Scientologists have stepped up their campaign against Paul Thomas Anderson's controversial new film The Master in the wake of the film's critically acclaimed debuts at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, a US newspaper is alleging. The New York Post says the Oscar-winning producer Harvey Weinstein, who runs the film's distributor The Weinstein Company with his brother Bob, has increased his personal security.
The Master, which has long been billed as Paul Thomas Anderson's "new film about Scientology" has been the talking point of the autumn festival season so far. The film-maker himself has admitted Phillip Seymour Hoffman's snake-like charmer, the nascent cult leader Lancaster Dodd, is partly based on Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, but has also argued that his film does not deal with the organisation at a wider level. The film, which also stars Joaquin Phoenix as a drifter sailor who becomes one of Dodd's first followers, won the Silver Lion award for best direction and the Volpi Cup prize for best acting (split between Hoffman and Phoenix) at Venice on Saturday. It would reportedly have also taken the top Golden Lion prize for best film but for a technicality.
The Post's Page Six column also says that Scientologist leaders are planning a publicity drive to undermine the film when it is released in the US on Friday. It reports the words of "behind-the-scenes sources" but does not name or quote them directly. Other members of The Master's crew have also added extra security, the newspaper says.
During a press conference at Venice prior to The Master's screening, Anderson said: "This is a character that I created based on L Ron Hubbard, there's a lot of similarities to the early days of Dianetics … I don't know a hell of a lot about Scientology today but I know about the beginnings of that movement and it inspired me to use it as a backdrop for these characters. I can't be any more unambiguous than that.
"I think we were just trying to tell a love story between these two guys. We had a lot of scenes that weren't about that and we took them out."
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw handed Anderson's film a five-star review at Venice, calling it "an arresting and utterly absorbing psychological drama of marginal lives, an emotional history of charlatanism and gimcrack philosophy, a world of snakeoil truth salesmen offering self-medication of the spirit, all set in a postwar America realised with superb flair and confidence, utterly without cliche".
Xan Brooks, writing for the Observer, also gave the film five stars and described it as a "ravishing, unashamedly old-school American classic".