Marfa and the California Oil Fields There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is set in early twentieth-century California but was shot almost entirely on a 50,000-acre ranch near Marfa, Texas. California had changed too much to play itself at the turn of the century, and the West Texas landscape offered something the state of origin could not: unbroken horizons in every direction, with no visible structures, roads, or power lines.

Anderson wanted California but couldn't find it in California

Anderson and his location scouts spent months searching for a California location that resembled the state at the turn of the twentieth century — the barren, undeveloped Central Valley landscape where the real oil boom took place. Modern development had made it impossible. The California that Upton Sinclair wrote about in 1927 no longer existed in any visually accessible form.

"There was a place where they could stand on top of a hill and look around a 360-degree arc and not see a single structure, road or power line." — Robert Elswit, MovieMaker (2008)

The irony is deliberate: a film about how oil transforms a landscape had to be shot in a landscape that oil had not yet reached.

The McGuire Ranch near Marfa provided the blank slate for Little Boston

Production designer Jack Fisk and Anderson chose the 50,000-acre McGuire Ranch outside Marfa because it featured wide-open space, railroad tracks, and terrain that could plausibly double for the California valleys where the Bakersfield oil fields developed. Fisk and Anderson scoured the ranch together, planting sticks in the ground to mark building locations, figuring out the story through physical space.

Fisk's inspiration came from Marfa itself. Sitting by the railroad tracks during a lunch break, he noticed how the town had been built parallel to the rails — and used that pattern as the organizing principle for Little Boston. The fictional town was constructed from the ground up with roughly fifty carpenters. (alltherightmovies)

"I remember one day on There Will Be Blood, we broke for lunch, and the art director and I were sitting down by the railroad tracks, and I could suddenly see the whole town of Marfa, Texas, and the way it was built right parallel to the tracks. And that became the inspiration for the town of Little Boston that we built for the movie." — Jack Fisk, IMDb News

Fisk built complete 360-degree sets and never struck them

Fisk preferred to build complete environments rather than facade-only sets. His philosophy — construct the whole building, not just the camera-facing wall — worked particularly well with Anderson's shooting style, which avoided fixed camera positions and required the ability to shoot in any direction at any moment. Fisk never struck the Little Boston sets during production, leaving them standing so Anderson could return to shoot new scenes whenever the story demanded it. (screenanarchy)

Anderson had done extensive period research while writing the script — a notebook filled with more than 100 photographs from the era — and shared it with Fisk, so both came to the project with the same historical foundation. The collaborative process meant Fisk could build with confidence that the sets would match the screenplay's intentions.

The Presidio mine in Shafter, Texas served as Plainview's 1898 mine shaft

The opening mine sequences were filmed at the Presidio mine in Shafter, Texas — a near-ghost town with only eleven residents at the time. The cramped, dark mine shaft established the film's claustrophobic opening register and provided the physical danger that marked the production: Day-Lewis broke a rib during filming. (alltherightmovies)

The contrast between the mine shaft and the Texas landscape gives the film its visual arc. Plainview begins underground — cramped, alone, injured — and emerges into vast open spaces that he systematically fills with derricks, pipelines, and the infrastructure of extraction. The landscape changes because Plainview changes it.

Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills provided the bowling alley

The film's climactic sequence was shot at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, whose private two-lane bowling alley became the setting for Plainview's final confrontation with Eli. The mansion's cavernous interiors provided the tomb-like quality the finale required — a space that should feel opulent but instead feels suffocating, the architectural equivalent of Plainview's accumulated wealth. (alltherightmovies)

The film's location choices embed its argument about American landscape

The three principal locations — a mine shaft in a ghost town, a constructed frontier settlement on empty ranchland, and a Beverly Hills mansion — trace the arc of American resource extraction. The mine shaft is pre-industrial labor: one man, a pickaxe, rock. Little Boston is early capitalism: wells, derricks, pipelines, a community built to serve the extraction. Greystone Mansion is the endpoint: the wealth that extraction produces, housed in a building whose bowling alley is larger than the town that generated the money. The geography tells the story of the century the film compresses into thirty years.