The Licorice Pizza of the title is not eaten. It’s the name of a chain of stores that sold vinyl records (the famous “liquorice pizzas”) in 1970s California, before giving its title to Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film.
It is about a love story not obvious between two young people, Alana and Gary, and to tell it, the director of Phantom Thread relied on the stories of one of these friends, an ambitious young entrepreneur. “It made me want to relive this period that I idealized because I did not really live it being born in 1970, confides the filmmaker to 20 Minutes. Licorice Pizza is not a nostalgic movie. It’s a walk in an America that I find cinematic. “
Race against time
For this romantic and eccentric ballad, the filmmaker makes two exceptional performers debut on the screen. He wrote his film with Alana Haim, a member of the group in mind Haim, and assisted him with Cooper Hoffman. The latter is the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman actor who died in 2014 who was one of the favorites of the filmmaker of Boogie Nights at The Master Passing by Magnolia. “I don’t know if the talent is hereditary,” explains Paul Thomas Anderson. But after all, why not ? Cooper turned out to be breathtakingly natural in the face of Alana who, for her part, had a little more experience thanks to her career as a musician. “
This duo – him barely out of adolescence, she a little older – gallops in a Los Angeles unknown to the general public with a lot of dazzling sequences where they run as if they were trying to beat the clock. “This is the idea I have of the 1970s, insists the filmmaker. I see it as a moment of freedom where everything was possible and where you had to work extra hard to enjoy it. »This is what the hero does, a child star who is embarking on the waterbeds then
pinball machines with equal enthusiasm.
Star friends
Around this couple with the invigorating freshness, Paul Thomas Anderson gathered star friends like Sean Penn, Benny Safdie, Tom Waits and especially Bradley Cooper, astonishing in the role of Jon Peters, rather agitated Hollywood producer. “I called on friends that my family and I have been seeing for years,” says Paul Thomas Anderson. I hope that the public will feel included in our complicity and that they will accept to be the accomplice of our delusions. »We bite into his Licorice Pizza with the immense pleasure communicated by a delicious moment of cinema. And when it ends, we would take back part of it.