The Silent Opening There Will Be Blood
The first fourteen to fifteen minutes of There Will Be Blood contain almost no dialogue — three subtitle entries before the fourteen-minute mark. Daniel Plainview mines silver alone in a shaft, breaks his leg in a fall, drags himself to an assay office, shifts to oil prospecting, loses a worker, and adopts the dead man's infant son. The entire prologue is told through physical action, Jonny Greenwood's dissonant score, and Robert Elswit's images of a man dwarfed by landscape. It is one of the longest wordless openings in mainstream American cinema since the sound era.
Anderson and Tichenor designed the opening as a horror film prologue
Editor Dylan Tichenor and Anderson approached the sequence with the conventions of horror rather than the western or period drama the setting might suggest. Long takes, minimal cuts, gothic framing, and Greenwood's unsettling strings establish that whatever is happening in this mine shaft is not heroic perseverance — it is the origin of something dangerous.
"We approached it like a horror film, employing gothic shot framing and trying to build tension without a lot of cuts." — Dylan Tichenor, No Film School
The choice to withhold dialogue is also a choice about what kind of character Plainview is. When his voice finally arrives — delivering the oil pitch to a room of landowners — it lands as a performance within the film. The audience has already seen who this man is without words. His voice, when it comes, is a tool he has learned to deploy.
The silence forces the audience to read Plainview through his body
Without dialogue, the opening tells its story through physical evidence: the pickaxe strikes, the fall, the broken leg, the agonizing crawl across the desert with a silver sample clutched in one hand. Anderson and Day-Lewis communicate everything about Plainview's character in these minutes — his tolerance for pain, his refusal to stop, his willingness to work alone in conditions that would kill most people — without a single explanatory word.
"Everything you needed to know about that man, you discovered without any single person saying a word." — Daniel Day-Lewis, Cinephilia & Beyond
The prologue covers four years — 1898 to 1902 — in approximately fourteen minutes, compressing an entire origin story into physical action. By the time Plainview speaks, the audience knows he is a man who uses words instrumentally, not expressively. The silence is not an absence of character information but a surfeit of it.
The opening image inverts into the closing image
The structural function of the silent opening becomes clear only in retrospect. The opening image: a man alone underground, injured, clawing toward the surface. The closing image: a man alone in a mansion, surrounded by wealth, having beaten the last person near him to death. Both show isolation, but the first contains ambition and the second contains exhaustion. The film's trajectory is the distance between those two frames — from silent determination to "I'm finished."
Anderson described the film as "a mixture of western and horror." The silent opening establishes both registers simultaneously: the wide-open spaces of the western visible above the mine shaft, the claustrophobic dread of the horror film visible within it. The rest of the film oscillates between these two modes, and the bowling alley finale — underground again, enclosed again — closes the loop.
The first words carry disproportionate weight
The first word of dialogue in the film is "No!" — shouted during the oil well accident that kills a worker. The second substantial line is Plainview's discovery of oil: "There she is. There she is." The delay makes every word that follows feel chosen rather than habitual. When Plainview delivers his oil pitch — "Ladies and gentlemen, I've traveled over half our state to be here tonight" — the audience hears a man performing language rather than using it naturally, because they have already seen him operate in silence for fifteen minutes.