The Master (2012) on Netflix
Freddie Quell, a heavy-drinking Navy veteran, drifts through postwar America. He stows away on the yacht of Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a movement called The Cause, who takes him in.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.1/10203,525 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes85%
Trailer
Plot summary
Back home after the war, Freddie Quell is fired from a department store photography job after a fight with a customer. He takes work at a farm in California run by a Filipino-American community, and flees when an elderly coworker collapses after drinking moonshine Freddie made. In San Francisco he hides aboard the yacht of a man devoted to Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic head of a movement called The Cause. Dodd invites him to remain for his daughter's wedding and asks him to brew more of the moonshine he has come to enjoy. Dodd then leads Freddie through a session of rapid, unsettling psychological questions, and Freddie breaks down while recalling Doris, a woman from his hometown he promised to come back to. Freddie goes along as Dodd's family carries The Cause to the East Coast.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Master (2012)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- At the 69th Venice International Film Festival the jury meant to give The Master the Golden Lion, but a new rule barred acting and directing prizes going to the film that won it, so the top prize went to Pietà; Paul Thomas Anderson's film took the Silver Lion and a Volpi Cup shared by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
- Paul Thomas Anderson screened The Master for his friend Tom Cruise, an outspoken Scientologist who had issues with parts of it; Church of Scientology officials who reportedly heard from Cruise "hit the roof" over a scene suggesting the belief system was a product of its leader's imagination.
- The Master was shot almost entirely on 65 mm film stock, making it the first fiction feature to be shot and released in 70mm since Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet in 1996.
- Shipboard scenes were shot aboard the USS Potomac, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential yacht, while a month of filming on Mare Island used the wing of an old hospital and an empty admiral's mansion.
- Joaquin Phoenix was allowed to improvise on set, lost significant weight for Freddie Quell and invented the character's awkward gait; Paul Thomas Anderson compared his concentration to Daniel Day-Lewis's and said Phoenix stayed in character for three months.
- Reese Witherspoon was reportedly offered the part of Peggy Dodd before Amy Adams was cast, and Amanda Seyfried, Emma Stone and Deborah Ann Woll were all considered for Dodd's daughter before Ambyr Childers got the role.
- Anderson and Mihai Mălaimare Jr. planned to shoot mainly portraits in 65 mm, about 20 percent of the film, but ended up shooting 85 percent of it in that format.
- Amy Adams said Paul Thomas Anderson had her come to set for scenes she was not scheduled to appear in, to make her presence felt, and that at times she did not know whether the camera was on her.
