If a cast featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn, Regina Hall and Benicio Del Toro isn’t enough to draw you in for One Battle After Another, maybe the highest-grossing, multi-time award-winning director Steven Spielberg will be. The film, with DiCaprio in the lead role, doesn’t hit theaters until Sept. 26, but the iconic director was given an early look at the film, which he’s apparently seen three times now. Suffice to say, Spielberg’s review of the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed film didn’t disappoint.
As The Film Stage revealed, Spielberg spoke with Thomas Anderson ahead of the official Los Angeles premiere of One Battle After Another on Monday, Sept. 8. This came following a screening at DGA Theater in Los Angeles. The conversation featured plenty worth reading, but Spielberg’s comments about the movie itself were noteworthy.
Steven Spielberg Heaps Praise on ‘One Battle After Another’
The back-and-forth between Spielberg and Thomas Anderson kicked off with the former dubbing the upcoming movie “insane” and touting the amount of action in just the first hour alone.
“What an insane movie, oh my God,” Spielberg said. “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. What was it about the Thomas Pynchon book that first sort of set you off?”
After Thomas Anderson explained how much he loved the book (Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, which the film is based on), so much so that he struggled for years to adapt it. He revealed that he ultimately took his favorite pieces and other stories and combined them.
“…When I had a lot of other pieces, some other stories, I started to combine them. And I kept the things that I loved the most about the book, and the things I loved the most was the father-daughter story,” Thomas Anderson said. “I think even before I had kids, I kind of felt a connection to how this father felt about his daughter. And it only grew deeper and stronger as I have had kids to understand what he was writing about in that way. And I’m trying to take from the book what I needed and pursue my own path and let it move in directions that it seemed that it wanted to go.”
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While the duo spoke at length about the cast as well, Thomas Anderson admitted that he thought frequently about DiCaprio and Penn being great fits for One Battle After Another.
“Well, it was impossible to not keep thinking of both of them [when writing] because, you know, as much as you’re trying to kind of imagine a character,” Thomas Anderson said. “[I’d worked with Sean in Licorice Pizza] and I wanted to work with him in a very meaty way for as long as I can remember, as long as the first time I saw him on screen, I wanted to get ahold of him.
Based on Spielberg’s review alone, it’s hard to argue that his casting was anything short of a home run. As for Spielberg, he obviously knows a bit about working with DiCaprio, as the duo teamed up on the 2002 hit Catch Me If You Can.
As the official Sept. 26 release of One Battle After Another draws near, more and more critics’ reviews will begin coming in, so it’ll be interesting to see if it earns the same level of high praise that Spielberg gave it.
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