There Will Be Blood

About this event

(Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007, USA, 158 minutes)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature, made after a period of five years where he didn’t release a new film, was a breakthrough in many ways for this already celebrated talent. Marking the first time he adapted a previously existing work into a screenplay, PTA uses Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! as the jumping off point, but partway through his screenplay goes off the rails the novel set and never looks back. With Daniel Day Lewis in the iconic role of oilman Daniel Plainview, paired against an up-to-the-task Paul Dano as the preacher Eli Sunday, There Will Be Blood shows a maturation of PTA’s style and now, on the eve of its 20 th anniversary, is regarded as one of the greatest films so far this millennium.