There Will Be Blood
Film history is the story of films constantly building on one another. If one contemporary director knows this, it’s Paul Thomas Anderson, PTA for professional purposes. In PTA & HIS MASTERS we take a look at the unofficial filmic predecessors of Paul Thomas Anderson. We place the director – arguably one of the most important directors of his generation – next to the influences he unabashedly cites in his work. In PTA & HIS MASTERS we link THERE WILL BE BLOOD to John Huston’s THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE.
With THERE WILL BE BLOOD, PTA created what many still consider his magnum opus. The screenplay was loosely based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair from 1927. “My natural instincts as a writer may be more scattered, so in an effort to be more traditional I used a book”, PTA said about that choice.
Daniel Plainview is een zilvermijnwerker, die een hard leven leidt met zijn zoon H.W. Wanneer hij opvangt dat er olie uit de grond spuit in Little Boston, California, neemt hij zijn zoon mee op een missie om hun fortuin te zoeken. Daniel slaat zijn slag, wordt een self-made tycoon en zijn rijkdom groeit. Maar hoe rijker en machtiger hij wordt, des te meer verliest hij op moreel vlak de pedalen. Wanneer hij een predikant tegenkomt die hem uitdaagt, slaan de stoppen door.
PTA’s THERE WILL BE BLOOD takes greed, capitalism and ruthlessness and brings all of these elements together in one man, Daniel Plainview, inimitably portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, who won his second Oscar for the role. Across from him, stands Paul Dano’s equally fascinating and fanatic preacher Eli Sunday, as the embodiment of the organised religion. As the title prophesies, not only oil will flow in PTA’s epos. Johnny Greenwood created the droning, powerful score and cinematographer Robert Elswit won the Oscar for his work in depicting the American Dream-turned-nightmare. The sum of these different parts make THERE WILL BE BLOOD into a contemporary classic. Who would’ve thought that a sentence like “I drink your milkshake” could be so haunting…
Next to influence of Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, it’s John Huston’s THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948) that influenced PTA the strongest during the production of THERE WILL BE BLOOD. “All of life’s questions and answers are in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE,” the director explain. “It’s about greed and ambition and paranoia and looking at the worst parts of yourself. When I was writing THERE WILL BE BLOOD I would put SIERRA MADRE on before I went to bed at night, just to fall asleep to it.”
The setting and the straight-forward story were a driving force in PTA’s creative process. “I was trying to find something that was 100 percent straightforward, old-fashioned storytelling,” and the director found this in SIERRA MADRE. “THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE is as direct as you can get—nothing clever, nothing structurally new or different—and I mean that as a high compliment. It’s harder than anything else to be completely straightforward.” PTA also asked main actor Day-Lewis to watch SIERRA MADRE and to mirror his performance to Humphrey Bogart’s. For his own direction he sought inspiration in the simple frames and the limited use of different camera angles in each scene. With the same simplicity and straightforwardness of THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, PTA made a contemporary vision of greed, mania and the loss of humanity in a world where having too much is never enough. A scary but powerful echo to the state of the world today.
