On a clear, crisp Sunday morning, Paul Thomas Anderson is driving me around Tarzana, his home turf. Built on the site of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ranch, Tarzana is eclectically nondescript, like all the low-rise suburban enclaves that dot the San Fernando Valley. On Ventura Boulevard, where we stop to pick up some overpriced fruit drinks at a gym, the architecture is a do-your-own-thing mishmash that refuses to add up to a Style. Anderson bemoans the eyesores, but he’s a born-and-bred Valley boy. “It’s where I’m most comfortable in my own skin,” he says. He tried living on the other side of the hill for a year, in a Spanish home in Los Feliz, east of Hollywood. “It was a great house, but I said to myself, ‘I’ve gotta get out of here.’ I didn’t feel like I belonged,” he says. “I had to get back to the Valley.”

There are filmmakers whose work is inextricably linked with a locale—Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese are inseparable from New York, Nebraska is owned by Alexander Payne, Federico Fellini transformed our vision of Rome. Los Angeles, of course, has been the backdrop of thousands of movies since the silent era. We think we know it, but it takes an artist to help us see it anew. In such films as Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love—all set in his beloved Valley—and in his latest, Inherent Vice, set in L.A.’s South Bay, Anderson leads us down side streets we’ve never taken, arriving at destinations where we’ve never been.

Anderson, 44, lives atop a hill in a sprawling 1940 ranch-style home with Maya Rudolph and their four kids, but before we head up there, he wants to show me the former home of one of his idols. John Huston, whose The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of his favorite films, had an estate just a stone’s throw from where Anderson now lives. A passionate cinephile who always keeps an old movie running on TCM in his office, he knows that Huston shot The Red Badge of Courage in the nearby hills.

There are extravagant views of the Santa Monica Mountains from the windows of Anderson’s home: elms and jacaranda and palm trees in the distance, the lush foliage camouflaging hillside homes. With a little squinting you could easily imagine you’re living in the country. Yet just a few miles below is Magnolia Boulevard, which bisects the San Fernando Valley from Encino, to the west, all the way east to Burbank, home of Warner Bros. and Disney studios. It was this quintessential Valley thoroughfare that gave its name to his next movie.

Magnolia was his shoot-the-moon magnum opus, a teeming three-hour epic that follows the intersecting lives of nine lost Valley souls. Like almost all his movies, it was about, among many other things, fathers and sons, and it was made in the aftermath of the death of his own father, Ernie Anderson. Ernie was a voice-over artist who had once, under the name Ghoulardi, hosted a popular late-night horror-movie show on Cleveland TV. In Magnolia, aspects of his father are parceled out between two characters, one played by Jason Robards, the other by Philip Baker Hall. One is a rich TV producer, the other the host of a TV quiz show. Both are philanderers. Both are dying of cancer. Robards’ trophy wife, played by Julianne Moore, overdoses on prescription drugs and is found unconscious in her car by a little boy—an incident taken from Anderson’s life. “It was the tragic story of a wife my father had late in his life,” he says.

Anderson remembers the period when he was writing the script as both thrilling and chaotic. “I’d just had this great success,” he says. “It was the first time I’d had any money and I rented a house on Laurel Pass. I was coming out of one relationship and starting a new one. All that tragedy was coming out [in the script].” Magnolia is overwrought, exhausting, and magnificent, rising to a biblical rain of frogs that coats the Valley streets—and is never explained. Every character is damaged, from Tom Cruise’s preening, sexist motivational speaker to Melora Walters’ self-loathing coke addict, and most of them are capable of inflicting damage. Yet their creator doesn’t judge them. These emotionally crippled Californians want to transcend their personal histories. But as a line at the heart of Magnolia, and perhaps all his movies, observes: “We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.”

Anderson vowed that his follow-up—the third in an unintended Valley trilogy—would be no longer than a tight 90 minutes. Punch-Drunk Love, largely shot in an industrial section of Chatsworth, was an attempt to lighten up. “Attempt” is the operative word: This unnerving and singular love story, in which a rageaholic Adam Sandler overcomes his demons to fall in love with Emily Watson, unfolds like a bad dream willing itself, kicking and screaming, into a romantic-comedy ending.

There are no sweeping overhead vistas, no gaudy billboards, no palm trees—indeed, precious few establishing shots—in Anderson’s Valley films. These are L.A. movies made by an insider, and for the most part they take place inside. Los Angeles is a city of private fantasies connected by freeways: Its real life takes place behind closed doors. For a place stereotyped as being about flash and surface, it’s never been concerned with presenting a well-groomed face to the world. Building codes are for places protective of their past, and L.A., ever dreaming, doesn’t like to look back. Anderson’s movies instinctively understand this. Filled with anonymous stucco apartments, generic storefronts, and unadorned warehouses, they accept the non-descript, yet manage to make the nondescript unforgettable.

When Europeans turn their cameras on L.A.—think Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point or John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust or Jacques Demy’s Model Shop—their landscapes can’t help but editorialize: often scathingly, sometimes fondly, usually ironically. In Anderson’s movies, the physical city is a given; his gaze peers elsewhere—into L.A.’s messy, aspiring, wounded soul.

But as Boogie Nights suggested—and his non-L.A. movies There Will Be Blood and The Master confirmed—Anderson is an instinctive historian, with an uncanny ability to capture the feel and psychology of the past.

His new movie, Inherent Vice, based on the Thomas Pynchon novel, is set in 1970—the year Anderson was born—in the fictional Gordita Beach, a stand-in for such South Bay surfside enclaves as Manhattan Beach, where much of it was shot. It’s his first L.A. movie not made in the Valley and his first true adaptation: great chunks of dialogue (and there’s loads of convoluted gab) are taken verbatim from Pynchon. A twistedly funny, weed saturated film noir that both apes and sends up classic gumshoe mysteries, Inherent Vice re-creates the after-the-fall L.A. counterculture without using the usual ’60s visual shorthand.

You won’t find any psychedelic freak-outs or Day-Glo VW vans. Though it’s filled with pratfalls and gags, and a level of pot consumption worthy of a Cheech and Chong movie, the comedy floats above a steady undertone of melancholy. Doc Sportello, the reefer-toting private eye played by Joaquin Phoenix, is haunted by his old flame (Katherine Waterston), whose sudden reappearance sets off his labyrinthine journey into the netherworld of the City of Angels. It’s a movie about loss—lost love, lost utopian illusions—set in a city where neighborhoods can vanish overnight, plowed under by rapacious real estate developers.

You also won’t find the coked-up, Scorsesian whip pans and careering camera moves of the Boogie Nights and Magnolia days. The most playful of Anderson’s movies is also the most stationary, his camera moored to the spot or slowly zooming in like a stoner fiercely trying to concentrate on whatever strange object floats into view. Robert Elswit’s cinematography has the slightly degraded, faded quality of an old postcard: We are simultaneously inside the smoggy L.A. past and seeing it through the filter of memory. We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Anderson lives and breathes the movie past. Back at his house in Tarzana, we walk down to the converted garage that is his office, a vast, high-ceilinged space lined with books, DVDs, VCRs, and movie posters. He flips on TCM, the first order of business. Is it just coincidence that the movie that happens to be on is 1954’s archetypal Hollywood-on-Hollywood saga, A Star Is Born? As we talk, his eyes are periodically snared by a glorious Technicolor image, and he stops to point out how it must have been achieved. I’m trying to get him to explain his unusual ability to get so deep inside L.A.’s past and present. He shrugs; he’s not one to analyze his own work, or blow his own horn. Boogie Nights? “It just came naturally, I’d been around it so long,” he says. We start talking about other filmmakers who’ve captured the ethos of a time period. “It’s funny the things you can get right somehow,” he says. “You just know: That makes sense. That feels right.” But now Anderson is not talking about other directors. He bends forward. “The truth is the truth is the truth.” It’s said lightly, almost with embarrassment. To my ears, however, it sounds more like a credo.

Title Photos: Magnolia: © New Line Cinema/Everett Collectio; Boogie Nights: Gillian Lefkowitz; Punch Drunk Love: Bruce Birmelin; Inherent Vice: Wilson Webb