There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood follows Daniel Plainview, an early-20th-century prospector who turns a bit of information about oil under someone’s land into a career in commercial drilling. It’s a simple engine: a tip, a decision, and the slow accretion of power.

What makes that engine engrossing is Plainview himself — a man built around accumulation, self-reliance and a need to control the world around him. He talks about family often, but the film lets you see those family claims operating as strategy as much as feeling.

Paul Thomas Anderson directs, Daniel Day-Lewis plays the central role, and Jonny Greenwood’s modernistic score keeps the period material feeling restless rather than cosy. It was a long, deliberate movie in 2007, and it still feels like one that wants you to lean in and listen.

The story is straightforward in its promise: a prospector finds opportunity and goes all in. An early scene — a young man named Paul Sunday telling Daniel Plainview about oil under his family’s land — is the literal spark that flips Plainview into commercial drilling.

From there the film opts for breadth over breathless plotting. It traces decades, showing the practical business of finding and pumping oil as Plainview’s small operations become something much bigger.

That passage of time does a crucial emotional job: as the business grows, Plainview’s private life frays. The movie never treats success as uncomplicated; what gets gained is measured against what is lost.

So the setup works because the plot is less about surprising twists and more about watching a personality harden under a specific set of pressures — commerce, land, and the way reputation can be used like capital.

Plainview matters because he’s not just chasing oil; he’s chasing what oil represents — leverage, independence, control. The film keeps returning to his rhetoric about self-reliance and family, and then quietly tests how much of that rhetoric is sincere.

That ‘family’ claim is a performance on many levels. Plainview adopts a boy, H.W., and the arrangement functions as a public signal that helps him do business. The kid becomes a living proof that Plainview is rooted, not some lone prospector without ties.

A later injury removes H.W.'s hearing, and the film uses that change to shift the texture of Plainview's private life. H.W. is both a tether and a mirror: he shows Plainview the shape of his commitments, and he also reveals their limits.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Plainview, and the film revolves around how that character negotiates ambition, control and the idea of family as both comfort and commodity.

Contemporary coverage singled out Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Daniel Plainview as the film’s central achievement. That attention is part of why the movie had such a profile during awards season.

Day-Lewis’s centrality is baked into the film’s shape: it’s a long movie that repeatedly returns the camera to one man’s decisions, moods and escalations. The attention paid by critics and awards bodies underlines how the role anchors the whole piece.

In practical terms, the performance became a pivot around which the film’s reception turned, helping to make the picture a headline example of auteur-driven drama in 2007–2008.

Put simply: the movie’s conversation is often a one-on-one with Plainview, and that conversation only works if the lead convinces us to keep listening — something contemporary reaction made very clear.

On the surface it’s an oilman’s tale; underneath it the film is preoccupied with capitalism and accumulation — how wealth is pursued, displayed and defended. Plainview’s appetite for control reads as a concentrated study of what accumulation does to a person.

Religion and commerce are pitched against one another in the story. The preacher figure stands in a different register of authority from Plainview, and the film stages their encounters as more than mere clashes of personality — they are competing systems of power.

Ambition here breeds isolation. The longer Plainview rises, the more his life narrows to transactions and confrontations. The movie quietly maps how ambition can eat away at ordinary human ties.

Family is presented as performance: presenting H.W. as a son serves business ends and shapes how other characters and communities treat Plainview. That idea keeps returning, which is why the film often feels less like a biography and more like an anatomy of roles.

Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the screenplay and stages long-form sequences that let character be revealed through tempo and space rather than constant exposition. The film trusts duration; it lets scenes breathe and the tensions simmer.

Robert Elswit is credited as director of photography, Jack Fisk led production design, and Tatiana S. Riegel is credited as editor. Those roles frame the movie’s look and rhythm, and the production credits point to a craftsmanship that keeps the period detail coherent.

Contemporary reaction singled out both Daniel Day-Lewis’s central role and Elswit’s work behind the camera, which together made the film feel deliberately composed and formally confident.

So the filmmaking is less about flashy tricks and more about sustained authorial choices: careful staging, deliberate pacing and production work that supports the film’s long, patient gestures.

The film used specially formulated, environmentally safe materials to simulate the gushers and on-set oil fire sequences. That choice kept the physical set pieces grounded in something tactile rather than entirely digital.

A production disclosure even notes the simulated oil mixture included food-grade ingredients — the creative solution aimed to get the right look without harming locations or people.

Those practical decisions make certain scenes feel convincingly physical: the oil isn’t just a matte painting or screen trick, it behaves like something present on set.

In a movie that foregrounds extraction and the material consequences of commerce, having a believable, physical presence for oil matters to the film’s texture.

Released and premiered on the festival circuit in late 2007, the film came to symbolise a particular strand of 00s cinema: auteur-driven, prestige independent filmmaking finding its place in awards season via specialty distribution.

It was part of a brief, visible return to frontier and revisionist-Western settings among American films that year, using West Texas locations that other contemporary productions were also exploiting.

At the same time the film sits in continuity with Paul Thomas Anderson’s earlier work; reviewers and coverage treated it as a logical development in his filmography rather than a sudden departure.

All that places the picture squarely in the mid-00s context: it’s an independent, director-centred epic that used festivals and awards momentum as part of how it reached audiences.

The film’s central idea of family as performance still reads sharply. Presenting H.W. as a son to further business aims is a clear moral choice that hasn’t dulled with time; it still makes modern viewers uncomfortable in the ways the story intends.

The decision to adapt only parts of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and to shape them into a character study rather than a faithful novel adaptation feels less like a limitation now and more like a deliberate creative stance.

Because the film focuses on character and long-form confrontations, its core tensions — capitalism versus other forms of authority, the loneliness of ambition — remain legible to contemporary audiences.

In short: the ideas the movie pins to its characters are durable because they are grounded in behaviour and choices rather than period spectacle alone.

Within Paul Thomas Anderson’s career it’s commonly grouped with his earlier features as a continuation of the director’s interests in character-driven, formally bold storytelling.

Earlier films in his filmography help trace thematic and stylistic lines that lead to There Will Be Blood, so it’s useful to see it as part of a through-line rather than an isolated experiment.

It also sat alongside other 2007 American films that reworked frontier or Western settings — a small cluster of pictures that year revisited similar landscapes and concerns.

The film’s awards season profile mattered: Daniel Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the picture received nominations that kept it in the cultural conversation during 2007–2008.

A line from the film — a blunt, memorable phrase about competitive oil extraction — entered wider circulation and is still quoted in popular commentary, which helped the movie remain headline-friendly.

Jonny Greenwood’s modernistic score shifted how people thought about music for period drama and raised his profile as a composer working in cinema.

Taken together, the performance recognition, a quotable line and an arresting score give the film concrete touchpoints that kept it in view after its initial release.