Quentin Tarantino justifies the “bloodsucking” actions of Daniel Plainview in ‘There Will Be Blood’
Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie There Will Be Blood is often considered his masterwork. In the years since its release, the film has drawn acclaim from all four corners of the earth, including Anderson’s fellow director, Quentin Tarantino, who has expressed his admiration for the movie on many occasions.
There Will Be Blood stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned oil baron in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Plainview is one of the most fascinating characters to ever grace the screen, and his quest for success in the oil industry leads him to become a man of true heartlessness and ruthlessness, even towards his own adopted son.
Interestingly, though, Tarantino believes that the film’s opening sequence provides justification for Plainview’s actions throughout the film, often violent and occasionally “bloodsucking”. The director once gave his thoughts on Anderson’s movie for Sky Movies and analysed its first 20 minutes.
“The opening 20 minutes of the movie, which is more or less silent, is actually quite terrific,” Tarantino said. “One of the things to take in is when Daniel Day-Lewis’ character breaks his leg in the mine and finds the gold. Look at that surrounding landscape around him, those rocks; it seems like he’s out in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t show his journey back to town.”
“But that journey back to town would literally be a movie unto itself because literally, he’s got a broken leg,” the director continued. “He would have actually had to drag himself by his elbows, miles and miles through the roughest terrain you could imagine before he finally got to the town and actually sought medical care while having to leave the gold that he found.”
Those actions of Plainview at the beginning of There Will Be Blood are not merely a “contrivance” or “misstep”, argued Tarantino, before suggesting that it’s Day-Lewis’ sheer embodiment of the character that audiences get the sense that he might have actually crawled all the way back to town after breaking his leg.
While justifying Plainview’s actions, Tarantino said: “As much of a bastard as this man proves himself to be, that courage that it took to do that actually gives him the heroic right for almost everything that he does throughout the movie. He went through hell to get this fortune. He is not just a bloodsucking businessman, even though the film works as a text for the beginning of capitalism in the Industrial Age.”
He continued: “The fact that the man would be able to accomplish such an act almost gives him the right for everything that follows down the line. The fact that Paul didn’t need to show it meant that you have to make that move yourself. It’s actually quite profound.”
Listen to Tarantino discussing There Will Be Blood below.
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