80th Academy Awards Oscar Nominations 2008 - Best Picture
There Will Be Blood
"There Will Be Blood" (Paramount Vantage and Miramax)
A JoAnne Sellar/Ghoulardi Film Company Production
JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Lupi, Producers
This is the first nomination for both JoAnne Sellar and Daniel Lupi. This is the fifth nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson and the first in this category. He is also nominated this year in the Directing
and Adapted Screenplay categories. He was nominated for his original screenplays for Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999).
A sprawling epic about family, faith, power and oil, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is set on the
radical frontier of California’s turn-of-the-century petroleum boom. The story chronicles the rise
of one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who transforms himself from a down-and-out
silver miner raising a son on his own into a self-made oil tycoon.
When Plainview gets a mysterious tip that there’s a little town out West where an ocean of oil is
oozing out of the ground, he heads with his son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), to take their chances in
dust-worn Little Boston. In this hardscrabble town, where the main excitement centers around
the holy roller church of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview and H.W.
make their lucky strike. But even as the well raises all of their fortunes, nothing will remain the
same as conflicts escalate and every human value – love, hope, community, belief, ambition and
even the bond between father and son – is imperiled by corruption, deception and the flow of oil.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD is the fifth film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson
(PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE, MAGNOLIA, BOOGIE NIGHTS, HARD EIGHT). Anderson’s
screenplay is loosely based upon the classic, 1920s muck-raking novel Oil!
tycoon, in the mold of such historical oil pioneers as Edward Doheny and John Rockefeller, Plainview
will bring progress and riches to a land that has never known them, at a cost that will blacken his very
soul.
As portrayed by Academy Award®-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel Plainview is a man
whose charm, aspirations and uncompromising obsession with remaining self-made will stir up a
maelstrom in the Central California town of Little Boston. As oil gushes up from the ground,
Plainview will bring changes of operatic sweep to this insular world – pitting belief, hope, love and
hard work against cynicism, greed, seduction and monstrous corruption.
Shot in Marfa, Texas where the legendary oil-themed GIANT was filmed decades ago, Anderson and
a devoted cast and crew have crafted a symphonic tapestry of images that appear to come to vivid,
visceral life right out of a sepia-toned photograph -- yet are completely original and intimately specific
to Daniel Plainview’s meteoric rise and bloodcurdling descent.
THE STORY
Paul Thomas Anderson, a two-time Academy Award® nominee, has previously directed four films set
in the West, though each has been its own entirely distinctive exploration of the territory. His first
film, HARD EIGHT, was a crime thriller set amidst the casinos of Las Vegas. This was followed by
BOOGIE NIGHTS, a kaleidoscopic look at the adult film industry; MAGNOLIA an interwoven tale of
one devastating and magical night in the San Fernando Valley; and PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE, that rare
fresh take on the romantic comedy. THERE WILL BE BLOOD marks Anderson’s first journey into
the foundational days of California’s lavish wealth and power, before movies, before high-tech, when
oil was the driving force of the land and brought hungry, ambitious men Westward in search of fortune
and a new future.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD began with Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!
Paul Thomas Anderson was primarily inspired by the 500-page novel’s first 150 pages, wherein
Sinclair delves in exquisite detail into the gritty, precarious lives of oil prospectors and oil workers.
He was also drawn to Sinclair’s pitting of unbridled greed against unchecked spiritual idealism, each
with their own insidious consequences. From that foundation of inspiration, he found his own
characters of Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday wending in their own directions, towards their own
intertwined fates.
Anderson began to do further research – prowling through the oil museums that dot California –
letting the era’s plentiful, richly atmospheric photographs further fire up his imagination. “You get
giddy looking at all those amazing photos,” Anderson notes, “getting a real sense of how people lived
their lives. There’s so much history in the oil areas around Bakersfield -- they’re filled with the
grandsons of oil workers and lots of folklore. So we did an incredible amount of research and I got to
be a student again and that was a thrill.”
80th Academy Awards Oscar Nominations 2008
Best Picture
Best Animated Feature
Best Actress
Best Actor
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