Little White Lies # 92

In the new issue of LWLies, Hannah Strong interviews writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson and cover star Alana Haim about the pair’s sparkling new film, Licorice Pizza.

She asks Anderson if there is an interconnection between the worlds in which his films take place. Is the San Fernando Valley of Boogie Nights or Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love the same San Fernando Valley as the one we see splayed out in front of us in Licorice Pizza? His answer was a no, but not an emphatic one. The way it reads is, “I don’t think of it that way, but very happy if you do.” 

Perhaps more so than any of his films to date, Licorice Pizza is a landscape movie, where the carefully-calibrated details in the background serve to enhance the drama in the foreground. It is the story of two free-spirited young people – Haim and Cooper Hoffman – nurturing a connection and trying to discern across the film’s runtime whether it is love.

Anderson has cited films such as George Lucas’ American Graffiti and Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High as inspirations, and this is evident not only in its focus on the roistering antics of its vivacious protagonists, but also the episodic, quasi-experimental structure of the film.