There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood
File:There will be blood.jpg Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Paul Thomas Anderson
Written by	Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson Novel: Upton Sinclair
Produced by	Paul Thomas Anderson Daniel Lupi Joanne Sellar Scott Rudin (Executive Producer)
Starring	Daniel Day-Lewis Paul Dano Dillon Freasier
Cinematography	Robert Elswit
Edited by	Dylan Tichenor
Music by	Jonny Greenwood
Distributed by	United States: Paramount Vantage International: Miramax Films
Release date	December 26, 2007
Running time	158 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$25 million
Box office	$75,700,000

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 California before becoming an oilman, building his first (albeit primitive) oil well with a small crew. 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 over the years, and he negotiates for new leases with a sales pitch that plays up sympathy for his adopted son, 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 lesser 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" his son. 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. Daniel, angered and frustrated at being forced to take care of a useless son whom he cannot communicate with or control, tricks H.W. into getting on a train and sends him off to 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 was fake-Henry's friend, who had since died of tuberculosis. 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. that he found him in a basket in the desert 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 has since profited greatly from Daniel's reward money), he had finally "beaten" him. The drunken Plainview then proceeds to chase, and then bash a heartbroken Eli to death. His bewildered and onlooking butler appears, to whom a tired Daniel says, "I'm finished."

Production

Development

Paul Thomas Anderson with Daniel Day-Lewis in New York, December 2007

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

Further information: There Will Be Blood (album)

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. [1][2]

Critical reception

The film received very positive reviews from critics. As of May 12, 2008, 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. 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". 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." 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:

• Best Picture (Daniel Lupi, JoAnne Sellar, & Paul Thomas Anderson)
• Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson)
• Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis) - Winner
• Best Adapted Screenplay (Paul Thomas Anderson)
• Best Art Direction (Jack Fisk and Jim Erickson)
• Best Cinematography (Robert Elswit) - Winner
• Best Film Editing (Dylan Tichenor)
• Best Sound Editing (Matthew Wood)

61st British Academy Film Awards

9 nominations including:

• Best Leading Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis) - Winner
• Best Film (Daniel Lupi, JoAnne Sellar, & Paul Thomas Anderson)
• Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson)
• Best Supporting Actor (Paul Dano)
• Best Music (Jonny Greenwood)
• Best Screenplay - Adapted (Paul Thomas Anderson)
• Best Production Design (Jack Fisk and Jim Erickson)
• Best Cinematography (Robert Elswit)
• Best Sound (Matthew Wood)

65th Golden Globe Awards

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, & Paul Thomas Anderson)

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:

• 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 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.

References in other media

In the media, there have been multiple uses of the title/phrase “There will be blood” to describe themes or subjects that have no immediate relation to the film itself. The phrase appeared on the cover of the February 18, 2008 issue of Newsweek, in reference to heated controversy within the Republican party in regards to John McCain. In 2008, “There Might Be Blood” was the title of two episodes of two different television programs, Psych and Gossip Girl (TV series). The phrase has also been referenced by the Food Network show Good Eats, in a July episode titled "There Might Be Oil," in which that episode's theme ingredient was edible oils. The Comedy Central TV show The Daily Show has made several references to There Will Be Blood, including a June 2008 segment about Midwestern floods titled "There Will Be Flood." The Comedy Central show The Colbert Report also used the phrase in February 2008, when host Stephen Colbert began a fake brawl with fellow television entertainer Conan O’Brien by yelling, “Oh, there will be blood!” During season 25, the TV quiz show Jeopardy featured a category titled "There Will Be Blood Sausage."

Some fans of the film believe Daniel Plainview's memorable quote "I drink your milkshake" will join the ranks of other famous movie lines within pop culture. That particular quote has been used in other media repeatedly. In season 24 of Jeopardy, "I Drink Your Milkshake" was the title of a category about milkshakes. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show and the 80th Academy Awards (for which There Will Be Blood was nominated for eight Oscars), has referenced the phrase "I drink your milkshake" several times on his show in response to news involving oil drilling, including during interviews with Ted Koppel and Nancy Pelosi. In February 2008, the night before the 80th Academy Awards, a Saturday Night Live skit featured a Food Network show starring Daniel Plainview and H.W. Plainview called "I Drink Your Milkshake" in which Daniel and his son travel from state to state looking for the perfect milkshake. "I drink your milkshake" has inspired a There Will Be Blood fansite of the same name, as well as a YouTube video called "There Will Be Milkshakes" which features a montage of scenes from the film with the song "Milkshake" by Kelis playing in the background. Also on YouTube, dozens of fans of the film have made parodies or filmed themselves repeating that particular phrase.

Other media references include the South Park episode "Breast Cancer Show Ever", which parodied the final scene of the movie: after Wendy beats up Cartman, Mr. Mackey approaches and says "Wendy!" to which she replies "I'm finished" as Cartman lies facedown in blood. A Daily Show segment used a clip of Daniel Plainview speaking to the residents of Little Boston to poke fun at real-life Big Oil executives, while The Colbert Report utilized a clip from the film's oil derrick explosion scene in the segment “Aqua Colbert.”

External links

• Official Website
• Official UK Website
• There Will Be Blood at IMDb
• There Will Be Blood at the TCM Movie Database
• There Will Be Blood at Rotten Tomatoes
• There Will Be Blood at Metacritic
• There Will Be Blood at Box Office Mojo
• Template:Amg title
• Essay on There Will Be Blood at Alternate Takes
• There Will Be Blood Production Notes