Costumes were compelling for Paul Thomas Anderson, but some of it tested his patience.
Endless dressmaking fittings were not the director’s thing. “Costumes were interesting enough to decide we wanted to be in this world, but talk about patience,” he said. “That required a patience that I don’t have in terms of fittings. The endless fittings and designs and endless drawings. I had a lot of enthusiasm for it early on, but then I glazed over and I let [costume designer] Mark [Bridges] and Daniel get on with their work and trust what was going to come up was going to be right.”
But the experience has changed him. “It’s hard now to walk down the street and not look at clothes in a completely different way,” he said. “You get really angry when a button falls off your pants.”
The moderator Lynn Hirschberg, asked the cast and crew about the intimacy and insularity of the film and the dysfunctional family nature of it too.
There were no sound stages and the film did shoot in the spiral staircased, multi-leveled Georgian Townhouse where nearly all of “Phantom Thread” claustrophobically takes place. “They all lived on top of each other like mice, like miniature people,” Anderson said of the people who lived like this at the time. The “There Will Be Blood” director named some of his favorite films with insular confines, including Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” David Lean’s “Brief Encounter”, “The Passionate Friends” and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “I Know Where I’m Going.” “They all usually take place in intimate spaces,” the filmmaker explained.
“It was awful,” Daniel Day-Lewis said not mincing words about working in these tiny little rooms. “We’d hoped that we’d find this way of working again where we’d be self-contained, uninterrupted and in a world we could create and just stay in.” This romantic notion of a self-contained world would soon curdle when the reality set in. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “We were living on top of each other, it was an enormous unit and there was no space. The paraphernalia of film is a normal experience of working in films, but… that entire house was like a termite nest.”
“I think I had… I think you call it a panic attack,” Krieps said of working in these confined proximities. “Suddenly, I couldn’t breath. In every room there were just cables, there’s an energy to it and it’s taking the breath away of your character.”
“Well, we’re all ok now,” PTA said when Hirschberg noted he didn’t seem too upset with the working conditions. “But it was hard, it was really hard.” The director added that to preserve sanity, he should have shot on a sound stage, but it just didn’t feel natural or right. “There were struggles, but it was struggles that were worth it.”
“Phantom Thread” opens December 25th in select theaters, but special sneak previews to see the film in New York and Los Angeles are running now through November 30th.
