Hello cinephiles! Aside from the brilliant performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as oilman
Daniel Plainview, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film There Will Be Blood is perhaps best
known for its beautifully naturalistic cinematography, which was nominated for over 20 different
awards including a win for Best Achievement in Cinematography at the Academy Awards.
So, how did they do it?
Today we will take a look at what cameras, lenses, and film stock they used, as well
as the real locations, naturalistic lighting, and how they got some of the tricky shots.
This is Making Film.
Paul Thomas Anderson hired his main man, Robert Elswit to do the cinematography on There Will
Be Blood. Elswit had previously shot all of PTAs movies up to that point—
Hard Eight (aka Sidney),
Boogie Nights,
Magnolia,
and Punch-Drunk Love (Blood for Oil).
Elswit came to Anderson’s attention after he saw Elswit’s cinematography work on 1992’s
Waterland (Blood for Oil).
The two were later introduced by a mutual acquaintance, John C. Reilly, who would star
in Anderson’s first movie— Hard Eight (Blood for Oil).
What do you squat?
About 2.
Super.
Elswit said, "Paul is 20 years younger than me, but I liked him right away… He had so
much energy and enthusiasm.
He also loved some of the same movies I love — particularly films from the ’30s, ’40s
and ’50s, many of which are somewhat obscure.
Even at 25, Paul was an encyclopedia of American film,
and he was very aware of what pictorial style meant.
He can respond immediately to something he sees and understands instinctively why it
works or why it doesn’t” (Blood for Oil).
Anderson said that he will speak with Elswit from time to time to tell him what he’s
working on before the script is finished and Elswit, who is often very busy working on
other films will kind of hang back and say that whatever it is sounds good.
Anderson said, "Robert lingers on the edges through preproduction, never really saying
much because he knows once we start shooting it‘s him front and center.
He has a great way of staying back and letting everybody do their work and not jamming his
opinion down anybody‘s throat. He‘s the master of not peaking early.
He‘s done so many films he knows just how to pace himself. He lingers, lets things settle
and hears everybody out, and then comes in and cleans it all up and makes it happen” (PONSOLDT).
When Elswit’s time comes during pre-production, he and Anderson will go to the sets and “walk
things through” to figure out what the possibilities are (PONSOLDT).
They’ll catch up and mess around with lenses and stuff, but their main focus is to plan
the shooting schedule, which takes about "one or two days” (PONSOLDT).
They don’t storyboard shots, but I believe they actually did storyboard the Oil Fire
scene, but we’ll talk about that in another video (PONSOLDT).
As many are aware, one of the biggest inspirations for There Will Be Blood was John Huston’s
1948 film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
This is a favorite of Anderson’s, but the inspiration is not only in theme, but in style
as well— mainly its simplicity (Blood for Oil).
Anderson said, “we were trying to keep things simple — the simplest kinds of frames, the
simplest number of shots — and we tried to follow
the influence of filmmakers like Huston.
The movies of the ’40s are incredibly straightforward.
They’re the ones I love the most, really” (Blood for Oil).
As strange as it sounds, simplicity can often be a difficult mindset to stay in. One day,
Anderson convinced producer Daniel Lupi to get a crane that he was adamant that he would
use, but once the camera was attached and everything was ready to go, they thought it
looked terrible and out of place.
Anderson said, “It wasn’t the crane’s fault, it was just that we didn’t need it” (PONSOLDT).
As interesting as the camerawork is, the style of There Will Be Blood is very stripped down
and it looks almost as if it was made with a skeleton crew.
I can’t really imagine a 100 people on set during this shot.Here is a photo of them getting
the shot. It would be out-of-place to mix in a lavish Sergio Leone-style crane shot.
They also shot this part at 'magic hour,’ which refers to the short amount of time after
sunrise or before sunset where the light is softer and has a beautiful orange glow (Wiki).
They also shot it with a Steadicam in order
to give the scene a [quote] “floating feel” (Blood for Oil).
Anderson wanted the camerawork to have its own personality that felt real and imperfect.
A good example of this is the dolly shot of the car driving up to town.
Elswit said, “My dolly grip, Jeff Kunkel, was ready to attach the camera to a stabilized
head, but I knew Paul would never go for that…
Instead, we had the camera on a dolly with nobody sitting on it, and it was pushed down
the track as fast as it would go.
I had hot wheels at the end of the track waiting for it” (Blood for Oil).
See how the shot shakes and wobbles much like the car shakes and wobbles on the dirt road?
There Will Be Blood was shot on Panaflex Platnium, Millennium XL, and Panavision C-series and
E-series 35mm cameras with “high-speed anamorphic lenses” (cinephiliabeyond).
Anamorphic lenses film a stretched out image, in this case, onto 35mm film and then the
image is corrected by projecting it through lenses that stretch the image in the opposite
direction making it look normal.
This way you can get an aspect ratio that is wider than a regular 35mm image without
having to crop anything out.
Robert Elswit said, “Paul knew he wanted to make an anamorphic film because he prefers
the anamorphic lens system to shooting Super 35mm and doing an anamorphic release print.
We did Hard Eight in Super 35, but every movie we’ve done since has been anamorphic. He
just likes the look those lenses produce.
When you shoot in anamorphic, there’s a different feeling, a different way of staging
and different depth of field.
Paul loves older films, and those qualities mean something to him” (Blood for Oil).
'High-speed lenses’ are lenses that can also film in low-light situations or possibly
in shady areas without needing to add light.
They also shot using only prime lenses, which are lenses that cannot zoom in or out.
Elswit said, “When I shot Good Night, and Good Luck, we had a short schedule that required
us to work fast, and we never took the 11:1 zoom off the camera…
This show was different because Paul really likes the discipline of the 40mm,
the 50mm, the 75mm and the 100mm.
He wants to make the movie play out in those sizes, and he understands how that affects
staging and design” (Blood for Oil).
Elswit used modified C-Series anamorphic lenses made by a lens designer named Dan Sasaki for
Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (Blood for Oil).
They also used [quote] "a full set of E-Series lenses; two modified spherical Panavision
SP lenses, a 35mm and 55mm whose optics were roughly 40 years old; and a set of
Super High Speed lenses (ranging from 35mm to 85mm) whose optics were based on modifications Sasaki
had made to another set for Memoirs of a Geisha" (Blood for Oil).
For the C-Series and E-Series lenses, Sasaki replaced the glass with “more modern glass”
and made them flatter (Blood for Oil).
In some cases, he removed the “anti-reflective coatings” from the lenses to allow for some
lens flares.
Sasaki said, "Paul didn’t want the flares to look like the kind you might see in a music
video; he wanted the controlled, organic look you’d get from a dated lens” (Blood for Oil).
Dan Sasaki: “Because of the layout, E-Series has more lens shapes in it,
we’re going to see multiple staggered flairs unlike the single flare that we saw with the C-Series.
But because we have linear coating in the E-Series,
we’re going to get a more controlled veiling glare or a black is going to stay black longer…”
They had some experience intentionally making lens flares for Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Punch Drunk Love, made around five years before There Will Be Blood. In an interview, Elswit
talked about staging lens flares:
Those lens flares that you have in Punch-Drunk Love…
Robert Elswit: Yeah, that’s really Paul. That’s Paul going, yeah, God, I love those…
you know, the anamorphic lens flare and how to get them to happen on cue and it means
we put joker pars, which are little HMI lights on C-stand arms just out of camera— just
out of the view of the camera and they’d uncover them at certain times and cover them up.
Paul Thomas Anderson had bought a vintage 1910 Pathé camera for specific scenes in
Magnolia and Sasaki [quote] "tricked up a vintage 43mm lens that was built
around the [camera’s] optical element” (Blood for Oil).
Elswit notes that they used this for “six or eight shots” in the film.
One shot with the vintage lens that he was very pleased with was this shot of Plainview
with an infant HW on the train (Blood for Oil).
He says that if you look closely, “you can see color shifts in the corners, where the
colors don’t line up precisely” (Blood for Oil).
Sasaki notes that [quote] "Paul and Robert did some of the most extensive testing I’ve
ever seen to nail in a look with the lenses” (Blood for Oil).
A lot of movies nowadays look almost too perfect— almost like a commercial. It’s very interesting
to see imperfections of the equipment adding to the overall feel of the story.
Another good example, albeit a little more on the extreme side, is The Assassination
of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Another characteristic of this lens is that
it’s “very low-contrast” and tends “to vignette optically,
especially on a full negative” (Blood for Oil).
They used the C-Series lenses mainly for interior scenes "that didn’t require high-speed lenses”
and the E-Series lenses for exteriors because those lenses had “lower contrast and resolution
than standard Es” (Blood for Oil).
The E-Series lenses would [quote] “soften the harsh desert daylight a bit” compared
to the modified C Lenses (Blood for Oil).
The Super High Speed lenses were used for night scenes as well as some scenes that took
place at dusk (Blood for Oil).
Elswit’s 1st Assistant Cameraman said that "The 43mm lens definitely had a vintage look
— desaturated, low-contrast, vignetting and low-resolution” (Blood for Oil).
What film stock to use on There Will Be Blood was an important decision to make — especially
for Paul Thomas Anderson who doesn’t tend to manipulate the images in post-production.
When it comes to film stocks,
Anderson usually goes for the "slowest film stocks possible” (Blood for Oil).
The slower the film stock the less sensitive it is to light, so on one hand, you get a
much clearer image with less grain, but on the other, you need a lot of light or a super
fast lens in order to get an image.
They shot the film on Kodak Vision2 50D 5201 film for daylight scenes (Blood for Oil).
50D refers to the ISO or ASA being 50
and D refers to the color being balanced for daylight shooting.
This means that the darker the location that you are filming, the bluer or cooler the image
will be. For night scenes, they used Vision2 200T 5217 film (Blood for Oil).
The 200 refers to an ISO or ASA of 200, which is still pretty low (Blood for Oil).
I don’t know a whole lot about this stuff, but I often screw around with film cameras,
and an ISO of 200 will give you a whole lot of nothing indoors or at night unless you
can get a decent amount of light.
The T refers to the color being balanced to Tungsten light instead of daylight. Tungsten
is more of a bluish or cool light, so if you use non-tungsten lights on Tungsten balanced film,
you’ll get a more orange or warm color.
As I said, I don’t know a ton about this stuff, but definitely check out the comments
below, because super knowledgeable people
will often write comments with a ton of useful information.
Paul Thomas Anderson has a reputation as a ‘film purist.’
He doesn’t usually allow filters to be used on his lenses. Elswit said, “We shot with
Vision2 stocks because they’re less contrasty and easier to work with outdoors [than Vision stocks]…
We did nothing fancy — no flashing, no special filters.
Paul actually thinks using an 85 filter is bad! I’ve often explained to him that the
stocks are designed to work with an 85, but he thinks that’s somehow interfering with
the alchemy of Kodak.
This time, though, he let me use an 85 when it was appropriate" (Blood for Oil).
Deluxe Laboratories handled the daily previews of the raw footage they had shot the previous
day. They printed all of their dailies— there were no DVDs or digital versions of
the raw footage.
Everything was a photochemical process— nothing was digital except for a couple of
shots where computer-generated effects were used.
It sounds weird to think of PTA using CG for his movies.
Well, here is an example: Those various oil wells were computer generated.
There was also the occasional removal of some modern parts of landscapes that didn’t exist
during the early 1900s (Blood for Oil).
Elswit noted that on other films that he has worked on that have used a digital intermediate
— where they digitize the film in order to manipulate the color and other aspects
of the image— he was usually able to cheat a bit during production because he knew that
he could get the image he wanted by messing with it in post-production (Wiki).
This was not the case on There Will Be Blood or any of Anderson’s films.
Anderson said, “I’m either old-fashioned or quite stubborn, or maybe both… But at
the moment I don’t really like [Digital Intermediates],
and I’m not sure what the advantage to the process is if you’re shooting anamorphic.
I have a hard enough time making up my mind about things without going into a DI suite;
I don’t think I’d ever get out of there.
The process creates too many options, and at any rate,
I don’t like the way it looks” (Blood for Oil).
We live in a time in which filmmakers can pretty much make things look exactly the way
they want it, whether that be changing the color like they did on O Brother, Where Art Thou?
or creating stylized space battles and computer-generated characters to better
explore the vision of the artist.
Stanley Kubrick said, “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”
There is, however, something to be said about people like Paul Thomas Anderson who give
up that control and allow the personality of the equipment or even the chemical reactions
of the film to inform on the creation of the art piece.
This is not to say that PTA is staying away from digital for the sake of capturing realism.
After all, this is a period movie with lots of thought put into the production design,
costumes, and lighting.
That said, in the case of a movie like There Will Be Blood, this lack of control over
the chemical process can create images that you could consider to be divine.
The chemical reaction that creates these images has a certain input on how we receive the film.
I feel like I used to be a ‘film purist,’
but I don’t think I really have a problem with control.
I just have a problem when the special effects aren’t good enough for me to give up my
own reality and accept what is happening in the movie as real
and not the product of the making of that movie.
Of course, this is hard to do and it is much more difficult to get an audience to accept
Gollum as real than some oil wells that aren’t actually there.
Thanks for watching!
Stay tuned for part 2 where we will discuss how they shot down a mineshaft, how they achieved
the naturalistic lighting style, and how they made an epic on a budget.
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