what can they teach you anyways?
On Paul Thomas Anderson, film school, college droupouts, Martin Scorsese, Terminator 2...
The director Paul Thomas Anderson likes to tell this story about why he dropped out of film school. And when he tells this story, he admits upfront that he never wanted to attend film school. He also confesses that after high school he couldn’t get into film school if he tried. He couldn’t get into any college for that matter because his grades were so terrible.
The truth was Anderson never tried all that hard in school. He assumed that after graduating high school he’d immediately go direct movies. Since he was young that was his dream. He was the kind of film nerd who not only knew all the great directors and watched all the classics, he sought out rare Laserdisc copies of movies with director commentaries, full of filmmakers explaining how they pulled off this shot or why the characters are framed in the scene that way.
Why did he need a professor to teach him? The movies themselves and the people who made them were his education.
Well a couple years passed and surprise surprise — Anderson wasn’t directing any movies. The suits weren’t knocking down the door of a hotshot 20-year-old to manage and execute projects worth millions.
He panicked. Maybe he wasn’t so smart. Maybe he did need film school. So he swallowed his pride and enrolled in the prestigious New York University Film School. And on the first day of class, he regretted his decision. He was in a screenwriting course and the first words from the professor were, If you’re here to write Terminator 2, just leave now.
Anderson thought that was terrible. What if there was a kid in the corner who wants to write Terminator 2? That’s his vision. That’s his movie. That’s what he likes. Let him do it.
And besides, Anderson thought Terminator 2 was a pretty awesome movie.
Anderson worried he was wasting his time and money. Film school wouldn’t turn him into a director. But he needed to be sure. So when the same professor assigned students to write a one-page scene without dialogue demonstrating a character’s fundamental nature, Anderson devised an experiment. He’d gotten his hands on the screenplay for Hoffa, a gangster movie starring Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito, and written by David Mamet, one of the greatest screenwriters and playwrights of his generation.
Anderson loved this this fantastic scene in the script, “where Danny DeVito is driving along and it shows what he’s going through by the method he uses to keep himself awake while driving. He lights a cigarette and he lets it burn down to his fingers to keep him awake. And it’s just so simple and perfect and lovely, and it’s Mr. Pulitzer Prize himself, David Mamet. So I took that page, and I handed it in.”
The professor gave him a C+.
Anderson dropped out the next day. Fortunately, he’d cut class early enough to receive his money back. He decided to use those funds, plus some cash he made gambling, to do what he wanted all along—make movies. For $10,000 he directed a short called Cigarettes & Coffee and submitted it to Sundance. There it caught the attention of the director Michael Caton-Jones, who mentored Anderson and helped him develop the idea into a full-length screenplay. At Sundance the following year, he made a deal with Ryder Entertainment to direct the movie, which was retitled Hard Eight.
And that’s how the man who directed classics like Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and The Master got his start. He learned from experience and those who came before him.
A professor Martin Scorsese had while attending NYU in the 60s (the irony!) that “the only reason to come to film school was to get your hands on the equipment so you can make your movie.” Because, Scorsese said, “they can’t tell you how to make the movie. You have to have it in you. You have to have the inspiration, the passion.”
Maybe the difference in experience between the two is some commentary about the changing tides of American higher education. It’s possible. But I think it’s much simpler than that. Creating anything new means going against the grain, taking up space once held by the old ways of doing it, or the old players in the industry, and you have to be willing to hold onto your vision when the pushback comes.
Because there’s this moment every young artist, every creative person really, has to overcome, Anderson explained. It’s that first time “you got nervous that somebody else was right who was talking to you, somebody who was maybe in a position of power, like their opinion somehow was right or better than yours. Somehow, you could never stop to think, No, it’s just different. You just think differently than I do. And that’s okay. But I’m not wrong.”
Only one person can tell you how to make your art, how to achieve your vision. And that same person is the only person who can reject you, who can tell you that it’s wrong.
That person is you.