Watch Paul Thomas Anderson Direct One Battle After Another in New Behind-the-Scenes Footage

The week is finally here. Paul Thomas Anderson’s long-awaited One Battle After Another is coming to theaters this weekend and, after two viewings, I can confirm the wait was worth it. A masterpiece of both action and comedy that confronts America’s political nightmares head-on, Anderson takes the ethos of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland while making an adaptation all his own. Ahead of Friday’s release, Warner Bros. has given us a peek behind the scenes in new footage, which gives a look at PTA directing his remarkable ensemble. (Also, make sure you stay until the end of the credits this weekend.)

David Katz said in their review, “Political urgency, contemporary culture-war talking points, and unashamedly aroused espionage personnel: this is what Anderson is committed to in One Battle After Another, and on my very provisional first-viewing verdict, he’s made a largely thrilling populist action movie with some of his most spectacular cinematic formalism, and disciplined, linear storytelling, but lacking the dark beauty and profundity of his best work. The characters we’re encouraged to root for are suitably inspiring and galvanizing; the baddies are rotten white-supremacist thugs (in executive-boardroom attire, along with camo gear); the moral boundaries are sometimes as clear as Star Wars, whose mythos and focus on dynastic legacies seem quite carefully adapted by Anderson (down to the martial arts references). Yet what makes it deliver and communicate so well as a rousing (hopefully appealing) commercial play is nailing these narrative essentials, and getting those storytelling pistons moving, and the cars on the loop-de-loop desert highways.”

See the behind-the-scenes video below, as well as more photos from the set taken by PTA himself, and a video of loading an IMAX 70mm reel.