Reference.com

There Will Be Blood

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

There Will Be Blood is a 2007 film directed, written and produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is loosely inspired by Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil! (1927), and 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, namely the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Many Best Actor Awards (BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors' Guild, etc.) went to Daniel Day-Lewis for his performance. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, two of which it won: Best Actor for Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit.

Plot

The story opens in 1898 with prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) accidentally discovering crude oil deposits in one of his silver claims. After having a rock sample tested, which confirms the presence of oil, Plainview begins extraction operations, eventually refining his extraction techniques with self-designed drilling and rigging equipment. He soon earns enough money to build a small drilling company. One of his workers is killed in a work accident, and Plainview takes the man's orphaned child as his own. He begins a much larger enterprise with the boy, whom he names H.W. (Dillon Freasier), as his partner. By 1911 he is one of the most successful oil men in California.

Plainview is approached by a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) who sells him an oil lead located on his 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 without telling Paul's father, Abel (David Willis), of the oil, but Paul's twin brother, Eli (also Paul Dano), knows of the oil and raises the price to $10,000, which he intends to put into the founding of his own church. Plainview pays him $5,000 up front and promises the other $5,000 as a donation to the church.

Plainview leases the drilling rights of surrounding ranches, with the exception of one, owned by Mr. Bandy (Hans Howes), who Plainview brushes off when Bandy demands that Plainview see him personally to discuss his property. With the money from his land, Eli founds his own church, the Church of the Third Revelation, and styles himself as a faith healer.

The hole hits a large oil reservoir, but the well blows out and catches fire. H.W. loses his hearing in the blast. When Eli comes to the derrick to request the money Plainview owes him, Plainview violently attacks him, screaming at him for being unable to heal his son. Humiliated, Eli returns to his father's house, where he beats the older man for selling the family's land at a greatly undervalued price.

A man approaches Plainview claiming to be his half-brother Henry Brands (Kevin J. O'Connor), and tells Plainview that their father is dead. Plainview takes Henry into his confidence, confessing 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 him away to a school for the deaf, and has no contact with him there.

Standard Oil approaches Plainview and offers to buy him out of Little Boston. When Plainview asks what he would do with himself without the Little Boston enterprise, the Standard Oil agent proffers that he should be taking care of his son, and Plainview threatens him with death. Plainview decides to make a deal with Union Oil to build a pipeline to the coast near Santa Barbara. He discovers that the pipeline must be routed through the only property near Little Boston that Plainview does not have leased, Bandy's ranch. Plainview and Henry go to scout out a route to the coastline, stopping by Bandy's farmhouse along the way to meet Bandy's grandson, who says his grandfather is away and would not return for several days. Plainview and Henry continue their horseback survey of the oil pipeline route, confidently pounding down a series of survey stakes from the desert floor of the Southern San Joaquin Valley, through Bandy's ranch, into grassland steppe, up and over the coastal range to the Pacific Ocean.

After arriving at the coast, Henry and Plainview strike a deal with Union Oil on the pipeline construction. Plainview again confides in Henry, but becomes suspicious that Henry is not who he says he is, which he tests by referencing landmarks and events from their hometown in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Camping out on their way back to Little Boston, Plainview wakes Henry up and puts a gun to his head, demanding information about their hometown. Henry admits being an impostor: Plainview's real brother was Henry's friend who died of tuberculosis. Plainview then shoots Henry and buries him in a shallow grave at their camp.

The next morning Plainview is awakened by Bandy, who agrees to lease his property for the pipeline on the condition that Plainview be baptized into the Church of the Third Revelation. In addition to his property being vital to Plainview's oil pipeline, 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 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, and becomes increasingly buried in his work, turning heavily to whiskey. Eli leaves Little Boston on missionary work.

The story jumps to 1927, to the marriage ceremony of H.W. and Mary Sunday. Plainview lives in a large mansion in an ever-drunken fog, and spends his days shooting his possessions with a rifle. H.W. (now played by Russell Harvard) asks his father (through an interpreter) to be released from their partnership so he can form his own oil company in Mexico. Upset, Plainview bluntly tells H.W. that he is in fact not his son, but an orphan found in the middle of the desert - which is why he does not carry any of his (adoptive) father's characteristics. In response, H.W says "I thank God I have none of you in me." He then leaves the room while Plainview calls him a "bastard from a basket" repeatedly.

Some time later, Plainview is visited by Eli in his bowling alley in the cellar of his mansion. Eli now heads a large church and evangelizes on the radio, but has lost his fortune in an economic downturn. He attempts to sell Plainview the rights to drill the Bandy Ranch land, now in Eli's possession. Plainview agrees, but with a condition of his own. He subjects Eli to a humiliating scene, compelling Eli to admit that he is a false prophet, and to denounce God as a superstition, before informing Eli that Plainview has already drained the oil from Bandy's land by his surrounding wells. Plainview mercilessly taunts Eli and attacks him, throwing bowling balls at him and chasing him around the lanes. Finally, Plainview bludgeons Eli to death with a bowling pin. He sits down next to the body, and his butler comes downstairs, calling for him. His final line is "I'm finished!"

Cast

Production

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, "at the end of the day, there [was] not enough of the book to feel like it [was] a proper adaptation." He didn't want to impose any kind of accent on whoever was going to play Plainview as he wanted to keep things simple. He wrote the original screenplay with Daniel Day-Lewis in mind and approached the actor when the script was nearly complete. He had heard that Daniel Day-Lewis liked Punch-Drunk Love, which gave him the confidence to hand him 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 New York Observer, the actor elaborated on what drew him to the project. It was "the understanding that [he] 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 by 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 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 started in June 2006 on a ranch in Marfa, Texas and took three months to shoot. Other location shooting took place in Los Angeles, California. 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. A New York Times Magazine profile on Day-Lewis 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, California, 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). It was shot using Panavision XL 35 mm cameras outfitted primarily with Panavision C series and high-speed anamorphic lenses.

Critical reception

The film received very positive reviews from critics. As of March 5 2008, on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 176 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.”

Top ten lists

The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007.

Soundtrack

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. The film also contains one of the Fratres for violin and piano 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.

Home video

The movie will be released on DVD disc on April 8, 2008. It will be released in a single disc as well as a two disc edition. Despite the recent announcement to stop production on HD DVD, Paramount had announced that the film would be released on a two disc collectors edition format.

Awards and nominations

80th Academy Awards 8 nominations including:

9 nominations including:

2 nominations including:

  • Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Daniel Day-Lewis) - winner
  • Best Motion Picture - Drama (Daniel Lupi, JoAnne Sellar, & P.T. Anderson)

Critics associations

Austin Film Critics Association 5 wins including:

4 wins including:

4 wins including:

2 wins including:

  • Best Actor
  • Best Composer

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 Writer's 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.

References

External links



Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 21:08:04 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation