Where to watch There Will Be Blood (2007)

Trivia & production notes

• Paul Thomas Anderson originally had a screenplay about two feuding families that he abandoned after purchasing a copy of Upton Sinclair's Oil! while homesick in London, inspired by its cover illustration of a California oilfield.
• Anderson changed the film's title from Oil! to There Will Be Blood because he felt the film only adapted the first 150 pages and lacked enough material to be considered a proper adaptation of the novel.
• Daniel Day-Lewis was chosen for the lead role before the screenplay was even finished, after Anderson learned that Day-Lewis had enjoyed his earlier film Punch-Drunk Love.
• The famous line "I drink your milkshake" was allegedly paraphrased from Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall's testimony about oil drainage during the Teapot Dome scandal, though a 2014 investigation suggested it may have actually come from 2003 remarks by Senator Pete Domenici about Arctic drilling.
• Child actor Dillon Freasier was discovered through a Texas school principal's recommendation and was cast without reading any scenes, based solely on a conversation with filmmakers.
• Day-Lewis developed his character by starting with the voice, using recordings from the late 19th century through 1927 and repeatedly watching John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre before bed while writing the script.
• Two weeks into principal photography in Marfa, Texas, Paul Dano replaced Kel O'Neill as Eli Sunday, despite originally being cast only in the smaller role of Paul Sunday, and had to learn the much larger part in just four days.
• The interior mansion scenes were filmed at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, the former home of oil tycoon Edward Doheny Jr., and the bowling alley scenes required painstaking renovation and could only accommodate five or six crew members at a time due to its narrow layout.
• Daniel Day-Lewis broke a rib during a fall while filming.
• Paul Thomas Anderson dedicated the film to Robert Altman, who died during the editing process.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article There Will Be Blood, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.