Paul Thomas Anderson on writing for “holy grail’ Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Day-Lewis must be one of cinema’s most mysterious actors. Paul Thomas Anderson has been instrumental in both creating this mystery and tearing it apart. Take, for example, the moment he revealed Lewis’ penchant for US reality show Naked and Afraid. Here, Anderson opens up about working with Hollywood’s enigmatic method man on his 2007 film There Will Be Blood.
Based on Upton Sinclair’s book Oil, There Will Be Blood focuses on silver miner-turned-oil prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who decides to relocate the oil-rich California. With his trustworthy adopted son HW providing a reliable family-man image, Plainview goes about cheating local landowners out of their land and property. Things come to a head when local preacher Eli Sunday begins to suspect Daniel’s real intentions, kicking off a rivalry that threatens to spill over into violence.
Following the film’s release, Anderson and Day-Lewis sat down to discuss the making of There Will Be Blood in detail. The director was quick to dismiss the idea that he had written the script with Lewis in mind, though he did admit that the actor quickly became the “holy grail” of the cast. “I didn’t want to grab onto the thought and keep on thinking ‘this is who I’m writing it for,” Anderson began, “because I didn’t know Daniel. I didn’t want to make presumptions about him or anything like that – although I obviously respected him as an actor. I thought ‘well that’s the Holy Grail if you can get to it.’ I really tried to just dash those hopes and write this man. But that being said, it kept on coming that Daniel would be the right man for the job if he decided that he wanted to do it.”
Anderson’s desire to retain the unknowability of Daniel Plainview continued well into the rehearsal period. Recalling how Day-Lewis developed the role while he was still living in Ireland, the director explained: “the good thing, quite honestly, is that the majority of the work Daniel and I did [prior to shooting] was long distance, and so it’s still a bit of a mystery to me. I don’t really wanna know what he was up to late at night, in his room, with his tape recorder. I don’t really wanna peek behind the curtain,” he concluded.
“I wanna know a little bit. I wanna be there to provide for him and collaborate and talk…” if you’re looking to find out more about their unique working relationship, you can check out Paul Thomas Anderson’s interview with Daniel Day-Lewis below.
