Erica Harrell
Producer

This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, There Will Be Blood at a screening at the Producers Guild. For a brief time I had interned on this film during pre-production when the film was based on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. I had read the script, met Paul and knew this was going to be an amazing film.

It definitely lived up to my expectations. Daniel Day Lewis delivers a performance that is truly outstanding. After the screening, producers Daniel Lupi and Joanne Sellar did a brief Q&A about the film.
Compared to American Gangster’s budget of over $100 million, Paramount’s indie division, Paramount Vantage only doled out $30 million dollars for the film. Within that $30 million, a little over $500,000 was spent on getting a train (the same train from 3:10 to Yuma) out to Marfa,Texas where the film was shot for some brief sequences. The creative producer and the money producer must agree on tough choices like spending that much money on just a train.

On A Monster in the Attic, we were unable to find the perfect location that had a pre-existing structure on it, and as a tiny indie film we decided to actually build a structure. Obviously a large portion of our budget we towards that build, but in the end it was worth it for us to achieve the look we wanted while keeping our cast and crew in town. Happily now our film set is being preserved in Kanab along side the Outlaw Josey Wales sets as a part of Kanab’s film history.

There Will Be Blood is loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! and Paul’s script had been shifted around to several different studios over several years even with Daniel Day Lewis attached, before Paramount Vantage made the film. The sets were all constructed and Paul was able to shoot the majority of the film in sequence. This is really an amazing film that I hope all of you will see. It will surely be an Oscar contender.

Watch the Trailer

[tags]There Will Be Blood, Paramount Vantage, Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson, American Ganagster, Indie Film, Upton Sinclair, Oil!, Greed, train, locations, 3:10 to Yuma, Daniel Lupi, Joanne Seller[/tags]