Paul Thomas Anderson's sixth film, The Master, is perhaps his most off-kilter to date. With its Scientology subtext, it's also likely to be his most headline grabbing, although the modest filmmaker, you feel, would rather avoid all that nonsense. Nonetheless, when **Empire **met up with him, Anderson was happy to nip one of them in bud: Yes, Tom Cruise *has *seen it. Well? "The rest is between us."
Fair enough. So how did L. Ron Hubbard's singular sect inform the movie? "Listen. I know there's a long history there, but when you're investigating something, and working on it for a film, you have to learn what it is about it you like. It's just not worth it to go and make a film just to poke a hole in something."
The idea for The Master, explains Anderson, predated his loose adaption of Upton Sinclair's Oil!, There Will Be Blood, as a clutch of formless scenarios "that would kind of peter out or I wouldn't know exactly what direction it was going in".
They finally came together in a narrative that unites demobbed Marine Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and charismatic demagogue Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a devil's dance of morality, faith and turps-based cocktails.
Not all of the Cannes show reel made the final cut - there's a scene that nods to John Steinbeck - but Anderson quashed any hopes of a director's cut down the line. "No, this it it."
The Master reaches these shores on November 2. Pick up the new issue of **Empire **from Thursday for more in the meantime.