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Inherent Vice is the first film adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, and many wondered how director Paul Thomas Anderson would step up to the challenge, as Pynchon’s books are often believed to be unfilmable. In an interview with IndieWire, Anderson said, “You can’t make a movie like this and assume everyone’s read the book. You have to sort of operate thinking no one has read the book and forget about that. Throw it out the window. So does this piece of background action function in a way that can support itself? I think that it can. It functions as a weird, bizarre throwaway in the background that danger is coming, that there is danger all around this character. Whether it’s explained or not, it kind of has a great, absurdist background feeling to it. Early enough in the movie, that hopefully contributes to paranoia — that nothing is what it seems. Anything can crawl out of the bushes at any moment. We had endless discussions about that on set and in the editing room about how to navigate that stuff, for sure. “The book was always there on the set, and we were digging around, looking for what he meant, what he was after. At the same time, the moment that you put any kind of reverence down for the material and treat it with a little bit more disregard from time to time, it could become really liberating. That’s the book and this is the movie — we’ve got another job to do. So it was this combination of deep respect and wanting to get it right mixed with, ‘Well, we’re on the road and we’ve got a job to do. How do we do it right?’”