Steven Spielberg is a big fan of One Battle After Another.
The legendary filmmaker heaped praise on director Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel after an advance screening in Los Angeles this week.
During a post-screening panel discussion, Spielberg revealed he had already seen the film three times. One Battle After Another stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a paranoid, washed-up revolutionary who sets off in search of his missing daughter (Chase Infiniti).
“What an insane movie, oh my God,” said Spielberg, as reported by The Film Stage. “There is more action in the first hour of this than every other film you’ve ever directed put together. Everything, it is really incredible. This is such a concoction of things that are so bizarre and at the same time so relevant, that I think have become increasingly more relevant than perhaps even when you finished the screenplay and assembled your cast and crew and began production.”
Spielberg also compared the film to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy classic Dr. Strangelove.
“I have not seen a movie that is so tonally a relative to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove,” he said. “This brings a kind of absurdist comedy, taken very seriously, because it’s so much a reflection of what’s happening today, every day, throughout this country. But it takes it to a point where you want to laugh, because if you don’t laugh, you’re going to start screaming, ‘This is too real.’ And so you got that outlet. Kubrick used armageddon as a way to tell his story, to make his statement. And there’s something that gets us on the same edge of that kind of absurdist feeling, a tone, that you take it both very seriously, but you’re praying for some kind of relief, some kind of a trigger to laugh. I nervously laugh all the way through Dr. Strangelove, and, more than nervously, I had a great time laughing all the way through this… may this movie make a bundle and make you very happy.”
Spielberg and Anderson also bonded over working with DiCaprio, who Spielberg directed in 2002’s Catch Me If You Can.
“When you said ‘cut,’ did Leo rush to the monitor to watch his own take back every day?” Spielberg asked Anderson, who agreed that “sometimes” the actor did just that.
“Leo has a great thing,” Anderson said. “He will sell you on something by saying, ‘This is a terrible idea, and you’re gonna hate it.’ And then he proceeds to tell you a really fantastic idea. But he loves to set it up by saying, ‘I think it’s a terrible idea.’
“He always does that,” Spielberg concurred. “…And it was amazing watching him in this, both of them. I have to say about Sean Penn: This is my favorite Sean Penn performance of his career for me.”
DiCaprio had been wanting to work with Anderson for decades, with the actor having previously had to turn down 1997’s Boogie Nights because he was committed to making Titanic. The actor has called passing on the film as his “biggest regret.”
“Any time that he asks, you work with P.T.A., this guy is like one of the great visionary filmmakers of my generation,” DiCaprio recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “His films, I’m still intrigued by to this day; I still talk about The Master, Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Magnolia — these films that are going to last for generations to come so you jump at an opportunity to work with Paul.”
Official critic reviews for the Warner Bros. film — which clocks in at nearly three hours — are not yet out. One Battle After Another is released in theaters Sept. 26.
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