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There Will Be Blood
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There Will Be Blood is a 2007 American drama film directed, written and co-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 wealth during Southern California's oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.
The film received significant critical praise and numerous award nominations and victories.
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Encyclopedia
There Will Be Blood is a 2007 American drama film directed, written and co-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 wealth during Southern California's oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.
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 American Film Institute, the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, 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.
Plot
Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an embittered and self-centered man who begins his path to fortune as a silver prospector out in New Mexico before becoming an oilman, building his first, primitive oil well with a small crew. One of his workers is killed in an accident, and Plainview takes the man's orphaned child (H.W.) as his own; his initial successes allow him to expand his enterprise over the years, and he negotiates for new leases with a sales pitch that plays up his appearance as a family man through H.W. (Dillon Freasier).
One day, Plainview is approached by young Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), who for a reward tells him of an oil source on his family's property in a small town called Little Boston. Plainview and H.W. travel there under the guise of hunting for quail and discover oil seeping to the surface. He thus offers to buy the land from Paul's father Abel (David Willis) to much suspicion from Paul's twin brother Eli (also played by Dano), who quickly establishes Plainview's true interests; he thus demands more money for the deal, but he is brushed aside by Plainview with a much lower offer to his father. Daniel soon begins to lease nearly all the surrounding ranches, and construction begins, allowing the hillside community to flourish from the flow of new wealth. Eli, who is a charismatic preacher and self-proclaimed faith healer, plans an expansion of his "Church of the Third Revelation" in the meanwhile. He thus proposes to bless a newly-built oil derrick at its opening ceremony, but he is suddenly turned down when Plainview decides to bless the well himself. Not long thereafter, a worker is killed by a falling drill bit, and later a head injury suffered from a gas eruption causes H.W. to go deaf — both incidents occurring at the same derrick. When Eli finally demands the money promised to him, Daniel attacks him, mocking his faith and his inability to "heal" H.W. Eli returns home to take his anger out on his father, blaming him for selling the land at a greatly undervalued price.
Daniel is later shocked by the sudden arrival of a stranger (Kevin J. O'Connor) claiming to be his long-lost half-brother, Henry, and he promptly takes him under his wing. The young deaf H.W. sets the cabin on fire in the middle of the night, causing a frustrated Daniel to trick H.W. into getting on a train bound for San Francisco. He shortly goes on to sign a lucrative deal with a large oil company and begins celebrating with Henry, but he realizes something is amiss about him. That same night, Daniel interrogates Henry at gunpoint, who admits he is an impostor: Plainview's real brother, who had died of tuberculosis, was the impostor's friend. An enraged Daniel shoots him and buries his body in response, prior to mourning his real lost sibling.
Daniel is woken abruptly the next morning by William Bandy (Hans Howes), one of the property owners that held out amidst the lease sales held some time ago. Bandy agrees to lease his property for the pipeline, on the condition that Plainview be baptized into Eli's church, hinting that he had witnessed the killing from last night. Plainview consents to Bandy's terms and undergoes a traumatizing initiation under Eli, who coaxes Daniel into admitting he had cheated and abandoned his son. He soon sends for H.W., but he is still unable to communicate with the boy, who is now learning sign language. Eli subsequently leaves Little Boston on missionary work.
More years pass, and an adult H.W. (Russel Harvard) grows to marry his childhood friend Mary, Eli's youngest sister. Through an interpreter he asks his father — now very wealthy and residing in an expensive mansion — to be released from their partnership so that he and Mary can move to Mexico, where he intends to start his own oil company. Daniel immediately disowns him, telling H.W. of his true origins and that he only used him for his business deals, leaving H.W. without guilt when he finally leaves.
The final scene features Eli, now ruined by poor investments lost to the Great Depression, visiting Plainview in his basement bowling alley; he offers to partner up with Daniel in order to drill the oil out from the old Bandy property, but Daniel toys with his desperation, announcing that he has already drained the oil from Bandy's land using the surrounding wells, and that with the help of his brother Paul (who, according to Daniel himself, has since profited greatly from Daniel's reward money), had finally "beaten" him. The drunken Plainview then proceeds to chase and then beat a bewildered Eli to death with one of the bowling pins. His bewildered and onlooking butler appears, to whom a tired Daniel ambiguously declares, "I'm finished!"
Production
Development
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. Homesick, he purchased a copy of Upton Sinclair's Oil! in London and was immediately drawn to the cover illustration of a California oilfield. 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. 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." 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. According to Day-Lewis, simply being asked to do the film was enough to convince him. 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."
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.
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." It took two years to acquire financing for the film.
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." 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.
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. 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." 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.
Filming
Filming started in June 2006 on a ranch in Marfa, Texas and took three months. Other location shooting took place in Los Angeles. Anderson tried to shoot the script in sequence with most of the sets on the ranch. 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. Both Anderson and Day-Lewis deny this claim, 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." 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, but he researched the time period that the film is set in as well as evangelical preachers. Three weeks of scenes with Sunday and Plainview had to be re-shot with Dano instead of Kel O'Neill. 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.
Anderson dedicated the film to Robert Altman, who died while Anderson was editing it.
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.
Music
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. 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. 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. 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.
In December 2008, Greenwood's score was nominated for a Grammy in the category of "Best Score Soundtrack Album For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media" for the 51st Grammy Awards.
Release
Box Office
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.
But Paramount Vantage spent so much money on the film's Oscar campaign that it just barely broke even.
Critical reception
The film received very positive reviews from critics. As of February 8, 2009, on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 195 reviews. On Metacritic, the film has an average score of 92 out of 100, based on 39 reviews.
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." 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." 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." 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." Richard Schickel in Time magazine praised There Will Be Blood as "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made." Critic Tom Charity, writing about CNN's ten-best films list, calls the film the only "flat-out masterpiece" of 2007.
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.”
The Times chief film critic, James Christopher, published a list in April 2008 of the Top 100 films of all time, placing There Will Be Blood at #2, behind Casablanca.
However some critics were more negative. In particular, Armond White of the New York Press has taken numerous opportunities to criticize the film. In his original review of There Will Be Blood, White 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". In 2008, White would explicitly reference There Will Be Blood as an example of “unpleasurable” film-making in his reviews of at least five other films. In 2009, White criticized the "toothless Robert Altman gumming" of director Paul Thomas Anderson, adding that Blood was a "symptom of everything wrong with the American experience." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle shot out at the film's 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." Several months after his initial review of the film, LaSalle reiterated that while he felt it was "clear" that There Will Be Blood was not a masterpiece, he wondered if its "style, an approach, an attitude... might become important in the future."
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."
Top ten lists
The film was on the American Film Institute's 10 Movies of the Year; AFI's jury said:
- There Will Be Blood is bravura filmmaking by one of American film's modern masters. Paul Thomas Anderson's epic poem of savagery, optimism and obsession is a true meditation on America. The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal. In a career defined by transcendent performances, Daniel Day-Lewis creates a character so rich and so towering, that "Daniel Plainview" will haunt the history of film for generations to come.
The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007.
- 1st – Ethar Alter, Giant Magazine
- 1st – Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle
- 1st – Tom Charity, CNN
- 1st – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
- 1st – David Fear, Time Out New York
- 1st – Scott Foundas, LA Weekly
- 1st – Stephen Holden, The New York Times
- 1st – Tod Hill, Staten Island Advance
- 1st – Glenn Kenny, Premiere
- 1st – Craig Outhier, Orange County Register
- 1st – Keith Phipps, The A.V. Club
- 1st – Ray Pride, Salon.com
- 1st – Mike Russell, The Oregonian
- 1st – Hank Sartin, Chicago Reader
- 1st – Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle
- 1st – Mark Slutsky, Montreal Mirror
- 1st – Nick Schager, Slant Magazine
- 1st – Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
- 1st – Jan Stuart, Newsday
- 1st – Ella Taylor, LA Weekly
- 2nd – David Ansen, Newsweek
- 2nd – Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club
- 2nd – Rene Rodriguez, The Miami Herald
- 2nd – Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club
- 3rd – A.O. Scott, The New York Times (tied with Sweeney Todd)
- 3rd – Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
- 3rd – Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
- 4th – Desson Thomson, The Washington Post
- 4th – Ty Burr, The Boston Globe
- 5th – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
- 5th – Shawn Levy, The Oregonian
- 6th – Christy Lemire, Associated Press
- 6th - Adam Kempenaar, Filmspotting
- 6th – Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
- 7th – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
- 9th – Claudia Puig, USA Today
- 9th – Richard Schickel, TIME magazine
- 10th – Lou Lumenick, New York Post
- Top 10 (listed alphabetically, not ranked) – Dana Stevens, Slate
Home video
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. Anderson has refused to record a commentary for the film. An 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.
Awards and nominations
80th Academy Awards
8 nominations including:
61st British Academy Film Awards
9 nominations including:
65th Golden Globe Awards
2 nominations including:
Critics associations
Austin Film Critics Association
5 wins including:
- Best Picture
- Best Actor
- Best Director
- Best Cinematography
- Best Original Score
National Society of Film Critics
4 wins including:
- Best Picture
- Best Director
- Best Actor
- Best Cinematography
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
4 wins including:
- Best Picture
- Best Director
- Best Actor
- Best Production Design
Broadcast Film Critics Association
2 wins including:
Guild awards
Directors Guild of America
The Directors Guild of America nominated PT Anderson for the DGA Award.
Screen Actors Guild
Daniel Day-Lewis won Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the 14th Screen Actors Guild Awards held in 2008.
Writers Guild of America
Anderson was also nominated by the Writers Guild of America for "Best Adapted Screenplay".
Producers Guild of America
The film also garnered a "Producer of the Year Award" nomination from the Producers Guild of America.
American Society of Cinematographers
Director of photography Robert Elswit won the American Society of Cinematographers' award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography.
The American Film Institute's Top 10
The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year for 2007.
External links
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