Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice will have its official world premiere at the New York film festival. Based on the book by Thomas Pynchon and starring Joaquin Phoenix as a pot-smoking PI in 70s California, Anderson's seventh feature will screen on 4 October at the festival's centrepiece gala.
Inherent Vice joins David Fincher's murder mystery Gone Girl in New York, showing off the event's muscle in the scrap between festivals to lay claim to the world premieres of likely Oscar contenders. In recent years the festival has hosted the first showing of Ang Lee's Life of Pi, Spike Jonze's Her and Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips, all of which went on to win Oscars.
The New York launch of the two high-profile films suggests a knock-on effect from the Toronto film festival's decision to stop films screened at the overlapping Telluride and Venice film festivals from playing during its opening weekend. Starting this year Toronto will not play any films that have had previous public screenings in its first few days.
By launching in New York, Anderson and Fincher retain the opportunity to screen their film at Telluride a month earlier. The Colorado festival is a strong springboard for launching an Oscar winner. It played host to the first screenings of Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, which won the best-picture Oscar in March this year. Anderson's previous film, The Master, which also starred Phoenix, launched at the Venice film festival in 2012. Despite multiple nominations, it failed to win an Oscar.
Inherent Vice is the story of drug-addled Larry "Doc" Sportello, a private detective who gets pulled into a murder investigation after taking on a case from an ex-girlfriend. Anderson's cast also includes Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson. Pynchon's book, which mixes real-life elements (such as the arrest and trial of the Manson Family) into the fiction, was adapted by Anderson.
The 52nd New York film festival runs from 26 September to 12 October.
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