Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Chase Infiniti during the Los Angeles press conference for ‘One Battle After Another.’
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It has taken two decades for filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s vision of One Battle After Another to hit the big screen. However, not all the pieces of the puzzle took quite so long to come together.
“We were just doing an interview and joking that I might have been noodling around this for 20 years, but Benicio del Toro came in to do his sequence, and we wrote the best sequence in the movie in a day and a night at dinner. It was always evolving,” he recalls during a press conference in Hollywood, California.
Bigger picture, it was a relief for Anderson, often referred to as simply PTA, to finally get the production underway.
“We have our premise, we have our story points, we have our characters, but there has to be room for discovery within reason. You can’t get out there and hope and cross your fingers that you’re going to find something, but we had found enough foundation and enough emotional plot work to get to currency, to get gambling, to go to the table and start playing.”
An Iconic Coen Brothers Character Inspire DiCaprio’s ‘One Battle After Another’ Performance
One Battle After Another sees Leonardo DiCaprio play a washed-up, permanently stoned and paranoid revolutionary Bob Ferguson who is living off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa, played by Chase Infiniti.
When his nemesis, Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, resurfaces after 16 years and she goes missing, Bob scrambles to find her, father and daughter both battling the consequences of his past. R-rated One Battle After Another is not based on a true story; it is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland. It boasts an ensemble cast that includes del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Alana Haim, and lands in theaters on Friday, September 26, 2025.
“I would be remiss and lying if I didn’t say that The Dude was an influence on this character in a modern-day context,” DiCaprio admits, referring to Jeff Bridges’ iconic character in The Big Lebowski. “I was also talking about Dog Day Afternoon with Al Pacino, and that fanaticism, he has to get back, connect with, and save the person that he loves. It opened the doors. I love this slice of life where you find Bob and Willa at the beginning of this movie. It’s not this utopian, happy villager set up. It’s a father disconnecting with his daughter. She’s a different generation. He’s completely disconnected from her. He’s a disaster of a father, and then all of a sudden, he’s put into this wild circumstance to try to save her.”
(Left to right) Moderator Erik Davis, director Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Regina Hall, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor and Benicio del Toro.
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While the human drama and family are central themes in One Battle After Another, the thriller isn’t light on action. What did Anderson, the man behind Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and Phantom Thread, learn from those scenes?
“I learned that it’s a lot more boring than it looks when you see it in a film,” he laughs. “It certainly doesn’t give you the intense satisfaction that it does working hand in hand in the scene with actors. That’s the most fun that you can have and the most satisfying. Sometimes, doing that kind of stuff is like putting a Lego together.”
“You have pieces, you know you need to get them, and sometimes you really have to hand over the set to stunt coordinators and Adam Somner, the assistant director and producer. You have to trust them to do that work, to keep everybody safe, and to do it well, and you actually have to take a back seat. You have to sit on your hands and let them get about the work of doing it.”
So, where did PTA, an incredibly accomplished filmmaker who also wrote and produced One Battle After Another, as well as serving as a co-cinematographer, find the challenges? Penn jokes that the biggest one was “getting room service in California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State Park after 9 pm.”
“I hear the word challenging, and it doesn’t compute thinking about the experience,” Anderson muses. “It was just a joy to go to work, frustrating to go to sleep, and exciting to wake up the next day for another day’s work. It was long, so I suppose I could try to find something challenging about it, but to get to the end of the experience, I feel like we’ve left it all on the playing field is a very satisfying feeling.”
(Left to right) Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Regina Hall, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor and Benicio del Toro in a press conference for ‘One Battle After Another.’
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‘One Battle After Another’ Is Full Of Happy Creative Accidents
Although some of the film’s best moments were meticulously well planned, PTA loves that some came out as happy accidents; one in particular came out of working with Teyana Taylor, who plays the ingeniously named Perfidia Beverly Hills.
“She’s really good because she’s also a director enough that she knows when an accident has happened, and it’s a gift. You’ve got to listen to it from the smallest thing,” he muses. “We were shooting some camera tests, and she came in; she had broken a nail and had a Band-Aid on. We were shooting with that Band-Aid, and we both fell in love with it, and realized that’s a gift. That’s not a broken nail, that’s a gift. That happened right there. I think her eyelashes have been messed up. We have one bad eyelash, and you say, ‘Well, that’s it, too.'”
“If you get in your head, as actors, then you come in, not open, not listening, not waiting to receive. You have got to have a plan, but you have to be ready to receive and look for the opportunities, because they are there in front of you, if your eyes are open. I found that very early on with Tiana, and that was the key to working together.”
No spoilers, but another happy accident was finding the location for a key desert car chase during the film’s third act.
“We knew we had our heroes out on the road, and we knew we were in the desert,” Anderson recalls. “That’s where the journey has taken us, and that’s where the journey is going to culminate and end. During the years of location scouting for various locations, we found ourselves quite close to the finish line of starting to film, and we ended up right near the Arizona border, driving on what we had started to call the ‘River of Hills’. You could feel, collectively in the car, that we were all excited by this stretch of road, and that maybe like a gift from the movie gods, or something. After years of driving and looking for something, anything, it had emerged to us, and we just ran with it.”
Leonardo DiCaprio and Chase Infiniti, during the press conference for ‘One Battle After Another.’
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Newcomer Chase Infiniti, who plays DiCaprio’s character’s daughter Willa, is a revelation. With One Battle After Battle already garnering serious awards buzz, she’s a standout. The Titanic actor bonded with her as he saw her share centre stage during chemistry reads.
“We knew that the central heart and the core of the film was Willa’s journey, and this film rides or dies on her performance. Needless to say, she did a phenomenal job,” he enthuses. “There were these meetings. Paul doesn’t really do an audition process. You have dinner, he gives her a karate lesson, we sit around, we improvise, but I think this idea of this generational gap between the two characters in those chemistry reads really came to fruition. Here you have a guy who’s completely disconnected from the modern world in every respect. Of course, we’re going to find him, a third of the way through the story, arguing with his daughter.”
“Bob doesn’t understand, but they’re all they have, and I think through these conversations and these meetings, these sort of workshops that we had, we secured who these people were. I love that Paul didn’t arrive in the film, showing the sort of happy villagers in their little hut up north. They’re having a father-daughter disagreement. Bob went and got drunk last night. She’s become the mother figure. He doesn’t understand her. She secretly has a phone. All that stuff came from these workshops that we’re able to do together.”
Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Chase Infiniti at the ‘One Battle After Another’ press conference in Hollywood.
Shutterstock for Warner Bros.
Here’s How Johnny Greenwood’s Score Was Key To PTA Achieving His ‘One Battle After Another’ Vision
A trademark of Anderson’s films is a killer soundtrack, and One Battle After Another is no different. Once again, the film sees the filmmaker reunite with long-time collaborator Johnny Greenwood.
“He’s involved from the very beginning and has had this script for a long time. He’s been writing music, but the important part is then hearing it,” PTA explains. “We would watch dailies, and we would be able to play the music that he was writing along with it, so everybody starts to really get a sense and an understanding of the tone. Everybody gets that same music in their bodies, and it helps push us all along on a similar journey. It makes it exciting, too. Watching an hour of dailies of cars driving on hills can be really boring unless there’s something compulsive behind it, so they had a sneak preview of that. Talking to something very specific, very early on, hearing Steely Dan’s Dirty Work on the way to work one morning and coming in and playing it for Leo, I said, ‘I think at the last minute here, I found your theme song.’”
“It’s another little piece of art that you really hold in your pockets as you’re trying to build something in pieces. It’s always helpful to have something like music to grasp onto. We can all understand and feel what the rhythm is and the melody lines. It’s an integral part of any film, but particularly acute here.”
The One Battle After Another director concludes, “Johnny’s music is always unique and special. We got a sneak preview of where this was going, what the tension was going to be, and what we needed to sustain, so it’s a tremendous luxury to work like that, and it’s because Johnny is steps ahead of us.”
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