“One of the stories in the film comes from Jason Robards, who famously fought in the war, was in the Navy … I worked with him on Magnolia. And he told me the story of coming back. I don’t remember what boat he was on, but he was coming back, and V-J Day was announced, and they’d run out of booze. And they broke into the torpedoes and drank booze [i.e, fuel] out of there. And the way he tells it, he woke up the next morning on the mast of the ship, and an inch either way he would have fallen to his death. And that story just stuck with me as a great story … something to get into the film.” – Paul Thomas Anderson, NPR Interview, 2013