Tom Cruise as TV self-actualisation guru Frank Mackey, who is estranged from his dying father, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards).
“No one´s making movies like Paul is right now,” says John C Reilly, who has been in all three of the director´s films. “But the thing is, if you really want to bring your vision to a movie, you have to be incredibly unrelenting and insistent. If you want to keep the vision pure, you have to be stubborn. And nobody is as stubborn as Paul.”
As Reilly´s words imply, Anderson has built up a fiercely loyal following among the actors he has worked with over the past few years, not least because he has managed to combine his unique vision with a reputation as a first-class director of actors - no easy thing in a business where visions are often pursued at the expense of the performers required to embody them. Philip Baker Hall and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who star together in another of this issue´s featured titles, The Talented Mr Ripley) have, like Reilly, been in all three of Anderson´s films, and they share Reilly´s enthusiasm for the way he works and the films he makes.
John C Reilly as LAPD officer Jim Kurring, who forms an unlikely relationship with Claudia (Melora Walters).
“If you want to keep the vision pure, you have to be stubborn. And nobody
is as stubborn as Paul”
John C Reilly
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But the Paul Thomas Anderson fan club is not restricted to those who have worked with him on more than one picture. Hollywood luminaries as diverse as Tom Cruise and Jason Robards - both of whom play key roles in Magnolia - have both recognised something in his work that made them want to be a part of it.
Cruise contacted Anderson after seeing Boogie Nights to suggest they might one day work together, and the film-maker responded by writing the part of Frank TJ Mackey - one of the most conflicted characters in Magnolia´s conflicted universe - with Cruise in mind. “Tom responded really well to the script,” says producer JoAnne Sellar, who also worked with Anderson on Boogie Nights. “After several meetings with Paul, he said he would do it. I thought it was really amazing that he would take this leap of faith, because Frank Mackey is a very risky role.”
As for Robards, he was drawn in by the unique quality of the script, despite the fact that he had only just recovered from a near-fatal illness, and that the part he was being offered in Magnolia was that of a man dying of cancer.
William H Macy as former TV quiz-show star Donnie Smith.
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“I was taken aback by the script because it is so honest about the human condition: about estrangement and relationships with parents and even death,” says the veteran actor, who began his career on Broadway in the fifties and won back-to-back Oscars in 1976 and 1977 for All the President´s Man and Julia. “It had a novelistic approach that I found fascinating. There were no star parts: every character was equal. It was just a slice of the life we live nowadays. And it was sort of prophetic that I be asked to play a guy going out in life: it was just so right for me to do this and bring what I know to it.”
Jeremy Blackman as TV quiz-show genius Stanley Spector, who is not so smart at relationships.
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Magnolia is set in the San Fernando Valley - that valley rarely obscured by clouds just north of Los Angeles which is the essence of Southern California and which has been mythologised in virtually every form of popular culture, from movies (Valley Girls) to rock ‘n´ roll (Tom Petty´s ‘Free Falling´). The irony is that, while the rich folks live in Bel Air and the alternative people live in Venice, the Valley tends to be where the ordinary folks live. And Magnolia is about a day in the life of a dozen inhabitants of the Valley who may not be 100% ordinary - this is, after all, almost LA, and around half of them work or have worked in television - but who have the same strengths and failings as the rest of us.
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