How Daniel Day-Lewis created Daniel Plainview for ‘There Will Be Blood’
Several film performances by Daniel Day-Lewis will go down in history as some of the greatest of all time, including his efforts in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread. But it’s another Anderson film that seems to stick out from the rest, the quite brilliant 2007 release of There Will Be Blood.
Day-Lewis played the role of Daniel Plainview, a silver miner come oilman who desperately searches southern California for a richness of crude oil at the conclusion of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th. It was a performance of a lifetime and one of the most convincing moments of cinema ever displayed on screen.
The first thing for Day-Lewis to do to prepare for playing Plainview was to read Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, on which Anderson based his screenplay. “There’s a lot of great detail about the world of the drillers and the prospectors,” Day-Lewis said in an interview with Chicago Movie Magazine. “I’ve read the book. But there were no clues there other than the introduction to the oilfields.”
The acting legend also studied the life and work of the American oil tycoon Edward Doheny in order to properly inform his character. Day-Lewis claims that Doheny was “one of the principal characters in the building” of Los Angeles and noted that the There Will Be Blood cast and crew actually shot the film’s iconic scenes in the Doheny mansion.
Interestingly, given the fact that Day-Lewis is often tagged with certain degrees of preparation ahead of a particular role, he claims he did not make any special arrangements for playing Plainview: “I don’t know what that says about me, I wish I could say there was some monstrous… well, there are a couple of monstrous members of the family that I suppose I could have modelled him on, but in this case, I didn’t. There was no model.”
The actor didn’t even visit an actual oil rig and further reiterated the fact that there seems to be a bit of a misrepresentation of his methods. “Considering the way that I work very often, I do feel I’ve been soundly misrepresented so many times that there’s almost no point in even talking about it,” he said. “People tend to focus on the details of the preparation, the practical details in this clinic or that prison and so on and so forth.”
But for Day-Lewis, the actual preparation is in the engagement with the script, with the material from one’s perspective. He continued: “For me, [to] fuel one’s fascination, one’s curiosity, the principal work is always in the imagination. That’s where it’s going to happen if it’s going to happen anywhere at all.”
One of the best features of Plainview’s character was his booming voice, and Day-Lewis also noted that he didn’t base it on anyone in particular. “One or two people have pointed out that they thought I’d somehow modelled it on John Huston,” he said. “There’s a great deal of freedom there, maybe potentially too much, to experiment. But I listened to some recordings of John Huston because, at a given moment, the vigour and delivery of his voice suddenly came into my mind from nowhere.”
While Huston was perhaps a background influence, again, the real work came from Day-Lewis’ imagination. “I try not to dismember the life of a man into separate parts, physical or spiritual or vocal,” he said. “I try to allow that life to reveal itself in some way as if I don’t really have much to do with it. Nearly always, it comes with hearing a voice in my mind’s ear.”
So, while like any actor worth their salt, Day-Lewis undertook his due preparation for playing Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, reading the source material and considering the kind of voice he might use, but the real genius of the performance came from the fact that Plainview really came from deep within Day-Lewis’ heart and mind.
