The director Edward Berger called “one of the masters”
Following the success of the epic anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front, which won the Academy Award for ‘Best International Feature’, Edward Berger was suddenly the European director whose name was on everybody’s lips. Berger had already directed the German film Jack and All My Loving, but it was his 2022 effort that earned him the highest praise.
The film is based on the 1929 Erich Maria Remarque novel of the same name and stars the likes of Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Daniel Bruhl and Devid Striesow, following a young idealistic soldier as he enlists in the German Army for World War I before being exposed to the brutal and violent realities of conflict.
With such acclaim to his name with the success of All Quiet on the Western Front, Berger once turned his attention to the other movies and filmmakers that have inspired him the most in a feature with A-Frame. After naming the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos and Francis Ford Coppola, Berger turned his attention to one of his all-time greats.
“Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the masters for me,” Berger noted, “And all of the movies that I’m mentioning here have that in common. They’re not just simple stories. They’re trying to capture something larger. And the way P.T. Anderson sort of demystifies the American dream is wonderful.”
Discussing Anderson’s masterpiece 2007 film There Will Be Blood, Berger continued: “This movie has influenced me the most in that he marries music and images so well and uses music to deconstruct the images. I remember when Daniel Day-Lewis crawls away from the hole that he dug and the camera pans to the beautiful landscape — rocky and arid but still beautiful — and then Jonny Greenwood’s sort of twinging, beehive string music comes on like a swarm of wasp attacking you.”
“It gives a complete new meaning to this landscape and really underscores the harshness of it,” Berger added. There Will Be Blood sees Daniel Day-Lewis make one of his greatest-ever performances as Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned oilman during the oil boom of Southern California in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Also starring Paul Dano, Anderson’s film documents Plainview’s ruthless and bloodthirsty quest for wealth and remains one of the director’s best movies.
There Will Be Blood also had a big influence on All Quiet on the Western Front, particularly on its score. Bergman admitted: “There’s another piece of music that I never forget, when the oil tower explodes and Daniel Day-Lewis rushes to rescue his adopted son. There’s a bunch of percussion, and it’s just chaos. It’s pure chaos. After a while, I realized, ‘Oh, it’s the oil rig. It’s the machinery of the oil rig.’ One of the things I said to Volker, our composer who did the music for All Quiet on the Western Front, is, ‘Destroy the images.’ And that came from the inspiration of There Will Be Blood.”
