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DCP BlogrollOld-Fashioned Filmmaking
Nov 1, 2007 12:01 PM, By Michael Goldman
Paul Thomas Anderson's team keeps There Will be Blood ultratraditional.
Photo: Francois Duhamel. All photos: Copyright: © 2007 by PARAMOUNT VANTAGE, a Division of PARAMOUNT PICTURES, and MIRAMAX FILM CORP. All Rights Reserved.
As he releases his dark character study about the rise and fall of a turn-of-the-century oil baron, Director Paul Thomas Anderson proudly touts his strict adherence to traditional filmmaking techniques while making Paramount Vantage's There Will Be Blood.
“We're Luddites,” he recently told millimeter. “Dinosaurs a little bit. I'm always trying to stay away from the word ‘digital,’ that's for sure.”
After a pause, in the interest of full disclosure, Anderson says, “We certainly don't cut on film, and there were some places where we needed visual effects, obviously.” Nonetheless, the old-fashioned theme rings true. The movie, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as narcissistic oil millionaire Daniel Plainview, was primarily shot on location in and around tiny Marfa, Texas, where the production built intricate sets designed by Production Designer Jack Fisk. It relied on the skill of Cinematographer Robert Elswit, ASC, to capture imagery in the anamorphic format — images that received very little post manipulation in most cases. At Anderson's insistence, the production relied exclusively on film dailies and never seriously considered the digital-intermediate process.
Anderson, Elswit, and others associated with the production view the shoot as a throwback to the days when crews routinely spent weeks at remote sites, engaging in the hard labor of location filmmaking. (George Stevens' Giant, a thematic ancestor to There Will Be Blood, for instance, spent several hard weeks in Marfa in the summer of 1955.)
“We shared a real sense of adventure [on location], and I think that translates into what you see on the screen,” says Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay. “Not having your usual comforts around, for a film crew, helps you commit to the one single thing you are doing — making this story happen. It's good we didn't have it too easy. That would have taken all the fun out of it.”
Elswit vociferously agrees. “[The whole team was] working in one small place — on one ranch, driving to the same place every day,” he says. “We could walk from one end to the other in a half hour. It was almost like we lived there. It's probably the way films were made in the 1930s and '40s, when truckloads of equipment went to the middle of nowhere and stayed there. It doesn't happen anymore, but it did on this shoot. I hadn't been on a location shoot like that in a long time.”
