Benicio Del Toro Talks Inherent Vice

Steve "Frosty" Weintraub of Collider conducted an interview with Benicio Del Toro -- who is on the heels of a box-office-shattering hit in Guardians of the Galaxy -- and he was able to ask about his experience working with PTA on Inherent Vice. We seem to be having a slight problem embedding the video, but the remarks are brief, so here's a transcription as well as a link to the story.

Collider: Two of my most anticipated films that are upcoming later: Paradise Lost, Inherent Vice. How'd you get involved in those projects and can you sort of talk about the experience of making them?

Benicio Del Toro: Paul Thomas Anderson called me up, and you just say "yes." And then, working with Joaquin Phoenix, who's one of my favorite actors. And I've known him for a while too, and we never worked together, so I was very excited... and that was a lot of fun...

(Thanks for the heads-up, Harley Quinn)

IV (theatrical premiere): 134 days

IV (world premiere): 65 days

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
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"Inherent Vice" Reportedly Completed; Details Begin To Emerge

According to Kris Tapley over at Hitfix, we should start preparing ourselves for "a very different Paul Thomas Anderson experience" with Inherent Vice. Tapley's sources have pretty specific impressions from seeing the movie, but they might suggest more than you would like to know about the movie this early on, so click below the fold at your own discretion.

That said, we can finally report: Inherent Vice is completed, and runs slightly north of two and a half hours.

So. The juicy bits...

First of all, some of Tapley's sources are skeptical that Inherent Vice will get much attention from the Academy come next Winter, despite the uber-awards-friendly release strategy...

Everyone who spoke to me about it was a fan of the movie, it should be said. But multiples times the film's Oscar fate was questioned. "I honestly, truly, really don't think it'll get much Oscar play, other than possible tech stuff," one said. Another asserted that its performances were its best bet, singling out Katherine Waterston in particular - though everyone agreed Joaquin Phoenix will be in the thick of the Best Actor hunt.

The reason behind their thinking? The movie is apparently pretty damn weird...

[Inherent Vice] is apparently a very faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel, which offers a zany blend of humor that could -- I stress could -- prove a tough sell to Academy types.

"It's BONKERS -- weird, weird, weird," one person who saw the film told me. "It made me laugh out loud several times, but not in the ways you might expect. The humor is not so much Boogie Nights as I think a lot of people are expecting. For reals, it tips into, like, Zucker bros.-level gags and broad humor. But, obviously, mixed with his other sensibilities. Strange, beguiling tone."

"It's a sui generis mix of broad comedy, suspense, romance, melancholy, and a touch of menace - unlike anything I can think of," said [another source.]

I'm told Josh Brolin stands out in the supporting ranks and that Martin Short's work as a druggie dentist is "batshit insane."Another compared the film to Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, starring Elliott Gould, "but amped up to 11."

"[Joaquin] Phoenix is in practically every scene, then I guess [Josh] Brolin has the second-biggest part. All the other names are extended cameos. Well, Del Toro has a BIT more than that, but not much."

"It looks gorgeous, though stylistically, it's somewhat more restrained than [PTA's] other films. That's because it's a lot of conversations, and he chooses to cover them with staid, well-composed back-and-forth static shots, or 'two-shots' that sloowwwllly push in." 

"The music is more all over the place than usual, and he uses a few songs of the era. The score is much more Radiohead-sounding, just by way of having actual guitar and drums thrown in. There's some atmospheric electronic stuff in there, too." 

Well that's certainly enough to get us more jazzed than we already were.

IV (theatrical premiere): 140 days

IV (world premiere): 71 days

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates

OFFICIAL: "Inherent Vice" To Have World Premiere At NYFF

Mere days after rumors started swirling, Variety is reporting that Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice will in fact have its world premiere on October 4th, at the 52nd annual New York Film Festival, as the fest's centerpiece gala.

UPDATE: As Timothy pointed out in our comments, festival director Kent Jones said in this article that Inherent Vice as �a journey through the past, bringing the texture of the early �70s SoCal counterculture back to full-blown life. It�s a wildly funny, deeply soulful, richly detailed, and altogether stunning movie.� 

You might want to start thinking about booking flights and hotels.

IV (theatrical premiere): 146 days

IV (world premiere): 77 days

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates

WATCH: PTA & Jonathan Demme talk "Greaser's Palace" At Austin Film Festival

If you'll recall, PTA dropped by the Austin Film Festival last year to talk to Jonathan Demme about his career. That lovely talk can be heard here. While in Austin, Demme and PTA also co-hosted a screening of Robert Downey Sr's whacked-out 1972 Western Greaser's Palace (which, based on the footage shown, we will HAVE to dig up somehow), and discussed the film afterword. Now, thanks to On Story, that second talk has finally surfaced in video form.

The embed on the page seems to be a little sticky, but for now you can watch it HERE. The video is about 30 minutes long, but the talk itself is only about 14 minutes. Enjoy!

via The Playlist

IV: 151 days

Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates

'Vice' Rumored For NYFF; More Insider Reactions Revealed

Paul Thomas Anderson at the New York Festival, 1997.

With Inherent Vice's theatrical release just a hair under five months away, questions have begun to percolate as to where ( or if ) the film will have a festival premiere. The Cannes Film Festival back in May proved an unrealistic mesh with the film's post-production schedule, with an anonymous source at Hollywood Elsewhere suggesting PTA was more comfortable with a late summer premiere at Telluride, Venice, and/or Toronto film festivals. Any of those festivals could still prove to be where PTA chooses to unveil the new movie, but according to new reporting from Hollywood Elsewhere, a slight curveball may be coming in the near future, with an exclusive 2014 New York Film Festival premiere in the works:

There's convincing chatter about Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, David Fincher's Gone Girl, and [Christopher] Nolan's Interstellar debuting at the New York Film Festival, although the most recent buzz says that Interstellar could play Telluride first. But the other two are thought to be NYFF exclusives.

PTA notably brought both Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love to the New York Film Festival in 1997 and 2002, respectively, so it is not much of a stretch to conceive that Vice could play there as well.

Hollywood Elsewhere also reported yesterday that word about Vice is continuing to reverberate within the industry:

Last night I spoke to a friend who knows a woman who recently saw Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice... Her initial nutshell reaction was that she "didn't get it" because...well, how could I know? But one of the apparent blockages was that it doesn't adhere to a precise narrative through-line that led anywhere in particular (i.e. no third-act payoff). But then she started to understand it a bit more when she began to think about it the next day. A film that's more about the journey than the destination. I told this guy that three months ago an industry friend who'd seen Vice had described it in a similar way, calling it "brilliant and mesmerizing in an atmospheric, non-linear sort of way"as well as "Lebowski-esque"

We'd say that sounds just like PTA.

The 52nd annual New York Film Festival will run September 26 - October 12.
The 41st annual Telluride Film Festival will run August 29 - September 1.
The 71st annual Venice Film Festival will run August 27 - September 6.
The 39th annual Toronto International Film Festival will run September 4 - September 14.

Not too much longer and we'll know which -- if any -- of these festivals will score an Inherent Vice slot in their lineup.

In the meantime...

IV: 157 days

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates

The framing chart used during production of Inherent Vice.

IV: 158 days.

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
Stay tuned to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and updates