From Entertainment Weekly By Christopher Rosen
Phantom Thread isn’t just a reunion between Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis, 10 years after There Will Be Blood. Anderson’s longtime friend and frequent collaborator Dylan Tichenor also returns as the filmmaker’s editor, following credits on Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.
“Paul and I have been very good friends for 20 years, since we started working together. We fell out of sync professionally but I’ve always been around for the other movies,” Tichenor, who has also worked with Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), Ben Affleck (The Town), and Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty), says. “I’ve seen the early screenings, I’ve talked to him about the scripts, even on the ones I didn’t end up cutting. So I feel like I didn’t exactly go away — Paul and I have been in touch the whole time.”
But their reunion was sparked after a late-night chat about ideas for a possible feature, one that would become Phantom Thread.
“He wanted to make a story about a couple whose relationship was the most combative thing. A love story about people who maybe don’t seem to like each other,” Tichenor, a two-time Oscar nominee, says. “That was the original idea. That was just a little kernel and we started batting it around and he got to the place where it sounded like a Hitchcock film. So we started talking about Rebeccaand Notorious. Then we started talking about plot and how to make sure we injected a plot into things — because Paul’s not a super big plot person. It percolated with him for a while. Once he decided to go back to Daniel with the story, which he decided early, Daniel became an integral part of it. That’s when it became a dressmaker, that’s when it became London, and that informed a lot of the movie. I think it’s a movie that started with a grain of something that, like everything does with Paul basically, and a pearl grew around it. I don’t think anybody could have guessed where it was going to go based on the first conversation.”
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