Cigarettes & Coffee

Cigarettes & Coffee (1993) is a short film you can watch online on iFILM — Paul Thomas Anderson's earliest directorial work, made for $20,000 and premiered at Sundance. Twenty-four minutes, a desert diner, five strangers, one twenty-dollar bill threading their lives together.

Philip Baker Hall headlines the cast, two years before Anderson cast him again in Hard Eight. The film is a blueprint: every instinct Anderson would later stretch across Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood is already here, compressed into a single location and a quietly tense chain of coincidences. Essential viewing for anyone tracing how an American auteur finds his voice. Stream Cigarettes & Coffee (1993) online on iFILM.