There Will Be Blood

Snapshot

Paul Thomas Anderson's fifth feature is a two-and-a-half-hour portrait of Daniel Plainview, a silver prospector turned oil wildcatter who methodically strips the Californian desert of its wealth while stripping himself of every human attachment. Set between the 1890s and 1927, the film adapts the early chapters of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! with severe freedom — jettisoning Sinclair's socialist argumentation in favor of a psychological study of American acquisitiveness in its pure, mythic form. Its antagonist-protagonist is among the most fully realized figures in American cinema of the decade. The film won Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Cinematography and is now routinely placed among the canonical American films of the twenty-first century.

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Industry & production

Anderson developed the screenplay over several years, drawing primarily from the first hundred-odd pages of Sinclair's novel rather than its full arc. The early relationship between oilman and son, and the collision between secular capital and evangelical religion, were the nuclei he retained; Sinclair's explicit political didacticism was discarded entirely. Financing was split between Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films, an unusual arrangement reflecting the film's prestige-but-uncommercial profile.

Principal photography took place in West Texas — notably in and around Marfa and in the Permian Basin — as well as in the California desert and the actual oil-field landscape of Stockton, California, whose wooden derrick infrastructure has largely survived from the early twentieth century. Shooting in locations with genuine period character gave the production a texture of archaeological authenticity that no studio backlot could replicate. The burning oil-derrick sequence was achieved as a practical effect: an actual constructed derrick was set alight, giving cinematographer Robert Elswit a single-take opportunity to photograph a real conflagration at scale.

Paul Dano, originally cast as the smaller role of Paul Sunday, took on the expanded dual role of Eli Sunday when Anderson substantially reconceived the preacher character during pre-production. This late revision restructured the entire second half of the film's dramatic dynamic, making Dano's Eli a figure of equal monstrousness — if opposite register — to Plainview.

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Technology

The film was shot on 35mm anamorphic, a deliberate choice that placed it in dialogue with the widescreen epic tradition of the 1950s and 1960s — the era of Giant, Shane, and the John Ford landscapes Anderson's frame frequently echoes. Elswit used the anamorphic format's characteristic horizontal compression and lens flare qualities to render the desert as both hostile and sublime. No digital intermediate was used to desaturate or otherwise process the image toward a period look; the period feel emerges from costume, location, and natural-light choices rather than post-production grading.

The sound design relies heavily on location ambience — wind across open flats, the thud and hiss of drilling machinery — in combination with Jonny Greenwood's score. The absence of a conventional score over long stretches, and the deployment of silence as a dramatic instrument, required the production-sound and sound-design teams to treat ambient noise as compositionally significant.

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Technique

Cinematography

Robert Elswit, who had shot every Anderson feature to this point, works here with a restraint and a grandeur that marks a significant evolution. The film opens with approximately fifteen minutes of nearly wordless cinema: Plainview alone in a landscape, prospecting by hand, suffering a broken leg, hauling himself across rock. There is no score in the conventional sense — only Greenwood's dissonant string episodes — and the camera observes from middle distance. This opening functions as a silent-film passage, establishing character through physical action and environment rather than dialogue, and it invokes the grammar of Erich von Stroheim and the early Hollywood landscape tradition.

Elswit's compositions are wide and often low-angle, placing the human figure against enormous skies. Light is predominantly naturalistic — the California high desert in full midday sun, or the amber glow of oil fires at dusk. Close-ups are reserved for moments of rupture: the ambush of Day-Lewis's face in the bowling alley finale being the most extreme. The anamorphic frame creates scope paintings in which spatial relations between figures carry dramatic weight; when Plainview and Sunday stand in a church interior or a field, the frame records a territorial negotiation.

Editing

Dylan Tichenor, another long-term Anderson collaborator, constructs the film in extended sequences with sparse cutting. Scenes are allowed to breathe to the point of discomfort; Anderson and Tichenor resist the editorial interventions that would conventionally modulate tension. The film's temporal ellipses are handled with unusual abruptness — years collapse in a cut — while individual scenes dilate beyond conventional scene-length. The bowling alley finale holds on Day-Lewis's face for durations that verge on the unwatchable. This relationship between duration and horror is the edit's central argument.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Anderson's staging is notably theatrical in the nineteenth-century sense: he blocks scenes for the depth of the frame, moving figures through space rather than cutting between them. The church revival sequences, in which Eli performs faith healings, are choreographed to expose the performative infrastructure of both religion and confidence artistry simultaneously. The film repeatedly stages confrontations as physical rituals — kneeling, shouting, oil being smeared on skin — that resemble ceremonies. The mud-soaked baptism of Plainview, his body forced down by Eli, is among the decade's most grotesque staging inversions: the capitalist humiliated by the mechanism he has always recognized as fraud.

Sound

Jonny Greenwood's score was among the most discussed and controversial musical contributions in American film of the decade. Drawing on the modernist string techniques of Krzysztof Penderecki — cluster chords, col legno bowing, extreme registral writing — Greenwood produced cues that function less as emotional underscoring than as sonic disruption. His earlier concert piece Popcorn Superhet Receiver contributed material; this prior release caused the Academy's Music Branch to rule portions of the score ineligible for Oscar consideration, a decision that drew significant criticism from film music scholars and practitioners who regarded it as among the finest scores in recent American cinema. The score rejects late-Romantic Hollywood convention entirely, substituting anxiety for sentiment.

The sound design treats the industrial environment with precision: oil gushing, metal creaking, fire consuming wood. The contrast between these material sounds and Greenwood's abstract strings creates a film-wide sonic argument about the relationship between physical extraction and psychic cost.

Performance

Daniel Day-Lewis's performance is one of the most sustained and technically extreme in the sound-film tradition. He reportedly drew on John Huston — director of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and himself an actor — for Plainview's cadences and rhetorical self-projection, though the full architecture of the performance remains his own synthesis. Day-Lewis committed to a physicality rooted in period manual labor: the early prospecting sequences make visible a body that has been shaped by the logic of extraction. The voice — a mid-Atlantic baritone with evangelical undertones — places Plainview in a tradition of nineteenth-century American self-invention, the confidence man as civic mythology.

Paul Dano matches Day-Lewis by opposite means: where Plainview suppresses and channels, Eli Sunday erupts. The performance amplifies the film's argument that both men are performing for an audience — Sunday's congregation, Plainview's workforce — and that their mutual recognition is finally what makes their relationship catastrophic.

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Narrative & dramatic mode

The film is formally a character study that uses the conventions of the American epic: long duration, historical sweep, landscape as moral register. Its narrative engine is not plot but deterioration — we watch Plainview shed each human connection he permits himself until what remains is pure appetite. The relationship with his son H.W. traces the arc of instrumental parenthood: the child is initially a business prop, then becomes a genuine if inarticulate bond, and the rupture between them when H.W. chooses independence is the film's emotional turning point, rendered in a scene of extraordinary coldness.

The Plainview-Sunday dynamic is the film's dramatic spine: two frauds who recognize each other as such and are destroyed by the recognition. Their final confrontation, which collapses the film's thirty-year span into a single absurdist tableau, is simultaneously cathartic and deliberately unsatisfying. The closing image — Plainview alone, surrounded by what he has acquired — is the film's thesis in visual form.

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Genre & cycle

There Will Be Blood inhabits the tradition of the American historical epic while systematically refusing its consolations. The genre template — the self-made man, the settling of the West, the founding mythology of American prosperity — is present and then inverted. Anderson had studied Robert Altman's revisionist Westerns and the 1970s Hollywood films that questioned American mythology; the film is in dialogue with that tradition as much as with the epics themselves.

It belongs to a distinct early-2000s cycle of revisionist American historical films — alongside Terrence Malick's The New World (2005) and Cormac McCarthy adaptations like No Country for Old Men (also 2007) — in which the founding myths of American expansion are examined with increasing formal austerity and moral bleakness. That two such films dominated critical conversation in the same year, No Country and There Will Be Blood, suggested a particular moment of cultural self-examination in American cinema.

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Authorship & method

Anderson had established a reputation through Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), and Magnolia (1999) for sprawling ensemble construction and a debt to Robert Altman. Punch-Drunk Love (2002) was a tonal and structural departure — compressed, formally experimental. There Will Be Blood represents the synthesis and transcendence of both impulses: it has the scope and moral ambition of the early films and the formal austerity of Punch-Drunk Love.

Elswit and Tichenor are long-term collaborators whose creative relationships with Anderson shaped the film's visual and rhythmic identity. Greenwood's involvement represented a significant departure from conventional film-scoring practice; his background as lead guitarist of Radiohead had no precedent in prestige American drama, and the collaboration opened a question — that subsequent PTA films have continued to investigate — about what serious-music compositional practice does to cinematic emotional registers when stripped of the conventions of the Hollywood score.

Anderson wrote the screenplay himself, adapting Sinclair loosely and drawing on research into early California oil history. The film's screenplay economy — vast narrative territory managed with minimal expository dialogue — reflects a maturation in Anderson's writing toward showing over explaining.

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Movement / national cinema

There Will Be Blood is American cinema in the most unambiguous sense: concerned with national mythology, set in recognizable American landscapes, engaged with the origins of the economic order. It lacks the European art-cinema affiliations that sometimes attach to Anderson's other work, though its formal patience and its willingness to leave narrative business incomplete are characteristic of international art cinema rather than classical Hollywood. Its closest American antecedents are the 1970s films of Francis Ford Coppola and Terrence Malick — filmmakers willing to use the resources of American commercial cinema for projects that refuse those resources' conventional constraints.

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Era / period

The film depicts the late Gilded Age through the early 1920s, a period Anderson treats with historical specificity in costume and technology while avoiding nostalgia. It engages directly with the founding conditions of American petroleum culture — the land rush, the wildcat well, the displacement of agrarian communities — and places the rise of fundamentalist evangelicalism in the same moment as industrial capitalism's expansion. This historical layering, in which two ascendant American forces meet and mutually corrupt each other, gives the period setting its argumentative weight.

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Themes

The film's central proposition is that American capitalism and American evangelical religion are structurally identical: both are organized around the extraction of value from human credulity, both require performance, and both promise transcendence they cannot deliver. Plainview and Sunday are doubles rather than opposites. Their feud is not ideological but territorial — two confidence systems competing for the same audience.

Loneliness is the film's emotional substrate. Plainview explicitly articulates his misanthropy — "I don't like people," he tells his brother-impostor — and the film dramatizes how the drive for total dominance is incompatible with any sustained relationship. The oil, in this reading, is not wealth but a metaphor for the psychic appetite that consumes everything it touches.

The film also traces the transformation of American land from commons to commodity: the landowners who sell to Plainview do not understand what they are selling, and the film frames this incomprehension as a structural feature of capitalist expansion rather than individual naivety.

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Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception was among the most emphatic of the decade. The film won the Academy Award for Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis, his second Oscar) and Best Cinematography (Robert Elswit), and received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound Editing. Critical organizations broadly named it among the best films of 2007 and subsequently of the decade. It appears consistently on polls of the finest films of the twenty-first century, including the Sight & Sound surveys.

Influences on the film are traceable primarily to John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) — the study of greed as psychological pathology, the male antagonist-bond, the desert landscape as moral crucible — which Anderson has acknowledged as a foundational reference. Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), itself an adaptation of an American naturalist novel, provides a structural precedent for the long-duration character study of acquisitive destruction. The silent-film grammar of the opening sequences invokes both von Stroheim and the Griffith-era landscape tradition. The influence of 1970s American art cinema — Coppola, Malick, Altman — is present in the formal freedom and the willingness to prioritize atmosphere over narrative efficiency.

Legacy and forward influence are more difficult to trace precisely, as is standard for any recent canonical work. The film confirmed Anderson's position as the preeminent American art-cinema director of his generation and established the prestige historical character study as a viable mode for ambitious American filmmaking in the following decade. Its visual language — wide anamorphic desert, naturalistic light, long takes observing extreme psychological states — has been broadly influential on the look of American prestige drama. Greenwood's score effectively established that dissonant concert-music composition was available to mainstream prestige filmmaking, and his subsequent work on Anderson's The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), and Phantom Thread (2017) extended that practice into an ongoing body of work. Day-Lewis's performance became a reference point for discussions of screen acting at the edge of theatricality, cited both as exemplary and as a cautionary instance of performance overwhelming narrative function. "I drink your milkshake" entered the cultural vocabulary as an idiom for zero-sum competitive destruction — a rare instance of a film's imagery migrating into common speech.