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As many have noted, Inherent Vice has a period appropriate look, resembling a film that could’ve been shot in 1970, just like the film’s setting. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Anderson said “I was using a lot of lenses I had used on the 35mm portions of The Master. One lens that we used is a lens from 1910 or 1911 that we put a modern housing on. It’s from an old Pathé camera that we first used on Magnolia...We had a set of lenses that we used on The Master that I was familiar with that I thought would work really well, because I had gotten to know them – I know the imperfections, that one lens is a little cooler or one drops off a little here or one is softer.”

“[Cinematographer] Robert [Elswit] and I talked about making the film feel like a faded postcard; you want it to look like a movie from 1970, but you don’t want it to feel like a pastiche. I had a bunch of film in my garage that was improperly stored – it was 10 or 15 years old – and we shot some tests with it, and one of two things would always happen. Either it inspired us, because the blacks were very milky and the colors were a bit faded in a great way, or it was damaged beyond repair and you got no exposure at all. We wanted to use it but you couldn’t really depend on it at the risk of not getting anything, so we would use it here and there and a couple of the shots made it into the movie. More importantly, it served as a kind of inspiration for us to say, ‘This looks great, how can we use our modern film stocks and lenses to try to replicate that kind of look?’”