There Will Be Blood 25 pages

This wiki explores There Will Be Blood (2007), Paul Thomas Anderson's epic drama about an oil prospector's consuming ambition in turn-of-the-century California. Daniel Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Daniel Plainview, a self-made oilman whose single-minded pursuit of wealth sets him against Paul Dano's Eli Sunday, a young evangelist who mirrors Plainview's hunger for power in spiritual form. Robert Elswit won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

"I was trying to find something that was 100 percent straightforward, old-fashioned storytelling." — Paul Thomas Anderson, IndieWire (2017)

Film & Story

There Will Be Blood (2007) serves as the central hub page. Plot Summary (There Will Be Blood) tracks Plainview's thirty-year arc from silver miner to oil baron to drunken murderer. 40 Beats (There Will Be Blood) narrates the film in 40 turns mapped to a modified Yorke five-act structure, every beat footnoted to caption-file line numbers. Cast and Characters (There Will Be Blood) covers the principal players and their roles in the Plainview-Sunday conflict.

Director & Key Crew

Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood) examines the director's departure from ensemble filmmaking, his adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel, and his organic on-set method that favors accidents over planning. Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) documents the actor's year-long preparation, his construction of Plainview's voice from John Huston recordings and period documents, and the performance that swept every major acting prize. Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) tells the story of a last-minute casting change — fewer than four days to prepare opposite an actor with over a year of character work — that produced the film's essential antagonist. Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) covers the Oscar-winning anamorphic cinematography, the vintage Pathe lenses, and the controlled disaster of the derrick fire. Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood) traces how a Radiohead guitarist composed a dissonant horror-film score at Abbey Road Studios, only to have it ruled ineligible for the Academy Award. Jack Fisk (There Will Be Blood) documents the production designer who built Little Boston from the ground up on a Texas ranch, drawing inspiration from Marfa's own railroad-parallel layout.

Key Sequences

The Silent Opening analyzes the film's fourteen-minute wordless prologue — one of the longest in mainstream American cinema since the sound era — and how it establishes Plainview's character through pure physical action. The Derrick Fire examines the pivotal gas blowout that deafens H.W. and exposes Plainview's priorities, shot as the only fully storyboarded sequence in a film that otherwise thrived on spontaneity. The Baptism Scene traces the structural mirror between Plainview's mud-beating of Eli and Eli's baptismal revenge, with the forced confession of abandoning H.W. as the scene's most complex moment. The Bowling Alley Finale covers the fifteen-year time jump, the inversion of the baptism, and Plainview's murder of Eli at Greystone Mansion. The Milkshake Speech documents the Teapot Dome origins of the line, its function as both geological metaphor and existential parable, and its afterlife as one of the most quoted scenes in twenty-first-century cinema.

Analysis & Themes

Themes and Analysis (There Will Be Blood) provides the central analytical framework for the film. Capitalism vs Religion (There Will Be Blood) argues that Plainview and Eli are not opposites but rivals competing for the same territory, tracing the six-step humiliation cycle that structures their conflict. The Father-Son Relationship (There Will Be Blood) follows the arc from adoption as business decision through abandonment to the devastating "bastard from a basket" rejection. Plainview as Anti-Hero examines Plainview's open misanthropy, his refusal to change, and how the Henry subplot serves as the structural hinge that delivers him into Eli's hands. Oil! and the Upton Sinclair Adaptation documents what Anderson kept, cut, and invented from the source novel — inverting the protagonist, evacuating the politics, and keeping only the period texture.

Setting & Production

Marfa and the California Oil Fields covers the irony of a California story shot in Texas, Jack Fisk's construction of Little Boston, and how the three principal locations — mine shaft, frontier settlement, Beverly Hills mansion — trace the arc of American resource extraction. Production History (There Will Be Blood) reveals the full production story from Upton Sinclair's novel through the Marfa shoot. Critical Reception and Legacy (There Will Be Blood) documents the film's near-universal acclaim and its steady rise to consensus status as one of the defining American films of the twenty-first century. Physical Media Releases (There Will Be Blood) covers the DVD, Blu-ray, and anticipated Criterion 4K UHD.

Structure & Graphics

Structure Graphics (There Will Be Blood) visualizes the narrative architecture of the film across 40 beats, tracking Plainview's control trajectory from the mine shaft to the bowling alley.

Threads: The wiki traces several interconnected arguments. The Plainview-Eli conflict operates as a series of transactional humiliations — each precisely mirroring a previous one — rather than a conventional rivalry. Plainview's misanthropy is present from the first frame and success merely gives it room to express itself; the film tracks escalation, not transformation. The father-son relationship tests whether Plainview is capable of genuine connection, and the answer — he is, and it doesn't matter, because the instrumentality always wins — provides the film's emotional engine. Anderson's formal choices (the wordless opening, the horror-film score, the fifteen-year time jump) serve a character who operates at the edge of conventional narrative structure.