Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of “Oil !,” Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, “There Will be Blood” has received many acclamation from the critics and won best film and best actor honors in 2007 from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Daniel-Day Lewis, known from movies like “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Gangs of New York,” won the title for best actor and Anderson the title for the best director.

The movie was shot over three months in 2006 from May to August, in New Mexico and Marfa, Texas.

Lewis portrays Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector who is setting dynamite in silver mine in 1898. This venture leaves him wounded, but he manages to reach to the claim office, bruised as he is. Plainview turns out to be a greedy character, a man of very few words, who wants to take every piece of land from the Californians.

Soon Plainview starts an oil drilling business and, after an accident suffered by one of his partners in which he loses his life, he becomes the adoptive father of boy. 

Anderson was inspired by Sinclair’s novel and used his book as the base for the screenplay. He first adapted the first 150 pages of the book and visited museums dedicated to oilmen in Bakersfield. From here the plot for “There will be Blood” picked up.  

When he wrote the screenplay he had in mind Daniel-Day Lewis as the main character and he approached him with the script. Lewis accepted the role and he recently said in an interview that the reason why he took this part was “"the understanding that he (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 I felt had a life of their own,” the New York Observer said.

Even though it took Anderson two years to raise the money for this movie, it finally reached the theatres in the country.

The story is a very loose adaptation of the novel and it bears stories about fathers and sons, ambitions, greed, and the dependence and crave for oil at the turn of the century.

After we see how Daniel-Day’s character takes the baby boy under his wing the movie jumps 10 years ahead and we see the boy, now named H.W. Plainview (Dillon Freasier), who is learning the business of oil from his adoptive father.

We can see how Plainview, even tough he is a misanthrope and hates people and says that he would make money only to get away from all the people, he hides his way of being behind joviality when it comes to convincing somebody to sign his land to him.

His opponent is a young Pentecostal preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano from “Little Miss Sunshine”). His poor family owns land with oil and wants submission from Plainview. There is a rumor that the original actor playing Eli was replaced with Dano due to the fact that the first one apparently was intimidated by Daniel-Day Lewis.

Dano proves to stand up to Lewis’s character.

Although with a tight budget, Anderson succeeded in gathering a top team like production designer Jack Fisk (“Days of Heaven”) and cinematographer Robert Elswit (“Syriana”).

The soundtrack is signed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead.

“There Will be Blood” received positive reviews. Manohla Dargis said in her review in the New York Times that "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." It was named the no.6 film in 2007 by the Associated Press film critic Christy Lemire.

The movie is nominated at the Golden Globe Awards for “Best Motion Picture” and “Best Performance by an Actor In A Motion Picture-Drama”- Daniel-Day Lewis. It has also been praised by critics associations of New York and Los Angeles.

Even though Anderson is known from his previous works like “Boogie Nights” and “Punch Drunk Love”, with “There Will be Blood” he succeeds in breaking out of the mold and turning to another path for him as a filmmaker.

 

Directed by:      Paul Thomas Anderson 

Cast:                Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciaran Hinds, and Kevin J. O'Connor

Release date:    Theatrical: December 26, 2007

Rated:              R