There Will Be Blood - now with child/partner forum we call H.W.

[cinemanarchist]

One of the most towering achievements in cinema this year, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, finally opened in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas Day and was rewarded with a per-screen average of $91,300 over the weekend, the best average of the year, according to Pamela McClintock of Variety. Of course, the film only played at two theaters, but still, that's mighty impressive. Nineteen cities across the country also hosted a midnight screening on Saturday; no word yet on how those screenings were received.

also:

GUILD MEMBERS!
YOU ARE INVITED TO ATTEND SCREENINGS OF THERE WILL BE BLOOD
FOLLOWED BY A CONVERSATION WITH PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

NEW YORK - JANUARY 3 2008, 7PM
DGA THEATRE, 110 WEST 57TH ST.,
RSVP TO (212) 654-1001
*MODERATED BY MARTIN SCORSESE 
http://www.vantageguilds.com/twbb/index.html

70% of the midnight screenings were sold out.

And Martin Scrorsese? That's enough to make one's head explode just thinking about it. I want a detailed report from anyone who's lucky enough to attend.

[picolas]

bootleg it someone for the love of g

[cine]

oh fucking hell.

[MacGuffin]

Rising to the occasion
Going toe-to-toe with the intense Daniel Day-Lewis in 'There Will Be Blood' could be intimidating. Or it could be just a game.
By Paul Lieberman, Los Angeles Times

**SPOILERS**

NEW YORK -- PAUL DANO was only 5 feet 6 when he entered his last year of high school, but never worried that he was doomed to remain small. His father and older brother were big and he had those looong feet -- size 12, incredibly narrow. "I always told my friends, 'Guys . . . I'm gonna grow,' " Dano recalls, and he did, spurting 7 inches, making him just like those feet -- long and skinny.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson at first envisioned having a boy of 12 or 13 play the fledgling preacher in "There Will Be Blood," the character who takes on the ruthless oilman played by Daniel Day-Lewis. But after deciding that such casting was "ridiculous," Anderson still didn't give the part to Dano, who had auditioned for it just off his success as the brooding, mute older brother in the black comedy "Little Miss Sunshine." Though Dano did get a small role in the oil epic -- as the preacher's brother Paul -- that character had only one scene, so he brought little more than a change of underwear and a fresh T-shirt to the remote shoot in Texas.

The principals in the film are diplomatic when asked whether it's true that the actor who had been slated to play the preacher had to be replaced -- within days -- because he wasn't up to going head-to-head with Day-Lewis' intensity. "Whatever the problem was," insists Day-Lewis, "I absolutely don't believe it was because he was intimidated by me."

But Dano, who was 22 at the time of the filming, understood what he was getting into when he leaped up to second billing, suddenly playing both Paul and now the preacher, Eli Sunday. He'd worked with Day-Lewis once before, after all -- on 2005's "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" -- and had gotten videos of most of the Ireland-based actor's other films, including "Gangs of New York," in which Day-Lewis as the murderous Bill the Butcher arguably overwhelmed the actor who played his foil, Leonardo DiCaprio.

When the camera light goes on, you see why Day-Lewis is "known to be extreme in his investment in his work," as Dano puts it. The point is, either that scares the bejesus out of you, or it doesn't. "I think that is something to sort of be turned on by rather than be scared by," Dano says. "You know, it's like a game almost."

So, "when I first got down in Texas and we figured out this whole part thing" -- that he'd play the preacher who is instantly wary of oilman Daniel Plainview -- "we talked about it a little bit." Then? "Once we started working, I don't think we spoke to each other much at all."

That's a game? "You know, if he's not gonna say anything to me or look me in the eye, you know . . . I'm gonna give that right back to him."

THEY have three great confrontations in the film and the first two were shot one day after another, though they're far apart in the story: In the first, Day-Lewis' determined oilman ("I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.") slaps around the preacher, who wants to know why his church has not gotten the funds it was promised. In the second, Eli Sunday has the upper hand for the oilman is desperate to build a pipeline over the land of a faithful church member. The price? His baptism.

Dano suspects the back-to-back filming may not have been coincidence, but "PTA" -- director Anderson -- "doing that on purpose" to amp up the tit-for-tat humiliations of each man.

Dano says the scene in which he's slapped around got a new dimension when they saw the muck at the makeshift reservoir where it was shot. "It was like, 'OK, we gotta put him in the mud,' " Dano recalls. "It was Daniel and Paul [Anderson]. I think they both enjoyed that."

What they got was Day-Lewis dragging him through the mud by the hair while he gives off a high-pitched squeal, "that sort of happened in the moment," Dano says. "When I saw the film I went, 'Oh, my God, I'm screaming like a girl.' "

Plus, the tables were turned the next day. Dano had already experienced the seductive power of the pulpit in an earlier scene in a shack-like church, preaching the spirit to local Texans recruited as extras to play the early 20th century settlers. He couldn't help "feeling these people respond" as he laid healing hands on them and sensed how, in that role, "you start to want people to maybe worship you rather than worship God, you know?"

Then he has to baptize and abuse Day-Lewis -- who is there just doing what it takes to get a pipeline for his oil -- and that was a blast. "Oh, yeah, absolutely. Being a threat in terms of acting, in my experience, is more fun."

Except he wasn't supposed to slap Day-Lewis, at least not right away, for his face could get red. "And I completely forgot. Or whatever," Dano says. "Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure I just forgot and was having fun in the scene, you know, in the moment and I slapped the hell out of his face and then as soon as they yelled 'Cut!' I went, 'Oh . . . .' . . . I was mortified but I was also sort of thrilled, you know?"

Dano lives in New York, where, now 23, he has a year to go to get his degree in English at the New School amid doing films and plays. Indeed, he recently appeared in the off-Broadway "Things We Want," playing a possibly suicidal cooking school dropout under the direction of Ethan Hawke, with whom Dano has found himself on some lists lately -- of contenders for the supporting actor Oscar.

Hawke has been mentioned for "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." And Dano? Well, for being thrust suddenly into a difficult part, having to call home for more underwear, then holding his own in the company of Daniel Day-Lewis.

[modage]

Paul Thomas Anderson
By Josh Modell - The Onion AV Club
January 2nd, 2008

Paul Thomas Anderson famously dropped out of NYU film school after just a couple of days, intent on beginning a career making movies. It worked: At 26, the writer-director released a remarkable debut feature, 1996's Hard Eight, which featured several actors that would become part of his troupe, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, and Philip Baker Hall. Anderson's real breakthrough, though, came via 1997's Boogie Nights, a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking ensemble piece set in the porn industry. His even more sprawling Magnolia—another melancholy love letter to southern California—earned Oscar nominations and high praise; he followed that with the unsentimental, beautifully off-kilter romantic comedy Punch Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler. Then Anderson seemed to disappear.

It turned out he was working on his magnum opus. The film, loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, stars Daniel Day Lewis in a remarkable performance as a single-minded 19th-century oil prospector. A departure from Anderson's other films, Blood ditches modern-day L.A. and his regular group of actors and focuses largely on one character—Day Lewis is in nearly every scene of the 158-minute film—and the effect of his dark drive on those around him, particularly a young preacher played by Paul Dano. One of 2007's best films, it renders this seemingly small story huge and powerful. A jovial Anderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about Day Lewis, the melancholy of finishing work, and "message movies."

The A.V. Club: How did you first encounter Upton Sinclair's book?

Paul Thomas Anderson: I was in London, in Covent Garden, and it's impossible to miss. The title is in this enormous red lettering with an exclamation mark. Oil! That was the first I ever saw it, or heard of it. I had never read Upton Sinclair. I didn't read The Jungle in high school or anything like that. But it's pretty terrific writing.

AVC: What's your process of adapting like? Had you ever tried to adapt something before? All of your produced screenplays have been originals.

PTA: It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called Rule Of The Bone. I didn't do a very good job. I didn't really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book. I really was confused by that, because I loved the book. I remember being taught in school that you would underline things that you liked. I remember just underlining everything as a kid, thinking, "This has all gotta be important!" I would just underline the whole thing! [Laughs.] I remember my dad saying, "I don't think you understand. Just underline key ideas." Anyway, I think that's what I did on that Russell Banks book. I felt like my job was to somehow transcribe it, which in that case, really wasn't the right thing to do.

So with There Will Be Blood, I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write. I can remember the way that my desk looked, with so many different scraps of paper and books about the oil industry in the early 20th century, mixed in with pieces of other scripts that I'd written. Everything was coming from so many different sources. But the book was a great stepping-stone. It was so cohesive, the way Upton Sinclair wrote about that period, and his experiences around the oil fields and these independent oilmen. That said, the book is so long that it's only the first couple hundred pages that we ended up using, because there is a certain point where he strays really far from what the original story is. We were really unfaithful to the book. [Laughs.] That's not to say I didn't really like the book; I loved it. But there were so many other things floating around. And at a certain point, I became aware of the stuff he was basing it on. What he was writing about was the life of [oil barons] Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair. So it was like having a really good collaborator, the book.

AVC: When you finish a film, are you generally pretty confident in it? At what point in the process do you know that it's good, or great, or the opposite? Do you need to see it with an audience?

PTA: It's back and forth all the way along. You definitely have moments of confidence, where you feel like, "We got something great today!" And you go home at night, completely unable to sleep, mad with enthusiasm and confidence. A couple of days later, you're lost again and struggling to make sense out of something. But that's okay. I actually enjoyed the struggles that we had trying to shape Blood, to get the pacing right, the rhythm of it. I showed it to family and friends, and we kind of knew the parts that we didn't like, or that we wanted to work on. Speaking for me and Dylan [Tichenor, editor], we knew the parts that we wanted to work out, that we weren't happy with. But there's a certain point where you're desperate to show it to somebody, and you put it in front of friends and family, and, lo and behold, the thing that you suspected wasn't working certainly was not working. And then you get that thing that opens your eyes to the bits and pieces you thought were flying that really weren't as great as you thought. Face to face with having to show it to your friends, you find yourself becoming a little less confident. It's that battle, a never-ending thing. Then when you do get to the end—I know when we got to the end of this film—we were really happy. I really felt like we did what we wanted to do, that we'd worked it hard enough that we could be proud of it. But that said, nothing prepares you for that melancholy when you've finished it. It's always a little bit depressing.

AVC: It's strikingly dissimilar to the rest of your movies; did you feel, when you were making it, that you were outside your comfort zone?

PTA: The struggles are the struggles no matter what. It definitely felt good to be outside of the comfort zone. I remember feeling like, "I should really try to enjoy this, because it will be over so fast." And it was. We had such a good time making the film, and I remember jumping ahead to the end, saying "In three months, it's going to be over." Quite honestly, I wish we were still making the movie. It's been really hard to let go of.

AVC: And yet it's easily the darkest thing you've ever done.

PTA: Definitely. But I like that. That's a good thing—it feels right. [Laughs.]

AVC: You've described it as a horror movie. Do you still feel that way?

PTA: I do feel that way, in the way of, "What's the best way to look at this story?" You're always coming up with bullshit ways to describe it, that for whatever reason can help communicate to everyone, like, "We've got to think of this movie as a boxing match between these two guys, and attack it like a horror story." Those are just ways to describe whatever the marching orders might be. They come in handy, those kinds of descriptions.

AVC: It's a bit surprising at how many laughs Daniel Day Lewis gets in uncomfortable spots, especially at the end.

PTA: It's great, isn't it? [Laughs.]

AVC: Is that how you felt when watching it with an audience? Were you expecting people to laugh?

PTA: I wasn't expecting it, but I was hoping for it! We used to laugh so much, but there is this completely nerve-wracking feeling, like, "Fuck, I hope they laugh."

AVC: How much, if any, of Lewis' character's misanthropy do you share? I just read this New Yorker review that described you as "pessimistic, even apocalyptic," which seems incredibly off the mark.

PTA: Yeah. Fuck, I'll take it. Sure. Yeah. [Laughs.]

AVC: But do you have that in you?

PTA: Absolutely, absolutely. We all do, don't we? I know that I do. It would be insane to say that I don't, that we all haven't had murderous thoughts. But we're socialized. We don't really do those things that we think about doing.

AVC: Do you have any of the character's "competition" in you?

PTA: From time to time, certainly yes, of course. But mostly, no. As I get older, I have less and less of it in me.

AVC: You wrote the part for Daniel Day Lewis. Had you met him before?

PTA: I hadn't, no.

AVC: So was sending him a half-finished script a shot in the dark?

PTA: More or less, but we had a mutual friend who had let me know how Daniel felt about Punch Drunk Love, which was that he was incredibly complimentary. So I was armed with that to give me a boost of confidence. Without that, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, yes, I would have made that leap and risked failure. But it was really nice to have that kind of encouragement to think, "Well, he liked that."

AVC: You've said that you spent a lot of time preparing, the two of you. What was the process like, working out what his character would be like, and how you were going to tell the story?

PTA: Well, we spent a couple of months together in New York. I just remember a lot of eating breakfast and a lot of walking around, more or less getting to know each other and not talking that much about the movie—just this flirtation, like dogs sniffing each other out, to get to know somebody that you're gonna get married to. We decided that we would make the film together, or more to the point, he decided that he would make the film with me. [Laughs.] Then we went in separate directions; I was back in California and he was in Ireland. That was a really good time, because we were separately doing our work. I was still working on the script, and he was doing whatever he was doing. We never really asked each other what we were up to that much. As far as I'm concerned, I didn't need to give him anything more than he wanted to know. I was just there to answer any questions he might have. It was certainly not my job to start babbling away.

Those were really good days, and they accidentally went on for two years, because we tried to get the film going, and we couldn't get it going, and life intervened. There were babies born, backs broken—he hurt his back. One thing led to another, and we just did that more or less for a year. We thought it was time really well spent, and then when we started filming, I can't even tell you: It was like we were cooped up in the starting gate, and the second the starting gate opened, we fell flat on our faces with all of this energy. We had the most horrendous beginning of a film, for two weeks, just completely off of the mark. We got it together finally, but it was hilarious. We had been cooped up for too long.

AVC: So did you have two weeks of wasted film?

PTA: A little bit. There was some stuff that was salvageable. There was some stuff that we got that was good, really good, actually. But mixed in was some stuff that I wouldn't show to anyone—the most embarrassing, off-the-mark kind of stuff.

AVC: Do you recall, either in conversation or rehearsal, the first time you heard Daniel speaking in the unmistakable voice he uses for the film?

PTA: The voice came in these little Dictaphone recordings that Daniel would send me from time to time. It was funny, because my first impression of them was "This is insane!" [Laughs.] But those are usually the best things, the things that you have no preconceived idea about that rattle your world. When you're writing it, and you're alone in your room, it's great. It's just you. But the great thing is opening it up to someone else. You have to be selfless and allow this thing to happen. So I would get these Dictaphone recordings, which were alternately exciting and nerve-wracking. But after sitting with them, just for a day, I could see where he was heading. Somewhere along the way, he just kept finding it, and finding it, and finding it, until it settled into what it became. He must have a Dictaphone from the 1930s, because everything sounded antique coming out of this tiny little speaker. So it all sounded old to begin with. And he talked about this: A great benefit of what we were doing was that there were no voice recordings from 1911 that we could draw from. We could really do what we wanted.

AVC: Were you worried when you first got the recordings that the voice was too over the top?

PTA: I don't know what it was; it was as exciting as it was nerve-wracking. But I've had that so many times before. I remember Phil Hoffman showing me what he was going to do in Boogie Nights, and going, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" [Laughs.] I remember being the same way when [composer and Radiohead guitarist] Jonny Greenwood was sending me score pieces. I was like "What?" But ultimately you have a day, maybe two days, to get out of yourself and see what another person was thinking.

AVC: It's been pretty widely reported that Daniel stayed in character the whole shoot. What exactly does that mean, and how does that affect your relationship on set?

PTA: I still don't know what that means. It's a major misconception that somebody is off the planet or something. But it's a level of concentration that is unparalleled, that's really what it is. Somebody who's come to do one thing, and only one thing, to be Daniel Plainview, and indulge in that for three months. Why wouldn't you take the opportunity to inhabit something else on a free pass for three months? It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. It really is the best way to do it, in my mind.

AVC: He's gotten tons of deserved ink, but what about Paul Dano? What do you feel like he brought to the table, and what was the chemistry between Daniel and Paul like? Loathing with some admiration?

PTA: That's a good way to put it, loathing with admiration. They had the benefit of working together before, so Paul knew what to expect, and Daniel gave Paul respect, underneath all of it. That said, they kept their distance from each other. But you can only play that game if there's an understanding—"I get it, you get it, let's get on with it. This is my line, don't cross it." It was like S&M, but we didn't have any safewords. [Laughs.]

AVC: You were there to provide the safeword.

PTA: But I was the last one who wanted a safeword! [Laughs.] It's my job to not have a safeword.

AVC: How many people are around when you're doing some of these really intense scenes, like the one in the bowling alley? It seems like, for actors working in that intense a scene, almost anyone would be a distraction.

PTA: It can be, if people are misbehaving or talking loudly, or wearing bright clothes, or chatting away. Ideally, in a perfect world, everyone is doing what Daniel is doing—concentrating on doing their job. And that's what we were all doing. You could say that we were all in character the whole time. The bowling alley is a particular situation, because it was so narrow that there could only be a very limited amount of people at any given time, maybe five or six behind the camera and then the two boys.

AVC: That was actually shot at the Doheny mansion, right? Was it ghostly?

PTA: It was great. It was funny, because that mansion has been used so many times in films; it's kind of this notorious location. Your first instinct as a filmmaker is, "Can we really shoot someplace that's been shot in so many times?" I think we had a free pass because this was the guy we were basing the film on. It's definitely pretty ghostly around there, without question. Daniel called it a pyramid that Doheny built to himself. I think that fits. It's kind of a mad place.

AVC: Some people will surely see it as a message movie because Upton Sinclair's name is on it, but for other obvious reasons as well. Were you thinking about modern-day strong-arm capitalism and mega-church religion while you were writing and shooting it?

PTA: I was thinking that we'd better be very careful not to do too much of that. And what I mean by that is what I said earlier, that we should approach the film as a horror film and a boxing match first. You know you're walking into a film about an independent oilman and a guy that runs a church. The risks that you run are big, long speeches that would help in paralleling or allegoricalizing, if that's a word. [Laughs.] We thought, "Let's be careful." That's a slippery slope, isn't it?

AVC: Sure, but you know it's there. Do you let a tiny bit of it in to avoid the floodgates opening?

PTA: I suppose that's probably what it is. It's so funny, because ideally, once you get underneath the skin of these men, that stuff falls away.

AVC: Is there a small part of you that hopes people take away an anti-capitalist message?

PTA: Do I hope the film brings peace to the Middle East? If we can help in some small way. We're just one film. [Laughs.]

AVC: One long film.

PTA: That's true. Maybe we should count as two.

AVC: Long films are required to have messages.

PTA: It's true, it's true! [Laughs.] That depends on how progressive you are, actually.

AVC: Do you think that people can watch it and not get that? Could a big oil tycoon watch it and just get a cracking good story out of it?

PTA: Chances are. I don't know. We've got to show it to the oil circuit, and see how they respond. [Laughs.] Maybe we'll take it to the religious circuit and see what they think.

AVC: It seems pretty obvious what kind of reaction you're going to receive there.

PTA: Does it? What do you think they are going to say?

AVC: I mean this in the best way, so don't take it the wrong way...

PTA: Uh-oh, I always get nervous when I hear that.

AVC: Your movies always seem very tidy. They might be sprawling, but they're very unambiguous. The conceit of so many independent films is to be ambiguous, maybe for its own sake.

PTA: I take that as a high compliment, actually. Thank you. I really do. We could have titled the movie There Will Be A Morally Unambiguous Ending. [Laughs.] That's really nice of you to say. Thanks.

AVC: Is ambiguity not in your filmmaking genes, then? Does it not appeal to you?

PTA: I don't know. It would require me to get objective and think too much. I'll just take the compliment.

AVC: The film is dedicated to Robert Altman. Was your experience working with him on Prairie Home Companion what you hoped it would be? You knew him a little bit, right?

PTA: I knew him pretty well, off and on for about 10 years, but I had gotten to know him particularly well in the last three or four years. I got to watch Bob navigate that film, and I watched how good he was at evading questions, in the best way. He was really good at not committing himself too early to something. He didn't impose his will early. He loved to work with people. He loved to see what they came up with. He would give things time to settle, to rise or to fall, and watching him do that was a great lesson in patience. Because at the end of the day, he invited everybody in to work on this film, but he ended up getting exactly what he wanted, and everyone else felt that they had been part of it, because they had. They really made the film with Bob. How he did that was a lesson to me.

AVC: Is that something that you feel you emulate? It seems like There Will Be Blood was very collaborative with Daniel.

PTA: I've had great collaborations in the past—some of the actors and the crew have been working together for years—and it felt like we were all working in great sync on this one. Maybe it was because we hadn't made a film together in a long time. We were all so happy to get back together and go to work, and work with some new people, like Daniel, and [production designer] Jack Fisk, and Jonny Greenwood. We really enjoyed making the film. I daresay a lot of us still wish we were making the film, and have had a hard time letting it go.

AVC: Will that spur you to dive into another movie more quickly?

PTA: Ideally. It's something we're all talking about. We'll take a little time off, and talk about what we'd like to get done in the new year. It would require me getting some writing done and finding some time to do that. Hopefully it won't take too long.

[MacGuffin]

`Blood' Is Breakthrough for Anderson

In the last conversation Paul Thomas Anderson had with Robert Altman, his friend and mentor told him: "I think this film is something different for you."

"It was so sweet," Anderson recently recalled. "He had no reason to base it on anything except just a feeling."

Altman died in November 2006, a month before Anderson planned to show him a rough cut of "There Will Be Blood."

But Altman's hunch turned out to be accurate.

Anderson's new movie stands apart from his first four films "Sydney" (aka "Hard Eight"), "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia" and "Punch-Drunk Love." And it's been hailed as one of the year's best films and a remarkable advancement for a maturing auteur.

"Your paranoia becomes `What ... does that mean? Does that mean at the expense of the other films this is something else?' ... But I'd be lying if I didn't say that every time you go to make a film, you're desperate to either do it better than you did it last time or to not repeat yourself," the 37-year-old writer-director said.

The scruffy Anderson speaks passionately about film and can discuss movie history with authority. When he began directing in his early 20s, he was seen as an L.A.-bred cinematic phenom who quickly became a star in the '90s independent film scene, specializing in movies set in his native San Fernando Valley.

With large ensemble casts, ever-moving cameras, memorable music and lengthy running times, Anderson established a bold style. This, combined with realistically flawed, often desperate characters, made Anderson not just a film-geek hero, but a sought-after talent.

Anderson's previous films all had notable autobiographical elements, but for "There Will Be Blood," he sought to expand outside of himself and began the script as a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!"

The director used roughly the first 100 pages of Sinclair's book and drew on other sources, particularly Margaret Leslie Davis' 1998 biography of oil tycoon Edward Doheny, "The Dark Side of Fortune."

"The benefits of the adaptation was that it helped me do things that my natural instincts wouldn't lead me to do," said Anderson, who acknowledged that, if left to his own devices, he's more liable to "spin off the rails a bit more."

"It was like collaborating with somebody," he said.

The result is a film about the fictional Daniel Plainview, an obsessed turn-of-the-century oil man, brought to life by Daniel Day-Lewis.

"It was a fully imagined, fully understood world that Paul had already created on the page for me, therefore it was that world, in its entirety, that unleashed a curiosity that can take you, you don't know where," said Day-Lewis.

For a film that's winning raves, it had inauspicious beginnings. Production was postponed for two years to raise financing, and only after shooting began, Paul Dano was cast in the supporting role.

"Quite honestly, after all that time, Daniel and I were like caged animals in the starting gate," said Anderson. "And the gate opened and we just fell flat on our faces."

Shooting in the desert of Marfa, Texas, they had to recover quickly.

"We built these sets and we were out there in costumes with cameras and everybody was standing around," Anderson said. "It's a little like, `What else are you going to do?'"

The themes in "There Will Be Blood" aren't what fans of Anderson are accustomed to. It largely deals with the heartless, indomitable will of big business in America.

Anderson, who watched John Huston's "The Treasure of Sierra Madre" (1948) repeatedly while writing "There Will Be Blood," acknowledged those ideas came out of negative thoughts about what he called the "boys network" of business today.

"It's fun thinking about that stuff: shadowy organizations, underhanded deals, investment banking I don't know," laughed Anderson. "I like Daniel Plainview a lot, and that makes it personal. He's mad and I know it and I don't want to really be hanging out with him a lot. He's great. I understand what he's going through; I understand where he's coming from."

What Anderson recognizes in Plainview is his single-mindedness in pursuit. Anderson has a reputation for fighting passionately for his films and has previously battled with studios.

His first film "Sydney" (1996) was taken away from him by the production company, Rysher Entertainment. The company changed the title to "Hard Eight" and cut it considerably. It was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival, but Anderson also sent his own cut, titled "Sydney," which the festival selected.

There were also disputes over the length of 1997's "Boogie Nights" (156 minutes) and 1999's "Magnolia" (188 minutes). But Anderson, who received a screenwriting Oscar nomination for both movies, says he now can see the point about their length.

"`Magnolia' needed it, and I certainly wish I could take 15 or 20 minutes out of that film," he said. "I don't miss scenes at all the way that I used to miss them when I was younger making a film. It's actually quite fun to get rid of them now."

"There Will Be Blood" still clocks in at 158 minutes, but Anderson said there was no friction with the studios (Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films) except for what he called "the YouTube Incident of 2007."

While editing the movie last summer, Anderson decided to enliven things by cutting a trailer, which he posted on YouTube. The simplicity of the process not dealing with the studio or the Motion Picture Association of America was "like a filmmaker's fantasy."

"And the studio went nuts," he said, smiling about his mischief. "We put it up on Friday and I remember they called on Saturday morning at 6 a.m.: `Do you know there's this thing on YouTube?' I said, `Yeah, we put it there.' They were like, `What the hell are you doing? Are you mad?'"

The trailer's warm reception pacified the executives, Anderson said, and ever since "There Will Be Blood" has rode a wave of good publicity and honors, including a Golden Globe nomination for best drama.

The whole experience reminds Anderson who has a child with his partner, "Saturday Night Live" cast member Maya Rudolph of the crazed mining of Daniel Plainview.

"You feel like a bottom feeder at the bottom of this dark tunnel, chipping away at something that you're not quite sure is there and even if it is there, you're not quite sure what it's worth," he said. "I can completely relate to that fever and insanity that happens and takes over."

[modage]

"There Will Be Blood" still clocks in at 158 minutes, but Anderson said there was no friction with the studios (Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films) except for what he called "the YouTube Incident of 2007."

While editing the movie last summer, Anderson decided to enliven things by cutting a trailer, which he posted on YouTube. The simplicity of the process not dealing with the studio or the Motion Picture Association of America was "like a filmmaker's fantasy."

"And the studio went nuts," he said, smiling about his mischief. "We put it up on Friday and I remember they called on Saturday morning at 6 a.m.: `Do you know there's this thing on YouTube?' I said, `Yeah, we put it there.' They were like, `What the hell are you doing? Are you mad?'"

The trailer's warm reception pacified the executives, Anderson said, and ever since "There Will Be Blood" has rode a wave of good publicity and honors, including a Golden Globe nomination for best drama.

fuck.  that is awesome.

[Pubrick]

"`Magnolia' needed it, and I certainly wish I could take 15 or 20 minutes out of that film," he said.

B O M B S H E L L

i hope he means dixon.

[cine]

so my favourite person in the world just got me advanced screening tickets to this tonight. hells yes.

[noyes]

so my favourite person in the world just got me advanced screening tickets to this tonight. hells yes.

wow. i wish i had a favorite person in the world.
that's awesome Cine.

record it like you did last time.
i look forward to your account.

[modage]

admin edit: SPOILS

American Epic 'There Will Be Blood'
Director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis on blood, oil, and how 'Gangs of New York' probably isn't Day-Lewis's most mom-friendly performance.
Source: Premiere

Quiet, stoic, and self-reliant Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) rapidly transforms into a wealthy tycoon when he discovers oil in the hard scrub of Southern California and is then driven by an almost demonic desire to extract the riches from the land he has acquired, regardless of the physical and spiritual price to himself and to the people who live there. Plainview eventually meets his match in the supposedly unassuming and deeply religious Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a young yet quietly ambitious preacher in the charismatic tradition. The two recognize the same desire and ambition for power in one another and become locked in a bitter struggle that will bleed from one century into another.

The origins of There Will Be Blood can be traced to a bookstore in London, where homesick Paul Thomas Anderson spotted the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, which then became an unlikely life raft for the struggling writer/director.

"I had been trying to write something, anything — just to get something written," Anderson says. "I had a story that wasn't really working. It was about two families, fighting. It just had that premise. And when I read the book, there were so many ready-made scenes and the great venue of the oil fields and all that. So those are all of the obvious things that seemed worth making a film about."

Anderson explains that he quickly became engrossed in the book's early focus on rural California and the proliferation of derricks and oil fields as prospectors began crisscrossing the state. But he was reluctant to turn the film into a didactic treatise on power, capitalism, and religion, despite the fact that the source novel is rich with allusions to the big issues that confronted America's rapid expansion.

"[I was] aware of it [enough] to know that if we indulged too much in it or let that stuff rise to the top that it could get kind of murky. And it [becomes] a slippery slope when you start thinking about something other than just a good battle between two guys that see each other for what they are. [I was] just trying to work from that first and foremost...everything that is there falls into place behind it. It would be horrible to make a political film or anything like that," he says.

With a story and a setting firmly in his mind, Anderson then realized that Blood would be the ideal chance for him to work with an actor he admired and longed to collaborate with: Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis accepted the role two years before he finally got a chance to play it and says he relished the chance to put his unique spin on Plainveiw's forceful egoism and dark misanthropy.

"I never really saw him as a miserable prick," the actor says. "The challenge, I dare say, is the same as it always is, which is just to try and discover a life that isn't your own. And Plainview, as he came to me in Paul's beautiful script, was a man whose life I didn't understand at all. It was a life that was completely mysterious to me, and that unleashed a fatal curiosity, which I had no choice but to pursue. He's just a fellow trying to make a living. I believe you see the seeds of the man you meet at the end in the man you meet at the beginning. So it never occurred to me to think that his journey was a short one."

Shooting took place primarily in Martha, Texas — the same setting for the Cohen Brothers' No Country for Old Men and, perhaps more famously, for Giant, the 1955 classic starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor. As a prospector, Plainview works the unyielding earth in solitude and, in an early scene in the film, falls down a mineshaft and breaks his leg. Taking on the role of Plainview was not just a physically demanding part; it also permitted Day-Lewis to experience first-hand the difficulties with which early pioneers of oil drilling struggled in order to learn and ultimately excel.

"When you discover Plainview at the beginning, he's almost learning himself how to do it. Anyone can swing an axe or a sledge. They kind of just made it up as they went along. Before cable rotary drilling became common use, they began by scooping this muck as it erupted out of the earth, scooping it up in saucepans and buckets. And then someone had the bright idea of trying to set up an A-frame and plunge the equivalent of a telegraph pole down into the ground. It was incredibly primitive. As the story progresses, then, there is something to learn about because the drilling procedure is a fairly complicated thing. But at the beginning it's just sheer blood and sweat," Day-Lewis says.

As Anderson began piecing his film together, it became clear that his minimal use of dialogue and vast open spaces would put a big burden on the score. Much of the energy and the pacing of the film would come from its music, so Anderson decided that a traditional composer might not be the most effective choice. Instead, he turned to Jonny Greenwood, guitarist for Radiohead, a British rock band known for its experimentation.

"[Greenwood] had a couple of pieces that existed before, that he had written for orchestra," Anderson says. "But he has written a few orchestral pieces I had heard that I thought were terrific. He also did an experimental film called Bodysong that he did the score for. I gave him a copy of the movie and then about three weeks later he came back with about two hours of music. I have no idea of how or when he did it, but he did it. It is kind of amazing. I cannot say that I did any real guiding or had any real contribution to it, except just to take what he gave us and find the right places for it."

Day-Lewis also found himself awestruck by Greenwood, in particular his self-taught technique: "The funniest thing about Johnny is that he didn't study composition. He studied violin, and then he went into the band, and the band became his life, but somehow along the way he taught himself composition. And he is the resident composer for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. [He] played a lot of the music, and scored the whole thing himself. I don't know how he did that."

But perhaps the film's greatest revelation is Dillon Freasier, who makes his film debut as H.W., Plainview's "son" and partner. When one of his workers is killed in a mining accident, Plainview decides to raise the man's boy as his own, and the pair travel around California in a Ford Model T, encouraging farmers and ranchers to sell their oil-rich properties at bargain-basement rates. During negotiations, Plainview exploits the boy's innocent looks to curry favor with women and Christian families. But when H.W. loses his hearing in an oil derrick explosion, Plainview is not emotionally equipped to deal with a handicapped child and partner.

"We did start out in Los Angeles and New York," says Anderson of the struggle to find an actor suited to the role, "reading young men with headshots, and that kind of thing, and resumes, and we thought that they should be sent to their rooms. We thought we needed a boy from Texas who knew how to shoot shotguns and live in that world. Casting director Cassandra Kulukundis asked around at the schools. She said: 'I am looking for a man in a young boy's body.' And one principal said: 'I have just the boy.' And it was Dillon."

Anderson didn't have Freasier read scenes, but simply talked with him about the part and says, "It was pretty clear that he was a very special young man. He took to it really well." Freasier, who had never been on a movie set or even seen a movie camera, reportedly loved the experience, and costar Day-Lewis says they immediately connected.

"I felt very close to Dillon, very fond of him," the veteran actor says. "He's a cowboy. His father is a rancher. Dillon has got his rodeo buckles. He's won numerous events. He does the round-ups. He's the real thing, and so he has this strange maturity that's very unusual."

According to Day-Lewis, Freasier had an insatiable curiosity for everything that happened on set, constantly absorbing new information "with such excitement and vision." But, adds Anderson, when it came to those scenes where he was expected to vent his physical frustration, he needed just a little push of encouragement — and a helping hand from mom.

"He had to struggle with Ciaran [Hinds] and he had to slap Daniel. He didn't like to do it initially," Anderson says of instructing Freasier to hit Day-Lewis across the face as hard as possible. The director recalls that it was only when Freasier's mother said, "You'd better do it, Dillon. They told you to do it. You can do it. It's okay," that the newly minted actor mustered the willpower to strike.

"His mom just raised him so beautifully and very respectfully," Day-Lewis says. "[She] is a state trooper and she wanted to do things right. And thought [that] she'd better check out this bunch that were going to be taking care of her son. So she went and got Gangs of New York. She was absolutely appalled. She thought she was releasing her child into the hands of this monster, and so there was a flurry of phone calls, and so somebody sent a copy of The Age of Innocence to her. Apparently," he laughs, "that did the trick."

[OrHowILearnedTo]

Ebert's Review:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080103/REVIEWS/801030301

Does 3 1/2 stars mean hes lost it?

[Pubrick]

Does 3 1/2 stars mean hes lost it?

half a star off cos it doesn't hav any chicks. dude's a total perv.

EDIT: holy shit i was kidding when i wrote that, then i read his review.

his reason why CMBB is not "perfect": "its lack of women".. geez, sorry you couldn't get your rocks off, roger.

[MacGuffin]

"Blood" filmmakers renovate mansion and Texan ranch
Source: Reuters


**SPOILERS**





How's this for a grisly coincidence: The violent climax to "There Will Be Blood," featuring Daniel Day-Lewis as an aged oil baron, was shot at Greystone Mansion. The famed Beverly Hills building was built by oil tycoon Edward Doheny in the 1920s for his son, who died in a murder-suicide.

The 55-room mansion has been used in many films, including the "Ghostbusters" movies and "Batman & Robin," and as the site for Hollywood weddings. While the "Blood" filmmakers transformed one room into a beautiful study, their biggest coup was discovering, and then refurbishing, the mansion's lost and dilapidated bowling alley.

"It was just an empty shell of a room," producer JoAnne Sellar said. "The structure was there, but it had deteriorated over the years. There wasn't anything of the bowling alley left."

With some elbow grease, the production refurbished it to what it would have looked like back in the mansion's heyday.

"It's still there now," she said. "We left it up for people to see."

BLOOD FLOWS TO TEXAS

While "There Will Be Blood" is set during the turn-of-the-century California oil rush, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson and his production team had to leave the state to find its locations.

"We scouted all over California looking for a California that doesn't exist anymore," said Sellar. "There's always a Burger King or a Starbucks or a freeway in the way. You can't get away from it. We couldn't have a 360 (degree) view."

The production scouted nearby states, but what Anderson was looking for was something that would give his vision "scope," Sellar said. Then they came across some pictures sent by the Texas Film Commission of a private ranch near a small town named Marfa. Anderson was intrigued enough to travel there, and as they say in the biz, he "fell in love with the place."

The ranch had the vistas that approximated the long-lost California, the space to build all the sets and the needed privacy. It even had a private rail line that was only used a couple times a month.

But the hard work was just about to begin: The production had to create an entire community from scratch. Under the guidance of production designers, carpenters reported for duty three months before the start of principal photography to build the town of Little Boston, the train depot and the home of preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). The production even constructed a life-size oil derrick, designed to historic specifications, that they burned down for one of the film's key scenes.

"Everything you see on the film was built," Sellar said. "There was nothing there; it was just an empty piece of land."

That empty piece of land also happened to be in the middle of nowhere. The nearest airport was three hours away in El Paso, and there weren't any local crews to speak of, thus necessitating transporting everything into a town of 2,000 people.

But the remoteness of the production helped the actors, Sellar said. "When you went to work on this ranch, you felt you were going back in time," she said. "There were no distractions, and we were totally in the movie. When we did come back to L.A., it was a culture shock because you got so used to living in that environment."

[MacGuffin]

'Tell the story! Tell the story!'
With his "big oil epic" starring Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson is no longer American cinema's enfant terrible. All he wants to do now is spin a good yarn, he tells Ed Pilkington
Source: The Guardian

**READ AT OWN RISK**

It is 10 years since Paul Thomas Anderson first left audiences and critics dumbstruck and confounded with his breakthrough film Boogie Nights, when he was just 27. How could such a pipsqueak of a director, they asked back in 1997, create a masterpiece that wowed right from its opening sequence: an audacious five-minute tracking shot that swoops and swirls through the nightclub of the film's title in joyful synchronisation to the dance music of the 1970s.

He has astonished ever since. Magnolia, the next out of the blocks, was an even bigger, more complex and yet richly evocative film that belied any attempt to categorise it. He was 31 by then, but still people marvelled at how one so young could conjure up such accomplished work. Anderson appeared to have found his style - the repertory film in which a multitude of characters and plot-lines are interwoven. But then in 2002 he bamboozled us again. He threw out the repertory technique and opted instead for a radically scaled-down and linear story in Punch-Drunk Love. It ran at a conventional 90 minutes - half the length of Magnolia - and though the film was anything but conventional, it left many fans delighted, others disappointed.

This year we are seeing the release of his fifth feature, There Will Be Blood, and it feels like an important moment. At 37, he's no longer the precocious youth. He has proved himself to be a director of formidable imagination and ambition, but we're waiting to see what he will do with such gifts. Will he have the resources to amaze us one more time?

It has to be said that the figure of the man sitting in front of me when we meet in a hotel in New York does not generate huge confidence. Others have remarked that PT Anderson in person looks weirdly fragile for such a titan of the cinema, but today he's beyond fragile. He is a wreck. He's unshaven. His brown shirt is more crumpled than linen fashionably should be. His posture is crumpled too. When later I play the tape of our conversation back, the first sound he makes that I hear him utter can roughly be transcribed as "Ooooooh" - a guttural, heartfelt expression of pain.

But, to be fair, it is the morning after the premiere of There Will Be Blood and PTA is, by his own admittance, worse for wear. Even so he is swaddled in an almost visible happy glow. The previous night, he tells me, represented the fulfilment of a childhood dream: to have his film shown at the New York Ziegfeld cinema. "I'd always wanted it, dreamed about it. It's a palace, a great old movie palace. I dare say we won't be making a big oil epic any time in the future and you think, 'Fuck! Hopefully it can play in a place like that.' It was massive, and we turned it up real loud."

What he describes as his "big oil epic" has been making waves even before it opened in America on Boxing Day. The LA Film Critics Association gave it four awards including best picture and director, and it has been nominated for two Golden Globes. Not bad going, I say, in an attempt to cheer up the suffering figure before me. "Yeah, you get it into your head that they don't matter, but then they give these awards to you and you love it," he says.

The inspiration for There Will Be Blood came to him a few years ago when he was in London. He says he had been feeling homesick for California's San Fernando Valley where he grew up and which famously forms the backdrop to all his earlier films. He had started writing a script about two warring families - a conceit that he liked, but he was struggling to know how to develop the story. He was browsing in a bookshop in Covent Garden when he saw a book with the word Oil! in bright red letters on the cover. It was the 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair set in California at the turn of the century among oil prospectors scrambling to buy up the fields. It rang instant bells with him; not only as a piece of his own local history, but as a perfect backdrop to his story about fighting families.

The result is a film that certainly does amaze, and bears several of the PTA hallmarks: breathtaking confidence, a love of acting and of visual beauty, and an exceptional grasp of the art of storytelling. Yet it confounds too, though Anderson, ever the director to avoid pigeon-holing, dislikes the description of the film as a departure. "Oh, fuck, no!" he says. (There are a lot of four letter words in the course of a PTA conversation, you just have to accept that.) "Don't depart just yet! There's nothing worse than somebody saying I want to do something that's a departure."

One of the most obvious contrasts with his earlier films, apart from its glorious outdoors setting in the open desert of Texas (California is too concreted over to provide its own setting), is that There Will Be Blood is more overtly engaged with politics than his previous films. I ask him how could a movie centred on the clash between an oil prospector's desire to make it rich and a evangelical pastor's spiritual attempts to stop him be anything else?

"Of course, I'm no dummy," he says with a slight warning growl. "But there's a trap you can fall into. If you set out to make a movie about oil and religion I'm not sure you wouldn't crash the car. Fuck! It's a movie first. You have to put on a good show first, I think."

At the centre of his efforts to put on a good show is the mesmerising performance of Daniel Day-Lewis, whose tour-de-force portrayal of the rags-to-riches oil man, Daniel Plainview, has to put him in the running for an Oscar. Day-Lewis conjures up a character of primeval energy, driven by greed and hunger for power, yet capable of tenderness as well as brutality. Anderson heightens the effect by letting the camera linger on the actor long beyond the point that most directors would shout "Cut!" The opening of the film is even more audacious than Boogie Nights - for the first 15 minutes or so, no word is spoken as we watch Day-Lewis frantically dig his mine shafts, his face blackened as though he were sweating oil.

I ask Anderson what it was like working so intimately with one actor - an experience quite at contrast with the ensemble approach with which he made his name. "At best it feels that you are connected to each other. You are completely playing the same tune. There's this kind of line between myself and the camera and Daniel that's pulled tight. When it was going well it felt just like that.

"We're still trying to figure out who the girlfriend is and who the boyfriend is in this relationship. When we first met I called him a few days later and I left a message saying: 'It's your girlfriend.' It feels like that. You are in a relationship with someone so intimate, every single day. I dare say there were moments when our spouses were jealous."

There is a good deal of classic American cinema in There Will Be Blood, partly perhaps as a result of the fact that Anderson compulsively played and replayed John Huston's 1948 gem, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as he was writing the script. He set himself the challenge of attempting to make a film as simple and direct as that, saying to me that he felt that in his previous films he had never quite managed to achieve economy in storytelling.

"Tell the story! Tell the story! That's what I saw in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The films that I love are very straightforward stories, like really old-fashioned stuff. I've never been a fan of whimsical or confusing storytelling." With There Will Be Blood, he says, "it was such a great feeling - cutting things out, slashing away. I didn't have any desire I might have had 10 years ago to shoot every single word that I wrote."

That ability - to slash away - comes with experience and growing confidence, I suggest, and he responds eagerly: "I think so, yeah. That's definitely what it is. You feel more comfortable in your own skin and learn that omitting things is the same as writing things."

Before we end I tell him I feel duty bound to ask him who he wants to work with next, because when the Guardian asked him the same question in 2000 he uncannily replied: Adam Sandler and Daniel Day-Lewis. Would he stare into his crystal ball for us one more time? "I'd like to work with Daniel Day-Lewis again," he says, forcing me to tell him that's not allowed. On his second attempt he says: "I'd love to work with Phil [Seymour] Hoffman again, and at some point Robert De Niro. That's as good as they get, right?"

And what kind of film does he have in mind? Has he another itch that he needs to scratch? "I'm already scratching," he replies. "I'm thinking: 'That's enough of that, get back to work! Let's go!'"

· There Will Be Blood is released on February 8