《血色将至》（独立报）

Slick customer: Director Paul Thomas Anderson strikes it rich with his gritty new oil saga

After his last film, Paul Thomas Anderson couldn't get arrested in Hollywood. But, as he reveals here, the director has hit paydirt with his forthcoming oil epic

Interview by Jonathan Romney
Sunday, 3 February 2008

You can't help but readinto the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film begins with a solitary man down a deep pit, hacking at rock with a pickaxe: like the oil prospector anti-hero of There Will Be Blood, Anderson seems to be going hell for leather after something that's unusually hard to reach – and unusually rewarding.

And so it turns out. Blood is an intransigently challenging, rich and turbulent work. Which makes the awards and nominations the film has scooped all the more remarkable. A Golden Globe Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis has been accompanied by nine Bafta nominations. And now it is up for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Leading Actor, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Depth and darkness are not qualities generally associated with the young US film-makers usually considered Anderson's peers. Wes Anderson, David O Russell, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze – all largely inhabit the daylight, conceiving playful, often dazzling tableaux under brilliantly glazed surfaces.

Paul Thomas Anderson, however, has combined high-energy stylistic swagger with genuine social and psychological finesse. His breakthrough film, Boogie Nights (1997), a panoramic evocation of the 1970s LA porn scene, was an exuberantly retro trash-culture tribute act, yet it also delved into the anxieties of characters who might easily have been lurid cartoons.

His next big ensemble piece owed much to his hero and eventual mentor, the late Robert Altman. Densely woven, exhausting and overwrought, Magnolia (1999) was nevertheless one of the few films of the last decade that can genuinely be called orchestral in conception.

Then Anderson blindsided admirers with his follow-up, Punch Drunk Love, a perverse romantic comedy about a series of mystifying discordances organised around Adam Sandler in an electric blue suit. Less a conventional American auteur film than an expensive piece of conceptual art, it polarised critics, but Anderson cheerfully stands by it. "It's probably my favourite film," he tells me. "I look at that movie and I hope they'll look back and say, 'Well, that's the good one.'"

Blood comes as even more of a surprise – so dark and sober that it's like following up Singin' in the Rain with an Alban Berg opera. Ostensibly inspired by Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, it's a historical drama about an empire-building oil man named Daniel Plainview, and is built around a force-of-nature performance by Day-Lewis, speaking in megaphone cadences that suggest a masterly impersonation of the late actor-director John Huston. Hence speculation that Plainview's story is a veiled "prequel" to Roman Polanski's Chinatown, an Anderson favourite, in which Huston played the monstrous magnate Noah Cross.

This is just one of the mysteries of a film in which little is clear, and almost no artistic decisions obvious. For example, there is the starkly ominous orchestral score, by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, which at no point seems conventionally to gel with the action: Blood is as daringly counter-intuitive as Stanley Kubrick was in his use of composers such as Penderecki in The Shining. Indeed, having made several Altman-esque works, Anderson has now made one that in some ways feels as close to a posthumous Kubrick epic as is imaginable. "We're all children of Kubrick, aren't we?" Anderson admits over the phone. "Is there anything you can do that he hasn't done?"

You expect a certain seriousness from Anderson, but Blood's raw-boned sobriety is new: it is a film that has little room for levity. But that's not how the director views it. "I see so much humour in this story, it makes me laugh – at least, how absurd it all gets. I remember feeling that we can't just be grim, we have to have some humour in here. We didn't want it just to be dark. I always thought at the very least that it should be uplifting," Anderson laughs.

Given Day-Lewis's notoriously thorough methods for preparing roles, one can imagine him spending two years down a mine to become Plainview, scrabbling at rock with his fingernails (he did recently comment: "In terms of the physical preparation, there wasn't really anything to do but stay fit and start digging holes"). But beyond explaining that he provided his star with copious documentation on oil drilling and Dust Bowl-era audio recordings, Anderson prefers to draw a veil over Day-Lewis's training. "I don't think it's a director's job to peek behind the curtain too much," he says. "The work Daniel did on his own is still a mystery to me, and I like it that way."

And the origins of Plainview's distinctive patrician boom? "Daniel sent me some tape recordings on a Dictaphone he used that must have been made in the 17th century, because everything sounded so broken and old, like a home-grown American aristocracy – John Huston does have a little bit of that."

Born in 1970, Anderson was raised in LA's San Fernando Valley; his father, now dead, was Ernie Anderson, a television actor known for voiceovers and playing "'horror host" Ghoulardi, a goateed hipster character who played bongo skulls while introducing late-night chillers. Anderson named his production company Ghoulardi in tribute to him; it was his dad who gave him his first film lessons, snapping his fingers through His Girl Friday on TV as a lesson in dialogue rhythm.

In his early twenties, Anderson enrolled at NYU's film school, but dropped out after two days to carry on making his own shorts. His first feature, Sydney (1996), was a taut portrayal of an old gambler, his surrogate son and an unreliable waitress-hooker. Little seen, it's ripe for rediscovery, not least because it's one of the few films ever to squeeze some warmth out of Gwyneth Paltrow.

Boogie Nights made Anderson a star auteur at 27. He eventually came under the approving wing of Altman, who repaid Anderson's enthusiastic homages by taking him on as back-up director while shooting his final film, A Prairie Home Companion. It's rumoured that Anderson shot sections of the film, though he claims he didn't have much to do. "I sat in a chair and ate all day and watched Bob work, and once in a while he'd say, 'Tell them to do this,' and I'd run down and back. I was his errand boy. It was so much fun."

Also on Altman's film, in front of the camera, was Anderson's partner, Maya Rudolph, a Saturday Night Live regular noted for her impersonations of Beyoncé and Donatella Versace. Now he and Rudolph have a two-year-old daughter, Pearl, whose birth, he says, has changed his priorities: "As I have got older and become a father, there's less and less time for films," he admits.

Like many American directors, Anderson confesses surprise that suddenly it's become possible to feel optimistic about producing good work in Hollywood. "I could have stood on a soapbox [in 2006] and railed about what was going on, but it's hard to do that now. It's been an amazing year."

The awards success of There Will Be Blood is symptomatic of this change. It's a film that isn't remotely afraid of extremities, ambiguities and downright obscurities – which, of course, Anderson relishes. "It's a gamble you take, the risk of alienating an audience. But there's a theory – sometimes it's better to confuse them for five minutes than let them get ahead of you for 10 seconds."

'There Will Be Blood' opens on Friday

Tycoon terrors: Larger-than-life moguls who filled the big screen

Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, 1941

Inspired by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, this rags-to-riches tale remains the template for stories of Mammon and melancholia

Giant George Stevens, 1956

The descent of James Dean's poor boy made good in this epic of the oilfields is a cautionary lesson in the dangers of overnight fame

Chinatown, Roman Polanski, 1974

This blackest of LA noirs starred John Huston as Noah Cross, vampiric snatcher of Californian water and dysfunctional patriarch

Melvin and Howard, Jonathan Demme, 1980

An apocryphal rereading of the life of producer/airman/ hermit Howard Hughes, starring Jason Robards as a hitchhiking sage

Eureka, Nicolas Roeg, 1984

It's gold that does for Gene Hackman's Arctic prospector – along with magic, madness, Kabbala and a young Joe Pesci

丹尼尔·戴—刘易斯（独立报）

How Daniel Day-Lewis' notoriously rigorous role preparation has yielded another Oscar contender

Again, there's method in his madness. He talks to Chris Sullivan

Friday, 1 February 2008

Anyone who has seen Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson's storming "big oil epic" There Will Be Blood might wager that the best actor Oscar is already his.

As the chillingly mercurial Daniel Plainview, a pioneering oil prospector who strikes it rich after discovering a lake of oil underneath New Boston, California, the actor owns the film for its two hours and 40 minutes. For the first 20 – in which not a word is spoken – he sustains a level of intensity that is truly astonishing. Day-Lewis has already received a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, plus top awards from almost every US critics circle, for his performance as the hard-bitten, irreligious misanthropic mountain of a man.

But, as the actor bounds into the room to meet me, he could not be more different from the toweringly obnoxious character he has created. Smiling for Ireland, the absurdly youthful 50-year-old is dressed like a traveller with a penchant for country and western, in checked shirt, jeans and a Mexican silver buckled belt, sporting shoulder-length wavy hair and two rather large silver hoop earrings. An affable, funny and down-to-earth man, without pretension, his rather charming old-school manners are given voice in an accent with more than a hint of an Irish lilt, as far from the clipped growl of Plainview as one could imagine.

Much of what is said about Day-Lewis is not to his liking. Journalists have written about his time on a film, his time off, what he does, how he does it. They have examined his relationships, his habits, his way of life. And here I am, about to do it again.

The reason for this level of interest is that Day-Lewis's work is big news. There Will Be Blood, loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! (itself loosely based on the scandalous life of the barnstorming oil tycoon Edward L Doheny), has received eight Oscar nominations and met with a fanfare of critical acclaim. Some have suggested that, judging by this rivetingly physical rendering, Day-Lewis is the world's greatest living screen actor.

"I was working on this part for three years, but not in isolation, as Paul and I were in very close touch the whole time," says Day-Lewis, who was in character throughout the shoot. "My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one. It begins way before, with the work before you start filming – and there is no limit to the amount of time that you take to discover a whole life; it could take six months, a year, or a lifetime."

I first met Day-Lewis more than 20 years ago. A tall skinny young actor with a bleached Jimmy Dean haircut, he was, as he described, "working on a little film about a launderette and two gay blokes". Since then, Day-Lewis has made 16 films, established himself as one of the world's finest actors, won copious awards and fathered three boys: Gabriel, with his former partner Isabelle Adjani, the French actress; and Ronan and Cashel, with his wife Rebecca Miller, the daughter of the US playwright Arthur Miller and writer/director of the actor's previous picture, The Ballad of Jack and Rose. The couple have lived in the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland for the past 15 years.

The son of the poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and Jill Balcon (daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, the founder of Ealing Studios), the actor grew up in Greenwich, south-east London. He never allowed his privileged upbringing to get in the way of a life less ordinary. "A house full of great books about art and literature was all well and good, but I was fascinated by the streets that were close by – Lewisham, New Cross and Deptford. I supported Millwall with great gusto and was on the terraces every Saturday with the rest of the lads.

"It was such an important part of my life that, give my parents their due, they did not deprive me of. Even though their experiences were very far removed from what I was experiencing, in that neither of them would ever have considered setting foot on the terraces of the Den, both of them were completely open and believed that, as much as they were part of this society, there was work that had to be done to break down its rigid demarcations.

"It was through roaming the streets of Deptford that I started to understand this society we live in, which at the time coincided with a wave of dramatists who used the medium to break down the social barriers: Barrie Keefe [he cites Keefe's Gimme Shelter trilogy with Phil Davies as especially inspiring], Nigel Williams, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and of course my hero, Ken Loach, who can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned.

"Then, when [Martin Scorsese's] Mean Streets came out, I was 16, and you cannot imagine the effect it had on me, a young and slightly wayward guy from south V C London. It was like a light going on in my head. It was so influential for me as a young person, never mind as a young actor."

Little wonder that when the director Stephen Frears cast Day-Lewis as Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), he excelled. "Here we have a Pakistani running a launderette, two gay boys and the National Front," he says, eyes twinkling. "My Beautiful Laundrette was truly outrageous and a continuation of this dramatic tradition of scrutinising this ludicrous divided society we inhabit. Hanif Kureishi [the writer] is the dog's bollocks and really puts the cats among the pigeons, Stephen Frears is a natural anarchist and I was a feisty young devil who loved anyone that stirred things up. It is a very sustaining feeling to feel that you are all partaking of this mischievous enterprise."

Of course, it's this mischief that makes him tick. Throughout his career, he has resisted classification and mesmerised critics and public with work where every role is bafflingly different and eminently challenging. "I did A Room With a View at the same time as Laundrette," he remembers. "I believe they premiered in New York on the same night. I relished the opportunity to do both – in Laundrette I was this working-class outcast, and in Room I was this upper-class twit. It was great fun."

The two roles established the actor on the international stage, but it was his Oscar-winning turn as Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989) that won him a reputation as one of the world's foremost practitioners of the method school of acting. Throughout production, the actor remained in character as the writer with cerebral palsy, never leaving his wheelchair and being spoon-fed by the crew. "A few people did find that a bit odd," he admits, chuckling. "My agent Julian, who is sadly no longer with us, was quite unsettled when he came to visit me on set as I was 'in character' all the time and, apart from anything else, he couldn't understand a word I was saying. So he walked out, had a very quiet aperitif in a local hostelry, and from then on just left me to get on with it."

This preparation, for which Day-Lewis is now notorious, has been the cause of much heated discussion – and some public concern. He crudely tattooed his hands and trained as a real fighter, twice a day, seven days a week, for nearly three years, for The Boxer (1997). His trainer – the former world champion Barry McGuigan, no less – remarked that he could have turned professional.

For In The Name of the Father (1993), he slept in an abandoned jail and ate only prison rations. For The Crucible (1996), he lived in the film set's replica village without electricity or running water and built his character's house with 17th-century tools.

But it was his method work as Bill the Butcher in Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) that attracted most attention. He trained as a butcher, caught pneumonia while on set (having refused to change his threadbare coat for a warmer one because it hadn't existed in the 19th century), and wandered about Rome (where Gangs was filmed) in character, fighting strangers. "I had to do my preparation," he says with a grin. "And I will admit that I went mad, totally mad. I remembered the days of fighting on the Millwall terraces and they stood me in good stead for Bill the Butcher. He was a bit of a punk, a marvellous character and a joy to be – but not so good for my physical or mental health."

Day-Lewis plays down most of the rumours about his working methods, and is clearly sick to death of hearing them. "For me, it seems obvious, as that is what I do," he stresses, sounding baffled. "And I think, 'Well, if people think it's odd, then what can I do?'"

One soon realises that it is Day-Lewis's quest for perfection that allows him to take on these different roles, these lives, and (apart from his family) that is what he lives for. "You go to these great lengths to imagine another world and time and imagine a man, like Plainview, living in those times – and having spent your imagination on that, it seems more fun to live there all the time than jumping in and out," he says. "That is the playground you've created, so why not stay there and play? It gets rid of that notion of playing between times, which often people talk about – waiting for the next shot. I don't buy that. Whatever you can do to give yourself a sense of continuity can only add to the work.

"I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced. And I love the pure pleasure of doing the work, no matter if that work involves some kind of discomfort – even though I don't see it as that, one just deals with the day-to-day challenges of the character. I do it out of curiosity and I enjoy it. But the way people would have it, it is like a game of self-chastisement and it has never been that way for me – it's all just a big, funny game."

For Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992), the actor was able to prepare for the role of James Fenimore Cooper's 18th-century hero Hawkeye by living off the land for six months, learning how to hunt, fish and skin animals. But where did this jovial, happily married family man find the seething ferocity of Plainview?

"Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week," he replies with a wicked glint. "We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal. And what is more invigorating than to unleash some of that stuff? But I cannot account for where any of this comes from. It comes from the unconscious and I cannot account for what ferments in my unconscious. That part of the work doesn't take part in the conscious; one just hopes there is a cave somewhere in your mind that you can ransack.

"But so much of the work relies on consciously allowing things to emerge in spite of yourself," he adds. "Consciously always looking for the instinctive – that animal part of yourself – and even though somewhere inside you sculpt and organise with some reason, there is always something a little more chaotic going on."

So engrossed was the actor in the role that, when asked how long the shoot was, he answers: "I don't know – maybe 12, 14 weeks. I really couldn't tell you. But the joy about great work is that you are not looking for the finishing line. Quite the opposite. As with all artistic endeavour, you lose yourself; it's like time out of time, a period when I lose myself and the clocks stop."

How do the wife and kids cope with having a father who, for long periods, is someone else? "For There Will Be Blood, my wife and kids were with me throughout," he replies. "And they did go a little bit crazy living with Plainview all the time, but the kids thought it was a laugh in the end to have this different bloke as their dad and both did a pretty decent impersonation of me. My wife is amazingly tolerant. I knew that from the word go. She just believes, like I do, that if you are attempting anything of a creative nature, no rules apply."

One of the hardest things for Day-Lewis is letting go of the characters he has so lovingly created. "Well, absurd as it might seem, when you've been someone else for that amount of time, it's even more absurd when it's all over." He laughs. "Then the joke is on all of us, because once a curiosity is unleashed you can't just tie it up again. It does take time to let go. There is no great part of you that wants to stop doing that work, and no matter how much you're begging for it to stop you need someone to put a restraining order on it."

Luckily for me, on the day we met, Plainview had long since vacated the premises.

'There Will Be Blood' opens on 8 February