Filmography: Punch-Drunk Love (2002); There Will Be Blood (2007); The Master (2012) Another likely popular choice for the best director of the new millennium for many, Paul Thomas Anderson is a filmmaker who likes to push the boundaries of the human psyche. Whether it be someone as "pedestrian" as Adam Sandler's Barry Egan in Punch-Drunk Love, or someone as larger than life as Daniel Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood and Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd in The Master, Anderson's foremost obsession appears to be obsessive personalities. The darkest crevices of the human soul, where unspeakable fear and anxiety exist, is where Anderson likes to explore, sometimes in order to alleviate, and sometimes in order to exacerbate. Journeying through the deep recesses of the human mind may not be for everyone, but even those who find Anderson's preoccupations off-putting have to admire his technical ability. Along with the likes of Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, Anderson is one of the few lone film holdouts in the film vs. digital debate, and his devotion to the power of actual film is very apparent. No one since Stanley Kubrick has been able to consistently shoot such epic looking films, which even in their dullest moments, still take your breath away just from the sheer scope of the image. Anderson is a natural born filmmaker in the purest sense of the word and whatever he has in store for the future of cinema, you can bet that avid filmgoers will be eagerly awaiting to devour it.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
