Paul Thomas Anderson and Joaquin Phoenix set for "Inherent Vice"

"I asked him to be in Boogie Nights, I asked him to be in There Will Be Blood, I've wanted to work with him for the longest time," he said. Discussing Phoenix's gifts as a performer, he said, "There's so much energy around him, he's like dynamite … he's thrilling, sometimes a bit maddening."

It’s not every actor that can steal a scene right out from under Philip Seymour Hoffman’s nose, but in The Master, Joaquin Phoenix did just that. No wonder, then, that director Paul Thomas Anderson is eager to reunite with him on his next movie. Phoenix is now in talks to join Anderson’s Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, replacing long-attached star Robert Downey Jr.

Joaquin Phoenix and Paul Thomas Anderson are set to reunite on Inherent Vice, an adaptation of a noirish Los Angeles-set novel by American author Thomas Pynchon. The pair collaborated to rousing effect on The Master, Anderson's acclaimed tale of a cult leader and his muse. Phoenix is currently Oscar-nominated for his role in the film.

Published in 2009, Inherent Vice tells the tale of Larry "Doc" Sportello, a pot-smoking detective who is hired to investigate a kidnap plot. The plot plays out a in turbulent late-60s LA inhabited by Manson family acolytes and "counter-subversive" agents at the LAPD. The New Yorker described the book as "a novel in which paranoia is less a political or metaphysical state than a by-product of smoking too much weed".

The film, written and directed by Anderson

LINK

LINK /