Terry Gross

The director of Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood talks to Fresh Air's Terry Gross about his new film, The Master, a tense drama with indelible performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams.

Waging Heavy Peace is about his music, raising two sons with special needs, and his own medical conditions, which have included polio, epilepsy and a brain aneurysm.

The Oscar-nominated actress plays the forbidding wife of a cult leader in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. She tells Fresh Air it was an opportunity to play a character type she'd never played before.