU episode followed. He worked as a production assistant instead and treated a 20-minute film as his real college. Cigarettes & Coffee, made for $10,000 partly from money his father had saved for tuition, reached Sundance in 1993. His first feature, Hard Eight, was recut by its backers, so he took his own workprint to Cannes in 1996 and raised the $200,000 needed to finish his version, with help from the actors John C. Reilly and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The Dirk Diggler short grew into Boogie Nights in 1997, reviving Burt Reynolds and making names of Mark Wahlberg and Julianne Moore. New Line then gave him a free hand, producing Magnolia, built around Aimee Mann's songs. Punch-Drunk Love, a rare dramatic turn for Adam Sandler, won him Best Director at Cannes in 2002.
There Will Be Blood, loosely drawn from Upton Sinclair's Oil!, earned $76.1 million on a $25 million budget and a Best Actor Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis, though Anderson himself lost three categories to the Coen brothers. He finally won Best Director and Best Picture for One Battle After Another in 2025, his biggest box-office hit. No one else has won that Oscar plus directing prizes at Cannes, Venice and Berlin.
Source: Paul Thomas Anderson
