Crude awakening

Regardless of how you feel about the collection of writings that make up Christian canon in your everyday life, should you ever find yourself in the movie-verse then beware, beware the Bible. Out in the real world, the scriptures may provide comfort to millions. But on celluloid the Bible is a mean, badass killing manual.

Even at one remove it can inspire murderous thinking. A gawp at the William Blake painting ‘The Great Red Dragon and the Women Clothed in the Sun’ is enough to send the Tooth Fairy over the edge in Michael Mann’s Manhunter.
Inspired by its teachings a particular class of movie maniac will, like that serial killer, start getting biblical on your ass. Take Russell Mulcahy’s Resurrection, in which Christopher Lambert hunts a murderous zealot who is hacking off bits of his victims in order to reconstruct the body of Christ in time for Easter.
This is nothing new. In 1932’s The Old Dark House, the similarly demented Brember Wills decides he houses the spirit of King Saul and attempts to kill Melvyn Douglas whom he mistakes for rival King David. Children Of The Corn’s Malachai (Courtney Gains) takes a far more proactive stance on the word of God when he leads the children of a sleepy Nebraskan town to brutally dispatch the entire adult population.
Another telltale sign of cinematic lunacy is the quoting of scripture. If Samuel L. Jackson is giving you his spiel from Ezekiel 25, you’ll be dead before you can tell him he’s actually just recycling dialogue from Sonny Chiba’s Bodyguard movies. And who could forget Piper Laurie recounting an equally dubious passage during a little birds-and-bees chat with her daughter in Carrie? “And the raven was called sin/And the first sin was intercourse,” she rants at the unfortunate Sissy Spacek.
These people, as you can gleam by their unfamiliarity with the actual text, are merely amateur Bible-thumpers. The professional classes are a much scarier bunch. If you’re lucky, you’ll encounter some enterprising hypocrite like David Warner in The Ballad Of Cable Hogue or Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry. These confirmed scoundrels will surely fleece you of your worldly goods but they’re rarely beyond redemption. In From Dusk Till Dawn all it takes for false priest Harvey Keitel to see the light is a good talking to from George Clooney – “So what are you, Jacob? A faithless preacher? Or a mean motherfuckin’ servant of God?”
The faithless preacher takes on an infinitely more sinister guise in Charles Laughton’s peerless 1955 film, The Night Of The Hunter. Robert Mitchum, playing the chilling self-appointed minister Harry Knowles, trails two runaway children during the Great Depression. Watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film There Will Be Blood, it is impossible not to think of Knowles, whose grandstanding seems to refract through both Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.
For his much-honoured role as turn-of-the-century oil prospector Daniel Plainview, Mr. Day-Lewis affects the crooked patriarchal tones of John Huston in Chinatown and menaces his way through an epic Greek cycle. “At least he isn’t false,” Day-Lewis notes.
That much is true. Plainview may be a swindler and a murderer but for proper falsity we must turn to antagonist Eli Sunday, a classic faithless preacher essayed with no little aplomb by Paul Dano. Together these compellingly wicked gentlemen preside as midwives over the corrupted birth of California.
“I do see it as a horror film about the birth of California,” says Paul Thomas Anderson. “I feel like people’s perception of California from far off places is that of a land of leisure, or a land of sunshine and recreation. Or they think that it’s Hollywood or they think that it’s Los Angeles. But California is cut straight down the middle by the San Joaquin Valley where you have peaches and oranges. And right across the way you have oil fields that go on forever. It’s so beautiful and bizarre but there is a kind of darkness there and a foreboding that the apocalypse is right around the corner too. I wanted to capture how scary it is. And I do think that Daniel Day-Lewis’ character is kind of a Dracula.”
Based on Oil!, an obscure out-of-print novel by Upton Sinclair, There Will Be Blood is, in the classic sense, not much of an adaptation at all. Where the book examines the conscience of the son of an oil tycoon and his sympathies with socialists and beleaguered oilfield labourers, the film blows up two minor characters to stage an epic battle between religion and capitalism. Dano and Day-Lewis, fighting their respective corners, make fearsome evangelists though neither serves any power higher than their own self-interest.
It may be the film’s central standoff but writer-director Anderson, perhaps mindful of the fierce religiosity back home in America, is keen to make the motif look like a happy accident.
“This is what this film is about,” says Anderson. “It is about the discovery of oil in California in a town and there is a preacher. But I thought we would really get in trouble if we started playing around with that stuff too much. What we had to do is attack the film and make it tell the story of a boxing match between these two lunatics, and make it a horror film, and let the rest take care of itself. That other stuff has to just be there. No one likes someone who politicises and no one likes a smart ass. Hopefully you take it to its bare knuckles to say, this is what it is. Ideally the movie is just a nasty fight between two brothers.”
According to Anderson much of what we see on screen is equally unpremeditated. Few who watch There Will Be Blood will not see similarities between the film and the newly resurgent class of arthouse westerns and neo-westerns that includes The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, The Proposition and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Others may see parallels with classic John Ford pictures such as The Searchers. But Anderson insists he and cinematographer Robert Elswit only realised what they were doing well into the process.
“I always loved Westerns and I always wanted to make one,” he says. “I remember looking to Robert (Elswit) when we were already in production. We were looking at horses and carts and stuff and I said ‘we are making a Western and didn’t even know it!’ We had not thought of it. It was so exciting because the story we were after was more of a horror story about this man who loses his mind, who loses his mind in the middle of his drive and his ambition. That was the movie that we were making. But the accident that we got to make a Western at the same time was thrilling. I’m trying to think of other western characters that are similar to Plainview. Hopefully he fits really well. Hopefully he will last.”
Certainly it’s difficult to envisage a time when audiences will ever forget Plainview or indeed Day-Lewis’ gargantuan performance. He is, to paraphrase André Bazin, an American madman par excellence. Sharing diseased fantasies with the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper or Ahab from Moby Dick, Plainview’s insanity – in the hands of Day-Lewis – takes on the vast dimensions of the Californian sprawl he inhabits.
“I’ll really glad people are seeing Ahab,” says Anderson. “I can’t tell you how much that meant to me because we’d always thought about Ahab. Moby Dick is the best, and I can’t tell you what it meant to me that they picked up on Ahab. That’s exactly it.”
Even more effusive reviews are declaring Anderson the new John Ford or D.W. Griffith. “It’s incredible, isn’t it, to be mentioned in that way,” he says. “I remember we were doing a shot and we were like, ‘It is a Searchers shot’. We just couldn’t help it. ‘We can’t do it, we can’t do a Searchers shot’. But any time we were out there with the camera… you know, John Ford is, I guess, the American filmmaker, isn’t he? And Griffith, yeah. The fact that somebody would mention our film alongside that is incredible. It’s really exciting. It’s great, that someone would think of it that way.”
But for all the legendary figures and mythical archetypes that have been evoked in the same breath as There Will Be Blood, much of the film’s power can be attributed to scrupulous historical research. Edward L. Doheny was the son of Irish immigrants who fled the Great Famine. An entrepreneur who devised drilling equipment, he presided over the railroad’s switch from coal to oil before becoming embroiled in a controversy over bribes known as the Wyoming Teapot Dome scandal. Anderson admits that he incorporated quite a bit of Doheny’s biography when he first wrote Plainview.
“I took lots and lots and lots of real things, really,” he says. “I used to write at my desk with the oil book on Doheny, 15 books about the oil business that I found from the time, and the different photos. And I would just sit and read all these pieces, and the building of that pipeline, all that information, Standard Oil, the independent oil prospector, all these things hopefully based on fact. Those pieces are ideally accurate. We fudged a few things here and there, but most of it is based on the genuine thing.”
Still, there’s no mistaking There Will Be Blood as taking place anywhere but the most filmic of spaces. A distillation of most of the American cinema of the twentieth century into a three-hour epic, even Anderson can’t quite pin it down.
“It’s so funny because I felt like we were making a science fiction film half the time too,” he says. “You felt like you were on Mars a little bit.”
Amazed audiences everywhere know exactly what he means.

There Will Be Blood is out now