With One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson has delivered something few cinephiles ever expected from him: an action movie.
Obviously, Anderson’s interpretation of an action flick is a cut above most other entries in the genre, and touches upon many of the same themes and preoccupations as his previous films. However, it can’t be denied that it does have a lot of gunfire, mayhem, and car chases, which is new territory for the man better known for arthouse fare like The Master, Phantom Thread, and There Will Be Blood.
Having said that, Anderson has always been open about his appreciation for movies in which things go kablooey and people drive cars really fast. In a 2025 interview with Esquire, he revealed that he’s just like the rest of us when channel-surfing on a Saturday night. In those circumstances, he’s not in the market for a sober, thought-provoking drama. Instead, “Chances are I’m going to land on something that has some kind of action-adventure element to it.”
Indeed, while Anderson hasn’t made anything approaching an action flick or a blockbuster spectacle until now, it’s not because he wouldn’t have jumped at the chance if he’d been offered one. “I’ve never really been asked,” he admitted in 2012, before revealing his love for The Dark Knight Trilogy, which contains some of the most spectacular action filmmaking of the last two decades.
“You look at what Christopher Nolan did with Batman,” Anderson mused. “That’s like the meeting of the highest level of artistic skill and a kind of commerciality and appeal to a wide range of people, which is what anybody would want.” In fact, in Anderson’s opinion, the marriage Nolan was able to make between art and commerce with his Batman trilogy is “kind of unparalleled, actually”.
Over the years, Anderson has spotlighted other action films that he loves in various interviews and lists. When he appeared on The Bill Simmons Podcast, he emphatically stated, “I love watching those Mission: Impossible films.” He worked with Cruise on Magnolia, of course, and has always been a huge fan, so it made perfect sense when he added, “Whether in his action films or dramatic films, Cruise is the fucking king.”
In a 2017 list of his 65 favourite movies, he included Jan De Bont’s Speed, widely recognised as one of the greatest action films of the ’90s, and he once confessed something that could get him banned from most artsy Hollywood soirees: he likes Marvel movies. He doesn’t even see the issue with them dominating cinema, shrugging to Variety, “Look, we’re all nervous about people getting back to the theatre, but you know what’s going to get them back in movie theatres? Spider-Man.” He thought Marvel’s martial arts extravaganza Shang-Chi was “good fun” with “a terrific energy,” and, even more astonishingly, he said the inexplicable words, “I liked Venom 2.”
At the end of the day, though, Anderson’s love for action cinema runs so deep that it was integral in two of his earliest filmmaking memories. The anecdote of his aborted attempt at film school has gone down in legend, as he quickly realised the whole thing was a sham when he arrived on day one. To his horror, he was met with a professor who declared that any student who wanted to make a film like Terminator 2: Judgment Day should leave the course. Like most people, Anderson considered James Cameron’s masterwork a “pretty awesome movie”, so that immediately told him film school wasn’t somewhere he wanted to be.
Lastly, Anderson revealed while promoting One Battle After Another that his favourite action movie in history is a late ’80s Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin action-comedy classic. “I’ve been dreaming of trying to make a film as fun as Midnight Run since I first saw it,” Anderson said of a film he returned to the cinema to watch three or four times during its first week of release. “It’s the high-water mark of a great film for a broad audience,” he added with a nod of complete certainty. “Midnight Run is the total package.”
