12 photos have arrived from director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest drama, The Master, which is already being heralded by critics as a modern masterpiece and the film to beat at this year's Oscars. The story follows a man (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who creates a questionable new religion that soon gains quite a following. Check out these latest "low-fi" images, followed by comments from Philip Seymour Hoffman and producer JoAnne Sellar, who both downplay the movie's connection to L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology.

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Attempting to play down the presumed fact that The Master is a thinly veiled biopic about L. Ron Hubbard and his creation of Scientology, Philip Seymour Hoffman made the following statement.

"It's not the L. Ron Hubbard story. [Scientology] was one of the bigger movements at the time, but there were a lot of movements at that time. There's nothing about how I'm behaving or talking that echoes [Hubbard]. I thought of a lot of other bigger-than-life personalities, charismatic people like Orson Welles. Joaquin Phoenix 's character is like a beaten dog. No matter where he goes, [Quell] gets into severe trouble. And somehow I'm able to deal with him."

This is what producer JoAnne Sellar had to say on the subject.

"People are going to have to draw their own conclusions to that aspect of the movie. Paul Thomas Anderson is interested in how veterans came back from World War II. They were these lost souls who were uncertain about their future."