Daniel Hennessy for The New York Times  The director Paul Thomas Anderson put years of research into âThe Master,â he said, examining Scientology and other paths.  “THE party’s definitely finished, but you’re sort of left to do the dishes,” the director Paul Thomas Anderson said the other day as he walked a visitor through the spacious ranch house in this city’s Encino section that served as his production base and editing facility for his latest film, “The Master.”  With the movie’s release months behind him, his staff was down to a handful of people. The main order of business for the moment was the preparation of vegetarian tacos for lunch, but there were still loose ends to tie up for “The Master.” Reels of celluloid, packed in rows of boxes, filled a room, awaiting transfer to a storage vault. On a kitchen table sat a stack of mock newsletters produced for the film’s Oscar campaign, rave reviews in the form of a religious pamphlet titled “The Cause Footpath.” Work was in progress on the DVD release; one major supplement will be a 20-minute sequence of outtakes that Mr. Anderson edited together in the trancelike style of the film.  Amiable and energetic, Mr. Anderson made his way to the guesthouse, where he proceeded to rummage through boxes stuffed with books and research material. To prepare for “The Master” — a story about the intense, symbiotic bond between Lancaster Dodd, a charismatic cult leader in post-World War II America (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and Freddie Quell, a tormented veteran (Joaquin Phoenix) — he tracked down as many books as he could find on the teachings of the Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard. They included “Dianetics in Limbo,” a personal account by Helen O’Brien, an early follower of the movement (and the inspiration for Laura Dern’s character in the film), and Hubbard’s own “Mission Into Time” (1973), about a sea voyage involving treasure hunts and past lives. (“He was really starting to lose his marbles by this point,” Mr. Anderson said.) He skimmed the writings of ex-Scientologists and pioneers of offshoot movements like Dianology and Dianotes, and perused several years’ worth of The Aberree, a Scientology newsletter.  Mr. Anderson said he still retains a fascination for the subject, which consumed him for years. “Laughing at it or being negative, that goes away so quickly when your head is inside it,” he said, “and you see how people are talking about getting better and taking control of their lives.”  While the Cause, Lancaster Dodd’s quasi-religion, is clearly a parallel version of Scientology, “The Master” is less interested in mocking it than in evoking the larger American tradition of spiritual questing and its endlessly regenerating cast of dreamers, visionaries, quacks and self-styled prophets. Mr. Anderson’s research was informed equally by scholarly tomes (Fawn Brodie’s “No Man Knows My History,” about Joseph Smith and the founding of Mormonism) and self-help pseudoscience (books like “Living Your Past Lives” and “Are Your Troubles Psychosomatic?”). “This stuff, it’ll make your head spin,” he said, pulling out books on psycho-cybernetics, the est movement and the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky.  While “The Master” may be too oddball to be an Oscar contender, it has performed well on critics’ year-end lists. And at least before the late arrivals of “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Django Unchained” it was the most closely dissected and passionately debated American movie of the year, confirming Mr. Anderson’s ability to incite stronger — and more divisive — opinions than almost any American filmmaker of his generation.  A common response, even among those who like “The Master,” has been bafflement. Many critics were eager to decode and interpret it, and some contend that only after several viewings does it reveal its meanings. Mr. Anderson said he has been pleasantly surprised by the reaction but also a bit stymied: “I knew we were doing something different, but I didn’t think it was from another planet.”  For him “The Master” is most obviously a story about the relationship between its two main characters. “That connection and that love, that was the cement,” he said. The widespread, and unfounded, expectation that it would be a Scientology exposé, he said, might have thrown some viewers. “If it’s not that, you kind of have to wrap your head around, well, what is it?”  To ask what precisely “The Master” is about misses the point that Mr. Anderson’s movies always contain multitudes. If his early films, like “Boogie Nights” (1997) and “Magnolia” (1999), were maximalist demonstrations of youthful prowess, committed to testing how much a film can hold and how extreme its emotional temperature can get, his mature works have increasingly felt like feats of concentration. “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002) and “There Will Be Blood” (2007) are both interior epics, colossal films that seem to take place inside someone’s skull.  “The Master” one-ups its predecessors by doubling the head space, creating a fluid mental landscape for the psychic duel between the Master and Freddie. As large as its themes may be, Mr. Anderson said he always thought of the film as a chamber drama. “In my head there was nothing epic or grand about it,” he said. “Everything about it was saying, ‘Make it smaller.’ ”  Everything about “The Master” seems distilled, from the eccentric, elliptical compression of the storytelling to the atypical combination of the large 65-millimeter film format and the tightly boxed-in compositions. Especially when seen projected in 70 millimeter, the fragmentary scenes and the unusually crisp, saturated image can produce, as Mr. Anderson put it, “that hyperrealistic thing that happens sometimes when you dream.”  “I hesitate to say ‘dreamlike’ — that feels like a code word” for nonsense, he added with a laugh, using a cruder term. “But all the stuff Master’s selling about closing your eyes and being able to relive things: it got inside me, certainly. And using lenses that are 40, 50 years old. The voodooist and hippie in me feels like those things get into the film.”
âThe Master,â according to its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, is a relationship film set in the context of movements like Scientology.