There Will Be Blood (2007) Script Review | #7 WGA 101 Greatest Scripts of the 21st Century

Paul Thomas Anderson paints a dark portrait of ambition, greed, and ruthless at the turn of the 20th century.

Logline: At the turn of the century, ruthless oil prospector, Daniel Plainview, moves to oil-rich California, projecting an image of a trustworthy family man to con local landowners into selling their valuable properties in exchange for building their community. But Plainview’s accumulation of wealth and power brings his true self to the surface as he begins to slowly alienate everyone around him.

Written by: Paul Thomas Anderson

Based on: Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Pages: 132

Scenes: 138

Perhaps the best way to understand the There Will Be Blood screenplay is to study it as a horror story and a boxing match story before treating it as an allegory. For instance, The Shining crossed with Raging Bull to create something altogether different.

The horror is to witness the slow decay of an oil prospector into a wealthy but increasingly wretched man, abandoned and alone. The boxing match refer to the feuding between the mentioned prospector and a pastor on whose family land the former made a bulk of his wealth.

Daniel Plainview is a ruthless man. A complicated man, ambiguous in his intentions and character. When an accident kills his mining acquaintance, H.B. Ailman, Daniel adopts the man’s orphaned baby, H.W., as his own. In the entirety of the story, it might be the only kindest action he’s made; except even that might be simply to create an aura of a respectable man than any other reason. As time marches into the twentieth century, oil booms in demand. When Paul Sunday comes to tell him that his family ranch in Little Boston is rich in oil, Daniel and H.W set out to California to make their fortune.

But he doesn’t stop there. Daniel quickly moves to buy the land all around, knowing that it would be easier and cheaper to do so before the land starts yielding the oil. Here, his ambitions clash with that of the aforementioned pastor, Eli Sunday, the brother of Paul. Daniel dislikes him because… well, I don’t think Daniel likes anyone. But I suspect he dislikes Eli especially because he senses him to be false and hypocritical. Their first real antagonistic clash occurs around page 45 in scene 51, when Daniel says he’ll allow Eli to bless the first well, only to publicly ignore him.

As drilling is underway, several events begin to unfold. H.W and Mary Sunday, both around the same age, become friends and companions, foreshadowing their eventual courtship and marriage as adults; H.W also loses his hearing in an explosion at the mine on page 56 and goes deaf.

I want to take a moment to focus on Scene 71, shortly after the accident, when Daniel cradles the hysterical child and tries to soothe him. It’s such an unusual moment of tenderness from the man that you would think he’s faking it… and yet, I don’t think he is. It seems like he genuinely loves the boy.

This is especially true when Daniel is prepared to pay for a special needs teacher in San Francisco leave the city and come set up a new school in the area so that he doesn’t have to send H.W. away.

And in his anger, he publicly attacks Eli and humiliates the pastor further, presumably out of rage over what happened to his adopted son.

The story takes a new direction at the Midpoint on page 67-68 when a man arrives and claims to be his half-brother, Henry Plainview. Although Daniel is overwhelmed at first, he’s also suspicious. But eventually, this dissipates. Henry wants to work for Daniel. And in Henry, Daniel finds a confidante and friend in whom he can trust and talk to freely; enough to baldly state what he wants.

But this new development appears to goad H.W, causing him to set the house on fire, which leads Daniel to abandon the boy on a train with Fletcher Hamilton, his business partner, to take him to the special needs school in San Francisco. (Before that, there is a sweet moment when Mary tries to entertain H.W at Eli’s church shortly after the boy goes deaf).

Troubles, though, continue mounting. Standard Oil tries to buy his wells, and although it’s a good deal, Daniel turns down their offer, sensing he stands to make more by not selling, but at the risk of antagonizing the large oil corporation. According to screenwriting guru, Blake Snyder, this is known as the ‘Bad Guys Closing In’ part of the script’s second half, where pressure mounts on the protagonist. At the same time, Fletcher is uneasy about Henry, but Daniel won’t let him make inquiries. He has come to emotionally depend on Henry.

Alas, this rare moment of trust is soon betrayed, though not with malice. On page 92, as the story heads to the close of Act 2, Henry fails to recognize a reference to their hometown in Fond du Lac, kicking in Daniel’s paranoia. At gunpoint, he forces Henry to come clean: He is not Henry after all. He was friends with the real Henry Plainview, who died of tuberculosis, and took his identity. But he insists that he is Daniel’s friend, and not trying to hurt him. Any guesses on how Daniel responds?

Yeah. Ouch.

As the story heads into Act 3, things head into strange territory. In order to secure an easement for Daniel to run his pipeline through a rancher’s land, the prospector grudgingly concedes to publicly repent in Eli’s church. Unsurprisingly, Eli uses the opportunity to humiliate Daniel in retaliation for all the smarts he was subjected to.

Meanwhile, H.W moves back with his teacher, George Reynolds. Daniel begins to rapidly expand his business with his son, while Eli becomes a missionary and travels to spread his gospel. And here, time moves quickly; an adult H.W and Mary get married around 1927. But H.W wants to dissolve the partnership with his father, and set out to Mexico, start his own company. An enraged Daniel doesn’t take it too well, although it’s clear that H.W has inherited his father’s steeliness for business while retaining his humanity.

A few years later, Daniel is visited by Eli. He has a proposition to drill on Bandy’s property, which Daniel could never buy. Daniel agrees, but only on the condition that Eli admits he is a fake. After some hedging, Eli acquiesces. And then Daniel drops the bombshell.

Which leads to Daniel bludgeoning Eli to death, culminating in an ending that can only be best described as ironic and morbidly funny.

There Will Be Blood is based on the novel Oil! By Upton Sinclair; or more accurately, it’s based on the first 100 pages or so. Paul Thomas Anderson came across it while in London. Intrigued, he began to undertake trips to Bakersfield to visit museums that housed research and artifacts about the oilmen in the early 20^th century. He also read Margaret Leslie Davis’s The Dark Side of Fortune, a biography of Edward L. Doheny, the American oil tycoon, upon whom Daniel Plainview was loosely based on. Another influence while he was writing was John Huston’s seminal classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a film that Anderson would watch every night before going to bed so as to absorb Huston’s straightforward approach to tackling the subject of greed.

Paul Thomas Anderson is one of my favorite screenwriters and filmmakers. His work is bold, magnificent, and daring; often, they take place in worlds that aren’t often seen on the screen. Boogie Nights dived into the pornography industry during the 1970s; There Will Be Blood takes place in the oil industry during the 1900s. Although the script is 132 pages, it never feels excessive. Compared to his scripts for Boogie Nights and Magnolia, this one is restrained and economical in its writing. Since he’s directing it, there’s plenty of camera directions used throughout. It harkens to the older style of screenwriting from the past, which would be likelier to have camera directions.

Notice, too, his use of pauses, beats, and silences to communicate and convey meaning and understanding versus dialogue, as well relying on action and imagery. It is a prime example of showing versus telling.

Like he did with Phantom Thread (#87 on the WGA List of 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century), if there is any dialogue required for creating mise-en-scene but unrelated to the main narrative, he will make an indication to this; presumably, this dialogue—likely to be technical jargon—will be worked out on the set.

If his earlier scripts were chatty, this is restrained to the point of being sparse. The effect, however, is startling. When dialogue is spoken after pages of silence, it is like an explosion of silence. In fact, the first seven pages of the screenplay contains no dialogue whatsoever.

There Will Be Blood came out in 2007, which might go down in history as one of the best years for cinema in the 21^st century, alongside works that made it on the WGA List, such as No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, Juno, and Zodiac. Although Anderson lost the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay that year to No Country for Old Men (that film dominated Oscar night), it remains highly lauded. I admire the There Will Be Blood screenplay more than I liked it, which feels like blasphemy, but I appreciate what Anderson has created here, as I have with all of his works. It’s the written equivalent of listening to a violin being played with a razor blade: an unnerving, jangling effect. It’s unsettling.

Notes:

Modell, Josh (January 2, 2008) | Paul Thomas Anderson (A.V. Club)

Hirschberg, Lynn (November 7, 2007) | The New Frontier’s Man (NY Times)

There Will Be Blood Production Notes (Cigarettes and Red Vines)