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Reader SurveyOld-Fashioned Filmmaking
Nov 1, 2007 12:01 PM, By Michael Goldman
Paul Thomas Anderson's team keeps There Will be Blood ultratraditional.
For the iconic shot of the Daniel Plainview's (Daniel Day-Lewis) face smeared with oil, staring at an oil-well fire, DP Robert Elswit, ASC, relied exclusively on firelight. He shot several scenes by firelight, candlelight, or in modest light, despite the fact that he used slow film stock for the project.
Cutting approach
Tichenor cut the movie on an Avid Media Composer system, configured by Pivotal Post, Los Angeles, with about 1TB of storage, and with an Avid Unity system serving as editorial's primary server. During the shoot, he was based in Hollywood, but periodically visited the set in Texas, cutting in Avid Xpress Pro on a MacBook Pro computer attached to a terabyte G-drive and an Avid Mojo DNA video acceleration box. Once the shoot wrapped, editorial was physically moved by airplane and truck to New York to allow Anderson to work closer to his girlfriend and young daughter.
Anderson gives great credit to Tichenor for the final product. “[We're] a dysfunctional couple, but much of the credit goes to Dylan for telling me to stay on target,” Anderson says.
“It seems to me,” Anderson says, “that the only people who really even know what an editor does and how valuable the editor is to a movie are directors. A mass audience probably thinks that the editor is someone who physically splices two things together, which is crazy. In fact, he's ultimately your strongest collaborator, and I would say, my most important collaborator. This film could have been a million different things without Dylan, and I don't say that lightly. I really mean that. He keeps reminding me, ‘We need to tell the story, let's not stray,’ which can certainly be my instinct sometimes.”
The director says that there was some fat to be trimmed in There Will Be Blood. “[It was] extraneous stuff that was necessary for Paul to shoot in order to figure out what is really the crux [of a particular scene],” Tichenor says. “But it is better to have too much available, and cut out what you do not need, than to not have what you desperately need. Specifically, we shot material showing [characters] building oil derricks — whole sequences, things that might end up on the DVD. But they didn't belong in the [final version]. As you see the skeleton of the movie start to solidify, it becomes important to become efficient and not be distracting.”
One key scene, in which Plainview's nemesis, preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) forces Plainview to admit his sins before he can be baptized, exemplifies the kind of subtle cutting work that Anderson and Tichenor collaborated on during the project.
“They aren't really tricks, but they are little moments that jump out at you,” Tichenor says. “Since Paul is so good at coverage, we had lots of angles to work with in that scene [in the church] that were so effective. Things like cutting in the middle of swings, or not even swings, but where you sort of fake it — Paul Dano says something in a close-up and turns in mid-sentence, and you pop back to the medium-wide shot to show him smacking [Day-Lewis'] character again. That helps get the audience excited — you feel the reaction of being right there.”
