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| There Will Be Blood | |
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 Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Paul Thomas Anderson |
| Produced by | Paul Thomas Anderson Daniel Lupi Joanne Sellar Scott Rudin (Executive Producer) |
| Written by | Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson Novel: Upton Sinclair |
| Starring | Daniel Day-Lewis Paul Dano Dillon Freasier |
| Music by | Jonny Greenwood |
| Cinematography | Robert Elswit |
| Editing by | Dylan Tichenor |
| Distributed by | United States: Paramount Vantage International: Miramax Films |
| Release date(s) | December 26, 2007 |
| Running time | 158 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $25 million |
| Gross revenue | $75,700,000 |
| Official website | |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
There Will Be Blood is a 2007 film directed, written and produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! (1927). It tells the story of a silver-miner-turned-oil-man on a ruthless quest for power during Southern California's oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano. Shooting began in mid-May 2006 in New Mexico and Marfa, Texas, with principal photography wrapping August 24, 2006. The first public screening was on September 29, 2007, at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. The film was released on December 26 2007, in New York and Los Angeles, and then opened in a limited number of theaters in selected markets. It opened in wide release January 25, 2008.
The film received significant critical praise and numerous award nominations and victories. It appeared on many critics' "top ten" lists for the year, notably the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Day-Lewis won Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors' Guild, NYFCC, and IFTA Best Actor awards for his performance. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning Best Actor for Day-Lewis, and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit.
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The story opens in 1898 with prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) toiling as a silver prospector in a wilderness mine. After escaping near disaster, Plainview literally drags himself and a fragment of ore back to town for assay. Four years later, Plainview is shown leading a team of men working on a primitive oil well. One of his workers is killed in an accident, and Plainview takes the man's orphaned child as his own. His initial successes allow him to expand his enterprise, and he negotiates for new leases with a sales pitch that features his adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), as his partner.
Plainview is approached by young Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) who, in exchange for $500, alerts Plainview to the presence of oil on the Sunday family's property in Little Boston, California. Plainview and H.W. travel there under the guise of hunting quail and discover oil seeping to the surface. Plainview then attempts to buy the property for a pittance from Paul's father Abel (David Willis), but is challenged by Paul's twin brother Eli (also played by Paul Dano), a charismatic preacher at the local church, who suspects the true reason for Plainview's interest. Eli asks Plainview to pledge a donation of $10,000 to the church as a condition for purchasing the land, but Plainview promises him $5,000, conditional on the later success of the drilling.
Plainview leases the surrounding ranches, with the exception of one, owned by an old man named William Bandy (Hans Howes), whom Plainview brushes off when Bandy demands that Plainview see him personally. Expecting the $5,000 donation, Eli plans an expansion of his Church of the Third Revelation, where he styles himself as a faith healer. Plainview constructs a large oil derrick, initially accepting Eli's request to bless the rig before drilling begins. At a public ceremony held when the drilling is started, Plainview blatantly snubs Eli and says a short blessing himself.
Not long thereafter, a worker is killed by a falling drill bit at the derrick. Things grow worse the next day when an explosion erupts from the derrick, causing the nearby H.W. to lose his hearing. Eli irks Daniel by repeatedly telling him that these disasters wouldn't have happened had he been allowed to bless the derrick. When Eli requests the money Plainview owes him, Plainview violently attacks him, berating him for being unable to heal his son. Humiliated, Eli returns home, where he attacks his father for selling the family's land at a greatly undervalued price.
A man approaches Plainview claiming to be his half-brother Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor). Taking Henry into his confidence, Plainview confesses his general hatred of people and his need to win out over all other competition. That night, H.W. attempts to burn the bed in which Henry is sleeping. Plainview sends H.W. away to a boarding school, presumably one for the deaf.
Henry and Daniel set out to survey and map a potential route for an oil pipeline, and later close a deal with Union Oil. Plainview eventually becomes suspicious that Henry is not who he says he is, and at gunpoint Henry admits being an impostor: Plainview's real brother was Henry's friend, who he claims died of tuberculosis. Plainview shoots and buries Henry.
The next morning Plainview is awakened by Mr. Bandy, who agrees to lease his property to Plainview on the condition that Plainview be baptized into the Church of the Third Revelation. Plainview is initially reluctant; however Bandy's leverage is his knowledge of Plainview's murder of Henry. Plainview, who has no interest in religion, agrees, and suffers a humiliating initiation in the church at the hands of Eli. Plainview sends for H.W., but is still unable to communicate with the boy, who is now learning sign language. Eli leaves Little Boston on missionary work.
The story jumps to 1927. H.W. (now played by Russell Harvard) has now married Eli's sister, Mary. H.W. asks his father (through an interpreter) to be released from their partnership so he and Mary can move to Mexico in order to found his own oil company. Feeling betrayed, Plainview disowns H.W., telling him that he is an orphan (calling him a "bastard from a basket") and that he adopted him so he could use him as an asset to acquire leases. Before he leaves H.W. tells Daniel "I thank God I have none of you in me".
In the final scene of the film Eli visits Plainview in his mansion to beg for money after making poor investments. He attempts to persuade Plainview to partner with him to drill on the Bandy Ranch, upon which Daniel had never placed an oil derrick. Before agreeing, Plainview forces Eli to admit he is a false prophet and assert that "God is a superstition," likely payback for Eli's forcing religious exhortations from Plainview during his baptism to the church. Plainview then informs Eli that he has already drained the oil from Bandy's land with his surrounding wells. He taunts Eli as he explains the situation, with such analogies as "I drink your milkshake," and "I drink your water. Everyday, I drink the blood of lamb from Bandy's tract," eventually attacking him. The confrontation escalates until Plainview beats him to death with a bowling pin. Plainview's butler enters the room and, upon seeing Plainview sitting exhausted beside the corpse of Eli, calls out to him; Plainview answers only with, "I'm finished."
Originally, Paul Thomas Anderson had been working on a screenplay about two fighting families. He struggled with the script and soon realized it just was not working.[1] Homesick, he purchased a copy of Upton Sinclair's Oil! in London and was immediately drawn to the cover illustration of a California oilfield.[2] As he read, Anderson became even more fascinated with the novel and adapted the first 150 pages to a screenplay. He began to get a real sense of where his script was going after making many trips to museums dedicated to early oilmen in Bakersfield.[3] He changed the title from Oil! to There Will Be Blood because, "there's not enough of the book... to feel like it's a proper adaptation."[1] He didn't want to impose any kind of accent on whoever was going to play Plainview as he wanted to keep things simple.[1] He wrote the original screenplay with Daniel Day-Lewis in mind and approached the actor when the script was nearly complete. Anderson had heard that Daniel Day-Lewis liked his earlier film Punch-Drunk Love, which gave him the confidence to hand Day-Lewis a copy of the incomplete script.[4] According to Day-Lewis, simply being asked to do the film was enough to convince him.[5] In an interview with the The New York Observer, the actor elaborated on what drew him to the project. It was "the understanding that [Anderson] had already entered into that world. [He] wasn't observing it - [he'd] entered into it - and indeed [he'd] populated it with characters who [he] felt had lives of their own."[6] The line in the final scene, "I drink your milkshake!", is paraphrased from a quote by New Mexico Senator Albert Fall speaking before a Congressional investigation into the 1920s oil-related Teapot Dome scandal. Anderson was enamored of the use of the term "milkshake" to explain the complicated technical process of oil drainage to senators.[7]
According to JoAnne Sellar, one of the film's producers, it was a hard film to finance because, "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture."[2] It took two years to acquire financing for the film.[3]
For the role of Plainview's son, Anderson looked at people in Los Angeles and New York City, but he realized that they needed someone from Texas who knew how to shoot shotguns and "live in that world."[1] The filmmakers asked around at a school and the principal recommended Dillon Freasier. They did not have him read any scenes and instead talked to him, realizing that he was the perfect person for the role.[1]
To start building his character, Day-Lewis started with the voice. Anderson sent him recordings from the late 19th century to 1927 and a copy of 1948 film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, including documentaries on its director, John Huston, an important influence on Anderson's film.[2] According to Anderson, he was inspired by the fact that Sierra Madre is "about greed and ambition and paranoia and looking at the worst parts of yourself."[3] While writing the script, he would put the film on before he went to bed at night. To research for the role, Day-Lewis read letters from laborers and studied photographs from the time period. He also read up on oil tycoon Edward Doheny upon whom Sinclair's book is loosely based.[8]
Filming started in June 2006 on a ranch in Marfa, Texas[3] and took three months to shoot.[2] Other location shooting took place in Los Angeles. Anderson tried to shoot the script in sequence with most of the sets on the ranch.[3] Two weeks into the 60-day shoot, Anderson replaced the actor playing Eli Sunday with Paul Dano, who had originally only been cast in the much smaller role of Paul Sunday, the brother who tipped off Plainview about the oil on the Sunday ranch. A profile of Day-Lewis in The New York Times Magazine suggested that the original actor (Kel O'Neill) had been intimidated by Day-Lewis's intensity and habit of staying in character on and off the set.[3][8] Both Anderson and Day-Lewis deny this claim,[3][8] and Day-Lewis stated, "I absolutely don't believe that it was because he was intimidated by me. I happen to believe that — and I hope I'm right."[9] Anderson first saw Dano in The Ballad of Jack and Rose and thought that he would be perfect to play Paul Sunday, a role he originally envisioned to be a 12 or 13-year-old boy. Dano only had four days to prepare for the much larger role of Eli Sunday,[10] but he researched the time period that the film is set in as well as evangelical preachers.[1] Three weeks of scenes with Sunday and Plainview had to be re-shot with Dano instead of Kel O'Neill.[3] The interior mansion scenes were filmed at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, the former real-life home of Edward Doheny Jr., a gift from his father Edward Doheny. Scenes filmed at Greystone involved the careful renovation of the basement's two lane bowling alley.[11]
Anderson dedicated the film to Robert Altman, who died while Anderson was editing it.[1]
This film was the second co-production of Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films to be released in as many months, after No Country for Old Men (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture).
There Will Be Blood was shot using Panavision XL 35 mm cameras outfitted primarily with Panavision C series and high-speed anamorphic lenses.[12]
The first public screening of There Will Be Blood was on September 29, 2007, at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. The film was released on December 26, 2007, in New York and Los Angeles where it grossed US$190,739 on its opening weekend. The film then opened in 885 theaters in selected markets on January 25, 2008, grossing $4.8 million on its opening weekend. The film went on to make $40.1 million in North America and $32.7 million in the rest of the world, with a worldwide total of $72.9 million, well above its $25 million budget.[13]
The film received very positive reviews from critics. As of May 12, 2008, on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 182 reviews.[14] On Metacritic, the film has an average score of 92 out of 100, based on 39 reviews.[15]
Andrew Sarris called the film "an impressive achievement in its confident expertness in rendering the simulated realities of a bygone time and place, largely with an inspired use of regional amateur actors and extras with all the right moves and sounds."[16] In Premiere magazine, Glenn Kenny praised Day-Lewis's performance: "Once his Plainview takes wing, the relentless focus of the performance makes the character unique."[17] Manohla Dargis wrote, in her review for the New York Times, "the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic."[18] Esquire magazine also praised Day-Lewis's performance: "what’s most fun, albeit in a frightening way, is watching this greedmeister become more and more unhinged as he locks horns with Eli Sunday...both Anderson and Day-Lewis go for broke. But it’s a pleasure to be reminded, if only once every four years, that subtlety can be overrated."[19] Richard Schickel in Time magazine praised There Will Be Blood as "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made."[20] Critic Tom Charity, writing about CNN's ten-best films list, calls the film the only "flat-out masterpiece" of 2007.[21]
Schickel also named the film one of the Top 10 Movies of 2007, ranking it at #9, calling Daniel Day Lewis’ performance “astonishing”, and calling the film “a mesmerizing meditation on the American spirit in all its maddening ambiguities: mean and noble, angry and secretive, hypocritical and more than a little insane in its aspirations.”[22]
The Times chief film critic, James Christopher, in a list of the Top 100 films of all time released in April 2008, listed the film #2, behind Casablanca. [23]
However some critics were more negative. Armond White of the New York Press expressed that the "musical wit disguises the story’s incoherence—its meaningless siblings, silences and opportunistic sadism", feeling that the film's finale was "confusing and slapdash" and "comes across as just secular-progressive prejudice and loopy, unconvincing drama".[24] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle shot out at the films praises by saying "there should be no need to pretend 'There Will Be Blood' is a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make it one."[25] Although Carla Meyer, of the Sacramento Bee, gave the film three and a half out of four stars, calling it a "masterpiece", she said that the final confrontation between Daniel and Eli marked when There Will Be Blood "stops being a masterpiece and becomes a really good movie. What was grand becomes petty, then overwrought."[26] David Bacon of Z Magazine believed the movie betrayed Upton Sinclair's more radical socialist message present in the book Oil![27]
The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007.[28][29]
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The title There Will Be Blood is taken from Exodus – the second book of the Old Testament –, where the Nile turns into blood, which is the first of the Ten Biblical Plagues:
| “ | The Lord says, "Here is how you will know that I am the Lord. I will strike the water of the Nile River with the staff that is in my hand. The river will turn into blood. The fish in the river will die. The river will stink. The Egyptians will not be able to drink its water."
The Lord said to Moses, "Tell Aaron, 'Get your staff. Reach your hand out over the waters of Egypt. The streams, waterways, ponds and all of the lakes will turn into blood. There will be blood everywhere in Egypt. It will even be in the wooden buckets and stone jars.'"[32] |
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Exodus has also been a key theme of Anderson's previous movie Magnolia, which referenced the second plague (Frogs).
Anderson had been a fan of Radiohead's music and was impressed with Jonny Greenwood's scoring of the film Bodysong. While writing the script for There Will Be Blood, Anderson heard Greenwood's orchestral piece Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which prompted him to ask Greenwood to work with him. After initially agreeing to score the film, Greenwood had doubts and thought about backing out, but Anderson's reassurance and enthusiasm for the film convinced the musician to stick with the project.[33][34] Anderson gave Greenwood a copy of the film and three weeks later he came back with two hours of music recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London.[1] Concerning his approach to composing the soundtrack, Greenwood said to Entertainment Weekly:
I think it was about not necessarily just making period music, which very traditionally you would do. But because they were traditional orchestral sounds, I suppose that's what we hoped was a little unsettling, even though you know all the sounds you're hearing are coming from very old technology. You can just do things with the classical orchestra that do unsettle you, that are sort of slightly wrong, that have some kind of undercurrent that's slightly sinister. [35]
The film also contains the cello and piano transcription of Fratres by Arvo Pärt, and the third movement from Brahms's Violin Concerto. The recording is by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Berlin Philharmonic directed by Herbert von Karajan.
The movie was released on DVD on April 8, 2008. It was released with one and two disc editions, both are packaged in a cardboard case. It has been said that Anderson has refused to record a commentary for the film.[36] A HD DVD release was confirmed, but later canceled due to the death of the format. A Blu-Ray edition was released on June 3, 2008.
8 nominations[37] including:
9 nominations[38] including:
2 nominations[39] including:
5 wins including:[40]
4 wins including:[41]
4 wins including:[42]
2 wins including:[43]
The Directors Guild of America nominated PT Anderson for the DGA Award.[44]
Daniel Day-Lewis won Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the 14th Screen Actors Guild Awards held in 2008.[45]
Anderson was also nominated by the Writers Guild of America for "Best Adapted Screenplay".
The film also garnered a "Producer of the Year Award" nomination from the Producers Guild of America.
Director of photography Robert Elswit won the American Society of Cinematographers' award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography.
The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year for 2007.[46]
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