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December 2007
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Press Conference Interview with Daniel Day Lewis and Director Paul Thomas Anderson


THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Press Conference Interview with Daniel Day Lewis and Director Paul Thomas Anderson
, continued
by Brad Balfour

December 24, 2007

Q: How did you prepare for the three big confrontation scenes between Daniel and Eli? What went into filming them?

PTA: First up is the reservoir—Daniel takes the first swing.

DDL: It was a very difficult day, that day. Things weren't going right, people were doing all kinds of things to try and fix the pipe which needed to be working in the background, filling the reservoir. We lost a lot of a day in this place, which we just couldn't afford to do. Time was very tight. Essentially, out of the necessity often something interesting is born, and of course the tracking shot which covered the whole scene. We didn't know if we could make it work, because obviously with the hits, you have to get each right at the right angle. In a moving shot that covers the whole scene, the chances of getting everything right in that scene were really slim. So we attacked it like that, and there was nothing you could do to get ready for that except just try it and try again.

PTA: And the next day we got to shoot the baptism scene, so Paul got to have his way. And that's a very similar thing, with one exception. We didn't rehearse it, we just knew where they would stand and had a couple of cameras rolling. We decided to get the scene before the slapping starts, and then we would start slapping. But Paul either forgot or decided to take his own initiative and slap Daniel across the face.


Q: What about the last scene?

PTA: That's a fog. That's two days of fog in a bowling alley.

PD: It was fun.

DDL: We actually shot that scene in the Doheny mansion. Sinclair loosely based the character in his book, "Oil!, on the life of Doheny. So by second remove, there was also a connection there. This was this huge, great, gloomy pile—it was the pyramid that he built to himself with the wealth he accumulated.

It's overseen by the Doheny trust, and the Doheny trust employs a very large army of people in extremely neat uniforms to watch every goddamn move that you make in the place. I don't know what they thought we were doing in there, but they seemed quite disturbed by the whole thing. We had already entered in a realm, and we didn't know one thing from another. It was very tight time—again, we had very little time to play with.


Q: The score is really interesting, like another character in the film. How did the score come to be?

PTA: It sort of begins and ends with Jonny Greenwood. I suppose the good idea that I had [was] to ask him to do it. He had a couple pieces that existed before that he'd written for orchestra. He's better known for his day job; he's in a band called Radiohead. He has written a few orchestral pieces that I heard and thought were terrific. I had known him for a few years and asked him to do it, and showed him the film. He said 'OK, great.' I gave him a copy of the movie, and about three weeks later he came back with two hours of music.

I have no idea how or when he did it, but he did it. It's kind of amazing. I can't say that I did any real guiding or had any real contribution to it. I just took what he gave us and found the right places for it. A couple of things that he'd written on piano that we then took to an orchestra, a couple things that he'd written for string quartet that just went straight into the film. We did that over the course of a couple months. It was a great experience working with him.

DDL: Paul recorded the music at Abbey Road in London. The astonishing thing about Jonny is that he didn't study composition. I think he was a violinist, and then he went into the band and the band became his life. But somehow along the way he taught himself composition. He is the resident composer for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He scored the whole thing himself. I don't know how he did it.


Q: Paul, you thanked Robert Altman in the credits—did his film "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" have any influence on this film?

PTA: Well everything of Robert's films has been an inspiration to me. I saw his film when I was starting out, and "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" was certainly one them, "Nashville, everything. All of them. We became pretty close in the last few years of his life. I got the job of sitting next to him on "A Prairie Home Companion," for insurance reasons. My partner [Maya Rudolph] was in the film, and she was pregnant at the time. Just in case anything happened with Bob I was hired to sit there next to him. I can't tell you what I took from it.

Obviously it was a privilege and an honor and all that, but just such an amazing good time. For 30 days, to sit next to him. Bob was very good at relaxing; he was a very relaxed director. I don't know if he always was like that. I think he might have been. I would find myself getting uptight about things, and he just sort of looked at me like "What are you worried about? It's all going to be fine."

Maybe I learned that from him, to relax a little bit more. He died while we were cutting ["There Will Be Blood"]. I was planning to show it to him. I was in Ireland with Daniel working on the film, and I was planning to come back and show it to him and never got a chance to. That's really a drag that he didn't get to see it. So, yeah, we dedicated the film to him.


Q: What was it like to work with Dillon Freasier, the kid who plays the son, H.W. Plainview?

Ciaran Hinds: I joined just a bit later after the guys had started, and Daniel and Paul talked about this extraordinary young fellow they had found to play H.W. I found it to be a great joy—a very natural young fellow with a lot of natural cheek, but for someone so young, a lovely dignity.

PTA: Cassandra Kulukundis was the casting director. We did start out in Los Angeles and New York, reading young men with headshots and that kind of thing. We thought that they should be sent to their rooms. We thought we needed a boy from Texas who knew how to shoot shotguns and live in that world. She asked around schools, she said, "I'm looking for a man in a young boy's body," and one principal said "I have just the boy." And it was Dylan.

Cassandra didn't really have him read scenes or anything like that. We talked with him and it was clear he was a very special young man. He took to it really well. We're all so fond of him. He'd never been on a movie set, he'd never seen movie cameras, nothing like that, but he loved it. I remember having the first costume fitting. You would think that most 10-year-old boys would not looking forward to wearing britches. But the second he saw them he said 'I've always wanted to wear britches.'

DDL: I agree with everything that Paul and Ciaran said about him. I felt very close to Dillon, I'm very fond of him. He's a cowboy, by the way. His father is a rancher. He's got his rodeo buckles, he's won numerous events, he does round-ups, he's the real thing. He has this strange maturity that's very unusual—something that a lot of kids his age might have in common in that part of the world. He's really used to hard work. He's got hands—you could knock out a horse with those hands. He's the most delightful person. He had that curiosity, as Paul was saying. Everything that was going on, every department, he was just constantly drinking in all this new information with such excitement.

There was a moment—as we approached the moment when we were going to start shooting—I started to worry a little bit. We were quite close, we had a nice friendship, and I thought, "Man, how's he going to feel when I start treating him harshly?"

So I thought I'd better have a conversation with him about that. I kind of sat him down and created this sort of portentous atmosphere. I said, "Dillon, you know how I feel about you. There are going to be moments in the next months to come when I'm going to speak harshly to you, I'm not going to treat you nicely. I hope you understand that I love you and so on…" And he looked at me like I was insane, like "Of course I know that." He was just one step ahead of us, pretty much most of the time.

PTA: He just needed the go-ahead every once in a while. He had to struggle with Ciaran and he had to slap Daniel. He didn't like to do it initially.

DDL: He developed a taste for it though.

PTA: But once we said, yeah, you have to hit him across the face as hard as you can, it's OK. And his mom said, 'You'd better do it, Dillon. They told you to do it, you can do it, it's OK.'

DDL: His mom just raised him so beautifully. She no longer is, but at the time his mom was a state trooper. She wanted to do things right and she thought she'd better check out this bunch of people that were going to be taking care of her son. She said, 'I'll go rent a movie that fellow did.' And she went and got "Gangs of New York. She was absolutely appalled. She thought she was releasing her dear child into the hands of a monster. There was a flurry of phone calls, and somebody sent a copy of "The Age of Innocence to her. Apparently that did the trick.


If we're to see Daniel's character as less than a monster, or more than a monster, it seems the relationship with his son is the key. How do all four of you understand his relationship with the boy?

PTA: I think his relationship to the boy—I wish Daniel could have done better with illness. But the trouble that he has facing up to what happens to the boy. It would have been nice if he could have done better with that.

DDL: You know, there's a real connection between those two. It's not pure exploitation, even though Daniel kind of taunts him later on, the idea of a cute face to buy land. Even earlier on there's a sort of joke made of it. It definitely goes deeper than that. The problem is that Plainview has no understanding of what the responsibilities of a parent are. His son is preternaturally responsible in a way that a genuine partner would be for the day-to-day running of his business.

From Plainview's point of view anything that interferes with the running of a business is something that he has to take care of, for his son's sake as well. He doesn't know how to deal with this damaged creature. He's a child—he doesn't know how to be a father to him. He's a friend and a partner, but he doesn't know how to take care of him as a father. He has no means of knowing that.


Q: This film is being talked about for all sorts of awards.

DDL: We are both in equal measures very excited and very nervous as well. We certainly understand the reactions we had so far that there are people that will go with us and others might not There are a lot really good films out this year with wonderful work in them. So the main thing is to get it out there and hope people see it.


Q: When you do polarize people then know you are having an effect.

DDL: It's kind of nice; at least we know they're having a discussion...yes.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD opens on December 28, 2007


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