Joaquin Phoenix loses his ship in new Master promo

Tonight Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master will be screening in 70mm at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. I was too slow to grab tickets, and you shouldn’t bother trying because they’re all gone, but there was a keen promo video for tonight’s screening that’s worth sharing. Above you can see Joaquin Phoenix totally lose his ship.

In related news, there’s an interview/feature on The Master in Newsweek written by the magazine’s long-time film critic David Ansen. Anderson acknowledges that L. Ron Hubbard was the inspiration for Lancaster Dodd, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, and also went over other influences for the film:

Kind of like the mixologist Freddie [Phoenix’s character], who makes booze from whatever is at hand, be it guavas or paint thinner, Anderson gathered pieces for his movie from disparate sources. There were scenes he’d written early on for There Will Be Blood he’d never used. There were stories Jason Robards had told him on the set of Magnolia about his drinking days in the Navy during the war. Chunks of Freddie’s experiences as a migrant field worker and wanderer were lifted from John Steinbeck’s life story. There was his fascination with the larger-than-life Hubbard. “But I didn’t want it to be a biography. It’s not the L. Ron Hubbard story,” Anderson says. He was inspired by a quote he read that the period after wars was a particularly fertile time for spiritual movements to start. “That was a hook you could hang your hat on.”

The Master arrives in theaters September 14th. I’ve included the other promo for the screening, titled “She Wrote Me a Letter,” after the cut.