First-Ever Oscar Winner for Best Casting Cassandra Kulukundis Talks Making 10 Movies with Paul Thomas Anderson

The Oscar winner for "One Battle After Another" said that working on "Phantom Thread" "cannot remotely be compared" to the experience on other films.

In an Oscar night that had potential for a lot of history, some legit history was made when the Academy Awards gave its first-ever Best Casting Oscar to “One Battle After Another” casting director Cassandra Kulukundis.

For Kulukundis and director Paul Thomas Anderson, who also took home an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, this is their tenth film together, and Kulukundis speaking backstage in the Oscars press room shared the surreal experience of having them each win after such a long history together. “We grew up watching movies and we grew up making movies together, and that’s why this night is insane,” Kulukundis said.

She added that each film has been its own unique experience with its own unique challenges.

“The collaboration changes on every movie because it depends on what we’re doing. ‘Phantom Thread’ cannot be remotely compared to ‘Magnolia‘ or ‘Boogie Nights,” Kulukundis said. “It’s just wild, and I feel like ‘One Battle’ in a lot of ways combined all of that. Everything that we’ve ever thought, said, seen together. It’s number 10, and it all makes sense. We’re full circle here.”

One of the unique challenges of any Anderson film is that he loves to work with non-trained actors alongside A-listers. Kulukundis said working with Anderson to find these people, be they soldiers or skateboarders hanging off a moving car driven by Benicio del Toro, lends a degree of “authenticity” to each film and “keeps everyone on their toes.”

What’s more, in her acceptance speech she described working on an Anderson movie as like being put into the “PTA Witness Protection Program,” in which you “literally don’t talk to your friends and your family unless they have somebody that’s right for the movie.”

“We don’t really know what’s going to come out of the real people’s mouths…We love real actors as well. You know, the ones who have trained, so we try to just keep it mixed because that’s what life is, isn’t it,” she said.

That was true of both of the stars of the film in Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, the latter making her feature film debut. Kulukundis said she read with dozens of women for the role of Perfidia Beverly Hills but saw Taylor as a “fighter,” while Infiniti was something of the opposite, coming across as “so demure and polite and fresh and so new and so innocent,” and she was in awe of how she too became a fighter on screen.

“She found it. She worked within herself,” Kulukundis said. “She found things that she didn’t even know she had and now she’s a shooting star.”