There Will Be Blood

(2007) 15 Sunday, 11pm, BBC3 Daniel Day-Lewis is tipped for Oscars glory for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and, if he wins the Best Actor award, it will be his third. The first was for his portrayal of Irish writer and painter Christy Brown in 1989’s My Left Foot; the second was for his role as a mercurial oilman in this seething, pared-down epic from director Paul Thomas Anderson.

There Will Be Blood charts the rise of Daniel Plainview, who begins the film as a lone gold prospector who endures filth and horrific injury to get enough cash to launch his first oil rig.

The film is staggeringly economical: very little happens, but everything that does happen counts in a big, big way. DayLewis’s performance is big, and the goal Daniel sets his sights on is just as big – an oil empire oozing wealth and status, but also, inevitably, stained with blood.

Blood here means family, too. Daniel’s main antagonist is Paul Dano’s magnificently creepy preacher, Eli Sunday (above), whose brother, Paul (also Dano), summons Daniel to his father’s farm in California, where fields of oil lie beneath the area’s barren landscape. It is the making of Daniel, but not without cost.

Money and family are what Daniel believes give his life meaning. Eli, meanwhile, eschews his family for his own brand of evangelising faith, which Daniel loathes, and which might just prove to be as corrupting as mammon.

If the film is to your taste, you will be riveted by There Will Be Blood. It won an Oscar for its simply breathtaking cinematography, while the music (by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) is as memorable as the soaring performances of Day-Lewis and Dano.

The story behind the film

American director Paul Thomas Anderson was in London when he first came across the film’s source material. Homesick, he bought the book Oil! by Upton Sinclair, a 1927 novel based on the life of oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny. Adapting it for the screenplay, Anderson concentrated on just the first 150 pages, and shifted the focus from son to father.