Hello cinephiles!
Today we pick up where we left off on the cinematography of There Will Be Blood. We’ll
talk about shooting at night, lighting interiors, and shooting the mansion scenes,
but first, let’s talk about shooting on location…
One of the most important undertakings that the filmmakers of There Will Be Blood were
tasked with was to find a location that looked like Bakersfield in Southern California during
the early 1900s.
They found it in a small town in Texas called Marfa. Marfa was also the location for the
1956 James Dean film, Giant,
as well as The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, which was shot during the same
time as There Will Be Blood,
but we’ll talk about that in another video.
Marfa is located in West Texas and was originally founded as a water stop for trains in the
early 1880s (Wiki).
It was a great spot, because the town is a little ways from other towns and cities.
Marfa is isolated by the “high desert of the Trans-Pecos and Davis Mountains
and as of 2010,
there are less than 2,000 people living there (Wiki).
Paul Thomas Anderson was asked about how working in such an isolated place affected the production.
He said, "The group mind-set was great. We‘ve been on location making our films before,
whether it was Hawaii or Reno.
Even a majority of Boogie Nights felt like we were on location because we were out in
West Covina at this house,
and we were all staying out there so we weren‘t going back to our regular daily lives.
We were away from our families, which as hard as that can be, was a blessing.
There‘s not much to do except make the film. And in terms of creating that environment
where ideally the only thing you‘re doing is drilling for oil,
it‘s a huge leg up [to be isolated]. We came back to California for two weeks, and
again, like with the extras, we all felt different,
we all felt more disconnected from each other. We used to go home to the same hotel —
all that stuff that people have said a million times about being on location is true.
There‘s a real reason to go on location.
And what was nice too is that it was so far out there that the feeling before we started
was bring everything you need.
If you‘re shooting in Los Angeles and you need something, an hour later you can have
it from a prop or costume house. But more or less, [costume designer Mark Bridges]
would just have to bring the costumes out that we needed and that was it.
But that was part of the fun — work with what you got because that‘s all we got" (PONSOLDT).
Paul Thomas Anderson: “We had one bizarre day where where we had to come back to California
and to a soundstage just for some inserts and a thing that didn’t end up making the
film and we were miserable.
All of us, the entire crew, Daniel, everybody and we cut— more or less, we turned around
and walked right out and said, “well, we’ll do this somewhere else. Get out of here.”
It was rumored that Anderson watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
every night before filming (Mental Floss).
Anderson has said that this [quote] “has gotten completely exaggerated,” but he did
get a lot of his inspiration from the movie (Mental Floss).
When asked about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Anderson said, "What was nice about
that movie was that it‘s kind of a play wrapped up in the clothes of an adventure film.
It‘s essentially a dialogue, a dynamic between these three guys. [The film‘s] traditional
straightforward storytelling was what I was influenced by,
and it was something that seemed to apply when trying to
make a big story on a limited budget.
You know, it was kind of like, well, how expensive is it to get your cameras outside?
It‘s not expensive.
And you get a good location, all right, so you‘re an epic…
What‘s next are the smaller scenes and taking care of it from the ground up,
if you know what I mean.
[Treasure of the Sierra Madre] is really so much about the way those guys beat each other up,
and the paranoia and that madness that happens.
It‘s so simple and so economical” (PONSOLDT).
Anderson was aware from the start that they weren’t going to get a huge-budget for this
epic story,
which was probably for the best because it was those epic scenes that Anderson said were
a ‘pain in the ass’ to shoot (PONSOLDT).
This includes, of course, the burning of the oil derrick, but also the scenes with lots
of extras (PONSOLDT).
Anderson much preferred shooting the scenes involving just a couple of actors in a room
or other small scenes.
He was very interested in how simple the camps were during that era, where everything was
sparse and people lived economically—
he decided to use that idea as a way to approach the production (PONSOLDT).
Anderson felt much more free to be creative without so much baggage and unnecessary equipment
weighing him down (PONSOLDT).
When they were creating the budget, they weren’t sure how they were actually going to film
some of the scenes that were necessary for telling the story,
such as shooting down the mine shaft, so they proposed
a higher budget than they really needed (Charlie Rose).
For the opening sequence in the mine shaft they found a location south of Marfa near
the Texas-Mexico border in a ghost town called Shafter—no joke (Blood for Oil).
As of 2000, the population of Shafter was just 11 people (Shortlist).
They actually shot some of The Andromeda Strain there (Shortlist).
Shafter was a silver-mining area where all the now-abandoned mines were [quote] “dug
by hand at the turn of the century” (Blood for Oil).
Elswit said, "We found one shaft that was 60 or 70 feet deep, and it was connected at
the bottom to a perpendicular tunnel that had been created mechanically
in the 1920s or ’30s.
We could access the vertical shaft via the horizontal tunnel at the bottom” (Blood for Oil).
Elswit had to be hung from a harness to get some of the shots including the shot of Daniel
Day-Lewis falling down the shaft (Blood for Oil).
They didn’t use a stuntman for this shot— Day-Lewis actually fell down that shaft (Blood for Oil).
The chief lighting technician, Robby Baumgartner, talked about lighting this sequence.
He said, “Over the mouth of the shaft,
we built a truss rig that supported a combination of 18/12K Arrimax Pars and 6K Pars, maybe
two of each.
We couldn’t point them straight down for safety reasons because Daniel was directly
below at quite a distance” (Blood for Oil).
The location where Daniel Plainview sells his silver was also shot in Shafter.
It was an old schoolhouse that Jack Fisk decorated to look like a
“turn-of-the-century” assay office (Blood for Oil).
They had the actors actually re-enact how they would [quote] “smelt ore and measure
it to establish its purity (Blood for Oil).
For this scene where the man is killed by a falling drill… they shot the exterior
on-location in Texas and the interior was a forty-foot-tall set
constructed by Production Designer Jack Fisk and his crew at an area in California fairly
close to Los Angeles called Mystery Mesa (Blood for Oil).
Baumgartner said, “The mine set wasn’t quite as long and narrow as the real mine
we’d used earlier;
it was a bit wider and a little easier to deal with. It was tented in at the bottom,
and we lit it with tungsten units” (Blood for Oil).
There were a few things shot in Mystery Mesa,
but the main sets were built in Marfa, Texas (Blood for Oil).
This includes the very small town, the church, the Sunday ranch,
and the oil derrick (Blood for Oil).
Elswit said, “We looked at a lot of locations with Jack [Fisk], but Marfa was the place…
There aren’t many spots in America where you can stand on top of a hill and see absolutely
nothing in all directions.
We all loved the quality of the landscape, and the ranch we used had the little railroad
the story required.
Jack picked a part of the ranch that worked perfectly — from the church you could see
the railroad, the oil well and the Sunday family’s little ranch house.
They were all visually connected, but Paul is an enemy of the obvious, so he didn’t
want to [show] that.
But Jack laid the place out wonderfully, and the sets were perfectly integrated into the
harsh landscape.
The structures’ simple stylization and the way they were sighted in relation to the land
and each other made the world of the movie seem very believable and real” (Blood for Oil).
And it left!
A lot of the realism of There Will Be Blood is created in its naturalistic lighting style.
The night shots outside often involved campfires to light the scenes.
In order to create this look,
[Cinematographer Robert] Elswit used two “flicker units” made from aluminum — one was one-foot
by eight-inches and the other was two-feet by four-feet (Blood for Oil).
The units [quote] “ran on six circuits to create a varied, organic flicker” (Blood for Oil).
[Chief Lighting Technician Robby] Baumgartner said, “Instead of having just six bulbs
flickering, we had 80 bulbs flickering on the smaller unit and 200 on the bigger unit.
For the smaller unit, I used clear 15-watt peanut bulbs spaced
about an eighth of an inch apart.
That created a solid little bank of light flickering on six circuits.
It simulated the hardness of a real campfire, but the quantity and proximity of the bulbs
created a softer source.
We ran the flicker boxes at 100 percent, dimming down each channel 5 or 10 percent to create
the flicker.
In order to get the right colors, I used a combination of party gels — red, amber and
yellow with a touch of green and blue — and cut them in shapes so the light wouldn’t
come out in one solid color” (Blood for Oil).
You can see in this picture how the gels were cut.
They did light with actual fire for some scenes such as this scene where
Plainview is digging the grave.
Here, they used flame bars that would essentially position a controlled flame to light the scene.
They also used real fire for the reaction shots to the Oil Derick burning, but we’ll
talk about that in another video.
For night interiors, Elswit would use floor-light setups of both balls made of a cotton material
called muslin and something called Lowel Rifa-lites
and toplight would be created with china balls (Blood for Oil).
We can see how this was done in the scene of Plainview and HW having dinner with the
Sunday family.
While I’ll happily be a supporter of your church for as long as I can.
For the bonus only.
Baumgartner said, “[Elswit] is a big fan of the Rifa-lites,
which are easy and quick to use.
We also used a lot of practicals and hard light generated by Tweenies, Inkies and Babies.
In some of the China balls, we used three halogen bulbs on a slight flicker to create
a bit of movement that would emulate the look of candlelight” (Blood for Oil).
The color of the light in the scenes had to reflect what kind of light was being used,
so in the earlier scenes that take place in Texas,
which were mostly supposed to look like they were lit by lanterns, were more orange
or ‘warmer’ whereas,
when they get to Signal Hill, most of the light is supposed to look like it comes from
electric bulbs,
so the color was bluer or ‘cooler’ (Blood for Oil).
Baumgartner said, "During prep, [Elswit] and I talked about how reading actual candlelight
was just too warm,
so for those scenes, we couldn’t match all the way down to candlelight.
We tried to find a happy medium that simulated the color of candles or lanterns without being
too low on the Kelvin scale.
We ran some tests where we matched the candlelight at 1800°K, and that was much too warm.
So we worked our way up to a level that was warm enough to be realistic,
but not so warm that we were too far into the red spectrum. In those situations,
we generally wound up at around 2300°K or 2400°K” (Blood for Oil).
I wanted to test this out so I took some shots and keyed in the color temperature manually—
here is 1800°K and here is 2400°K.
The interiors were designed by production designer Jack Fisk
to work with a natural lighting style where the amount of light might change throughout
the day (Blood for Oil).
Elswit noted that having a set where the light could change based on the time and weather
allowed for more creativity in shot choices (Blood for Oil).
One such set was Eli Sunday’s original church that Plainview visits after an accidental
death on the oil derrick.
The humble structure was made with wooden slats that revealed the outside in the spaces
between the boards.
In order to keep the light that was coming from outside
from blowing out in the dark church,
they built up the lighting inside to compensate (Blood for Oil).
To make the interior bright enough, they started by hanging four “6K Pars in the rafters,
[and] bouncing them into [sheets of] muslin to create a base level of light” (Blood for Oil).
However, once Elswit saw the setup, he decided to remove them so that they could “shoot
from more angles” (Blood for Oil).
They ended up using “Arri 18K Frenels” and some "Arrimax Pars” to [quote]
“push light through the windows and bounce light through the slats” (Blood for Oil).
What we are left with is a totally naturalistic lighting style that looks as though the only
light is coming from outside the building.
Elswit said, “If I’d had a different director, I probably would have added a bit
of fill in the corner behind us,
which you wouldn’t have seen…. As it was, there was never enough light to actually balance
the exterior, so the windows just blew out.
But we had enough light to shoot at a T3.2 or T3.5, which kept the light from flickering
or flaring, and we got extraordinary blacks and a huge amount of contrast” (Blood for Oil).
That was one god-damn hell of a show.
Later on, the well begins producing and Eli builds himself a fancy new church.
This set had ceiling made of muslin and a wall with a
large cross cut out of it to let light in (Blood for Oil).
They put some Arrimax Pars outside on a scissor lift
shining down through the muslin ceiling (Blood for Oil).
This was obviously meant to look like daylight, so Elswit used lights balanced to a daylight
color temperature— 5600°K (Blood for Oil).
He noted that the muslin affected the color temperature,
but he kept the lights at 5600°K anyway (Blood for Oil).
Elswit was shooting on a fairly low ISO film stock— in this case 200— in order to make
the image clear with less grain,
but this meant that the interiors had to be well-lit in order to keep the images from
being too dark.
They were shooting with a T-stop of 3.2, so Elswit tried to build the light level up in
most of the interior scenes (Blood for Oil).
T-stops are similar to F-stops on a camera.
One of the darker locations of There Will Be Blood was Daniel Plainview’s mansion
near the end of the movie.
I’ve talked about the history of the mansion in the video on Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance,
but the Greystone or ‘Doheny' Mansion was built by oil tycoon and inspiration for the
character of Daniel Plainview, Edward Doheny.
The historical mansion had fifty-five rooms and cost over three million dollars to build—
making it the most expensive mansion in California during the time it was built (shortlist).
The mansion has also appeared in an insane amount of movies, but personally,
I most recognize mansion from The Big Lebowski (shortlist).
Paul Thomas Anderson said, "It was funny, because that mansion has been used so many
times in films;
it's kind of this notorious location.
Your first instinct as a filmmaker is, "Can we really shoot someplace that's been shot
in so many times?"
I think we had a free pass because this was the guy we were basing the film on.
It's definitely pretty ghostly around there, without question. Daniel called it a pyramid
that Doheny built to himself.
I think that fits. It's kind of a mad place" (Modell).
It was also kind of tricky to shoot at the Doheny’s Greystone Mansion because it is
just so historic.
Daniel Day-Lewis: “The Doheny mansion is a museum now. It belongs to the Doheny Trust,
which, in turn,
employs a large army of young men and women in very crisp uniforms
who watch every single move that you make in a place— I cannot imagine what they thought
we were up to.
Drainage!
I am who the Lord has chosen!
Daniel!
The first scene in the mansion is in Plainview’s office where he speaks with a (now adult) HW.
This was one of the darker locations they shot in. Elswit said,
"That’s the one scene that made me wish we did a [digital intermediate], because I
would have fixed all the windows…
We wanted those scenes to be magic hour, and I don’t think I controlled the windows as
well as I could have.
I wasn’t doing anything unusual; I was just combining ambient light in the room with bounced
light from outside the windows.
The electric lights in the scene were just accents; they weren’t really lighting anything.
Outside the room, I had 18Ks bouncing into muslins with lots of blue gel” (Blood for Oil).
We can see here in this shot that we get both darker natural light and the artificial light
here which was just an accent for the scene.
So they must have been shooting on Tungsten-balanced film because the small amount of natural daylight
registers as blue or ‘cool’ whereas the artificial light registers as more orange
or ‘warm’.
Of course Elswit just said that he added blue gels, so this likely had made the right side
even bluer than it would have been.
I would assume that the bulb in this lamp is Tungsten balanced or perhaps even warmer
to counteract how blue the Tungsten film stock is.
Basically, warm/orange is the opposite of blue/cool, so you want to combine a film stock
with a particular temperature with light that is the opposite temperature to balance the color.
So you pair the warm Daylight stock with the cool Daylight lights or the cool Tungsten
stock with the warm Tungsten lights.
If you begin removing light, the temperature of the film stock itself becomes more pronounced.
So, Daylight balanced film will be warmer the darker the scene and Tungsten balanced
film will be cooler the darker the scene.
And of course, if you mix Daylight film with Tungsten light or vice versa, you will be
adding blue on top of blue or orange on top of orange.
This is why older movies that were unable to shoot at night would simply underexpose
Tungsten film shot during the day,
which would register as dark and blue, simulating night (Wiki).
This is kind of shooting is called “day for night” (Wiki).
What’s interesting about this scene is that it is Daniel Plainview essentially disowning
his only son,
but it was shot in the mansion that the real-life inspiration for Plainview had built as a gift
to his only son (shortlist).
Perhaps the most famous room of the mansion is the bowling alley
where Eli finds a passed out Daniel Plainview.
Daniel Plainview, the house is on fire!
Paul Thomas Anderson: “I would just want to say that Doheny built the bowling alley
in that mansion and I only knew about it because,
when he got in trouble with the Teapot Dome scandal in the ‘20s,
he set up his team of lawyers in the bowling alley and I saw a great photograph of all
these lawyers and desks down in this bowling alley.”
I can’t for the life of me find this photo, so if anyone is able to find it, please post
a link to it in the comments.
The bowling ally had appeared in a film once before in 1962’s
The Day Mars Invaded Earth (LA Weekly).
Perhaps even more interesting is that Elswit had actually been to Doheny’s bowling alley
before… for school.
Elswit said, “That mansion was the headquarters of the American Film Institute when I went
to school there…
The bowling alley was a complete wreck back then, but we used it as our soundstage when
we were shooting our first-year video projects.
The city of Beverly Hills was all too happy to let Jack Fisk restore the bowling alley
to its original glory.
There I was, standing in a place where I’d shot video films as a student.
It was very strange” (Blood for Oil).
It must have been an incredible experience to return to a room
where you learned cinematography to do the work that would earn you an Academy Award
for cinematography.
Crazy right?
David Lynch also went to AFI and shot most of Eraserhead in the mansion’s stables (LA Weekly).
When Paul Thomas Anderson first got to the bowling alley, he thought it had a Stanley
Kubrick vibe with [quote] "symmetry and menace” (Blood for Oil).
“Symmetry and menace” would be a great title for a book about Kubrick’s production design.
Anderson’s original idea was to paint the whole room white to look like “something
out of A Clockwork Orange” (Blood for Oil).
Elswit said, "There’s no character to the lighting at all; it’s just a white box.
Paul kept marveling at how Kubrick did things, and I would say, ‘But Paul, Kubrick built sets.
He didn’t come walking into a place like this!’” (Blood for Oil).
That’s not totally accurate, especially when only a few sets were built for A Clockwork Orange,
but I can see what he’s saying.
There is something to be said about a real historical location.
Eventually Anderson relented, because we get that beautiful red stripe down the length
of the alley that really gives depth to the space along with perhaps the key aspect of
the room— the practical light.
Robby Baumgartner explains saying,
"We were seeing floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall in there, so we articulated some 212 bulbs
to supplement the light coming from the practical globes hanging from the ceiling.
We put a pair of 212s on armature wire at each socket so we could just spin the 212s
and hide them behind the globes, depending on the camera position.
That helped to build up the ambient light to the point where [Elswit] could shoot freely.
A portion of that scene happens at the end of the lanes, where the light levels were
a bit low, so my best boy, Chris Milani, suggested hiding a row of PH 140 bulbs behind each pin rack.
That created a beautiful glow that we used for the whole scene; it also added a vital
push of light for the actors” (Blood for Oil).
The cinematography of There Will Be Blood is immensely beautiful and yet it is simple
and practical enough to always be in service of the story it is telling.
It’s a shame that Robert Elswit might not work with PTA again—
he reportedly didn’t have a great time working on Inherent Vice and PTA served as his own
cinematographer on Phantom Thread (Light the Fuse).
Elswit spent a great deal of time in the post-production of There Will Be Blood working on what he
needed to work on,
but it would be a year after the film was completed when he would really see the film
for the first time as an audience member.
I’ll leave you with a clip of him talking about the experience.
Robert Elswit: “And at the end, half drunk, the lights come up. Nobody knows who— you
know, there is nobody there I know at all. And I turn to her and I go,
‘you know what?
I really did deserve the fucking Academy Award.”
I’m finished.
Thanks for watching!
As a bonus for Patrons, I put together a trailer for There Will Be Blood as if it was a
teen high school comedy.
But when a new prize is added.
Ten-thousand dollars.
They’ll have to join forces to defeat the sexiest guy in school.
I’m your brother… from another mother.
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