Paul Thomas Anderson, The Man Behind 'The Master' Discusses Blue Mind w/ Terry Gross on NPR

Paul Thomas Anderson, the man behind the film 'The Master' discusses Blue Mind and loving the ocean with Terry Gross on NPR.

GROSS: So the movie opens with a shot of kind of swirling ocean water and that shot is, like, reprised much deeper into the film.

ANDERSON: Yeah.

GROSS: And it's a beautiful shot and of course, like, you know, the ocean makes you think of the continuity. First of all, the opening shot is in the South Pacific as the war ends, but it's also like, you know, the continuity. The ocean is always there, has always been there, and it's like swirling water, so there's just something, like, boiling under the surface - you get the feeling of.

But I kept thinking, like, I wonder if that's really the ocean or if he's, like, in a huge bathtub with, like, super blue water just making it swirl exactly like he wants it to.

ANDERSON: Yeah, yeah. Or that it's like a computer that just made some waves. Right? No. Yeah. That's - we were on a boat out in the Pacific. I say the Pacific. We were only about two or three miles off the coast and it was that time of day when the sun was not directly overhead, probably about 10:30, and just the angle of the way that it was hitting the water, you looked off the back of the ship and that's what you saw. So we just pointed the camera down at it and it was so hypnotic, so beautiful to look at, kind of endless. We kind of put it on in the editing room. We'd sort of see it up on the big screen and you'd just feel yourself being hypnotized by it.

And it reminded me - I kind of - I remember as a kid going to Pearl Harbor and they have that monument that you can go to. It made such an impression on me. You sort of look down into the water. You see these fishes moving around and, you know, to think about what happened there and all those bodies and all that stuff and all these kind of things that have gone into the water, it's a thought that always sticks with me, a thought that always sticks with me when I do go into the ocean, when I go swimming. You know, all that's happened and all that's beneath the surface and things coming and going.

I don't know. It gets you - it gets you in a good place of thinking about things in a wider way - to me, anyway.