When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a former member of a revolutionary group seeks help from other revolutionaries to find his missing daughter in Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedic adventure, One Battle After Another.

Anderson’s film finds former militant Bob Ferguson, seeking the help of his comrades after his daughter Willa goes missing following the resurgence of his sworn enemy, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw.

On September 7, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Anderson discussed the making of One Battle After Another during a Q&A moderated by Director Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans). He also spoke about the film in a conversation moderated by Director Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon) following the DGA’s New York screening on September 21.

During the Los Angeles conversation, Anderson spoke about how he came across the location for the last set piece of the film and how it influenced the movie.

“We went into this movie without that as our ending. We knew that all our participants were headed to the desert, and we knew that we were gonna have our man save the day in some way and exactly how was unclear. In location scouting, we drove on those what we called ‘the river of hills’ and that sequence blossomed. It’s very scary to drive over those hills because you come up 65, 70 miles an hour, there’s no one around but you’re going blind. You’re trusting that no one is there, trusting that everybody is gonna keep moving. I was just videoing with my phone and the more you were kind of static, the more you would lose the horizon line and it became very, very scary. And then I found when I zoomed in on my phone it was even scarier. We ended up after this river of hills at this thing massive thing called ‘the Texas Dip’ and it was one of those lucky moments where you sit in a car for four hours going, ‘I’ll never go on a location scout again’ and you come across this and go, ‘This is why you get in a van and location scout!’ These discoveries are there if the movie gods are on your side.”

Anderson’s other directorial credits include the feature films Phantom Thread, Inherent Vice, The Master, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia, Boogie Nights and Hard Eight. He is a two-time nominee for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for There Will Be Blood (2007) and Licorice Pizza (2021). Anderson has been a DGA member since 1996.