Aaron's Thoughts
Love going back and watching a legendary directors first film. Occasionally they will have things figured out immediately, but more often than not they are still figuring things out both in the style and voice that they want to have as a filmmaker.
Hard Eight is a really great example of the latter because you can see PTA’s early fascination with found & dysfunctional family plus the search for meaning & connection as one navigates the struggles of the world. Ideas that he perfects just one year later in Boogie Nights & goes on to somehow say even more about in the rest of his filmography.
It’s just all not quite there in this one. You can see the wheels turning. You can see he is confident behind the camera. He gets the best performance possible out of his actors. Heck, he even excels at moving the camera which is absurd for someone in their early 20s, but amidst all of that it’s clear that he is still figuring out his voice as a writer. He gets there not long after, but it’s kind of fun to see flashes of humanity in a legendary filmmaker like Anderson.
All that said, most directors would kill for a film as good as this to even be in their filmography. Which makes it comical that this is one of Anderson’s lesser films.
