Back in 2011 and 2012, before I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I wrote every day. At the time, I was inspired by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson. Even just an image of Paul with his notebook would make my day, get my creativity going, make me sit down with my own notebook and start writing. I loved Tarantino's fast-paced writing style. He would just churn out page after page of material, even stuff he'd never use, and that got me to do the same.
Both of them felt like "peer-mentors" to me. Mentors because I constantly learned from them. Peers because I felt like I related to them, not in terms of genius but in terms of history and process. There were moments I would learn something new about them and think "that's just like me!" This gave me hope. Hope because if there were similarities between these two people I idolized so much, even if I might not be the geniuses they are, maybe I could make something decent one day. That hope was so powerful that, even though I don't talk about them much anymore, it still lingers to this day.
My favorite film back then was probably
There Will be Blood, if we're just talking about the film I watched the most and the one that got my creativity going the best. To this day, the score sits in my top five favorite scores of all-time. However, I got a bit burnt out on it that I haven’t watched it in a long time. Right now, I’d even consider
The Master my favorite PTA film, just because I’ve only seen that a few times and thus it feels more fresh and exciting to me now than
There Will be Blood. That said, I’m never going to dislike
There Will be Blood, regardless of the varying degrees of enjoyment I have with it (varying as in, from really like it to love it - nothing less). It had too much of a lasting impact on me for me to dislike it.
This isn’t as in-depth as I’d like to get regarding PTA's work. I’d like to talk about Tarantino more as well. And I'd like to talk about my cinematic journey in 2011 and 2012, a very powerful time in my life when my creativity was at it’s peak, where I could really think outside the box in a way I sadly don’t feel I’m as good at anymore, and a time when my psyche was starting to go haywire.
But I’ll save that for later.
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but still, a lot of films should have earned him some noms, I thought they might, just maybe, nominate Dogville because that's not quite as artsy or taboo as a lot of his films I think, but they didn't anyway 
