I Drink Your Milkshake
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. 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.
Plot
The story opens in 1898 with silver prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) toiling in a wilderness mine.
After falling into the shaft and breaking his leg, Plainview literally drags himself and a fragment of ore back to town for assay. Four years later, Plainview leads 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. (Dillon Freasier).
Plainview is approached by young Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) who tells him of the presence of oil on the Sunday family's property in Little Boston, California.
travel there under the guise of hunting quail and discover oil seeping to the surface. At a public ceremony, Plainview blatantly snubs Eli and says the blessing himself.
Not long thereafter, a worker is killed by a falling drill bit at the derrick, and an explosion erupts from the derrick the next day.
Eli irks Plainview by insisting that these disasters would not have happened had he given the blessing. When Eli demands the money owed to him, Plainview violently attacks him, beating him for being unable to heal his son.
Humiliated, Eli returns home, where he in turn beats his father for selling the land at a greatly undervalued price.
A stranger turns up claiming to be Daniel's half-brother Henry (Kevin J. That night, H.W., having read Henry's diary, attempts to burn the bed in which Henry is sleeping.
He and Henry later 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 to being an impostor: Plainview's real brother was Henry's friend, who died of tuberculosis.
Plainview coldly murders and buries Henry.
The next morning Plainview is awakened by Mr. Plainview, who has no interest in religion, is reluctant; however Bandy's leverage is his knowledge of the murder.
Feeling betrayed, Plainview disowns H.W., telling him that he is an orphan and that he merely used the boy as an asset. responds, "I thank God I have none of you in me," and leaves.
The final scene features Eli visiting Plainview in his stately, empty mansion.
Plainview agrees on the condition that Eli renounce his faith; when Eli does, Plainview tells him that he has already drained the oil from Bandy's land with his surrounding wells. The confrontation escalates until Plainview beats Eli to death with a bowling pin.
Plainview's butler enters the room and calls out to him; Plainview's answer is, "I'm finished!"
Cast
Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview
Paul Dano as Paul Sunday / Eli Sunday
Dillon Freasier as H.W. O'Connor as Henry Brands
David Willis as Abel Sunday
Russell Harvard as H.W.
Plainview (older)
Production
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.
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.
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.
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.
Critical reception
The first public screening of There Will Be Blood was on September 29, 2007, at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. As of May 12, 2008, on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 191 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, in a list of the Top 100 films of all time released in April 2008, listed the film #2, behind Casablanca. 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 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." 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." David Bacon of Z Magazine believed the movie betrayed Upton Sinclair's more radical socialist message present in the book Oil!
Top ten lists
The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007.
Origin of the name
It is likely that the title There Will Be Blood is taken from Exodus – the second book of the Old Testament – in which the Nile is turned into blood (the first of the Ten Biblical Plagues):
Exodus has also been a key theme of Anderson's previous movie Magnolia, which referenced the second plague (Frogs).
In addition to this explanation, it is possible that the title has a simpler origin, in line with the events of the film. There are other events that involve bloodshed or other injury during the film, including a few deaths and H.W.'s loss of hearing.
Both interpretations suggest that the title is foreboding: the second because it implies that Plainview's rise will cause casualties and deaths; the first because although it suggests much the same thing, there is an added implication that Plainview can be seen to have a god-like status.
Further information: Magnolia (film)#Raining frogs and Exodus 8:2
Score and soundtrack
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.
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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.
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