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Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of There Will Be Blood Melinda Sue Gordon/Courtesy of Paramount Vantage

Quiet, stoic, and self-reliant Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) rapidly transforms into a wealthy tycoon when he discovers oil in the hard scrub of Southern California and is then driven by an almost demonic desire to extract the riches from the land he has acquired, regardless of the physical and spiritual price to himself and to the people who live there. Plainview eventually meets his match in the supposedly unassuming and deeply religious Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a young yet quietly ambitious preacher in the charismatic tradition. The two recognize the same desire and ambition for power in one another and become locked in a bitter struggle that will bleed from one century into another.

The origins of There Will Be Blood can be traced to a bookstore in London, where homesick Paul Thomas Anderson spotted the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, which then became an unlikely life raft for the struggling writer/director.

"I had been trying to write something, anything — just to get something written," Anderson says. "I had a story that wasn't really working. It was about two families, fighting. It just had that premise. And when I read the book, there were so many ready-made scenes and the great venue of the oil fields and all that. So those are all of the obvious things that seemed worth making a film about."

Anderson explains that he quickly became engrossed in the book's early focus on rural California and the proliferation of derricks and oil fields as prospectors began crisscrossing the state. But he was reluctant to turn the film into a didactic treatise on power, capitalism, and religion, despite the fact that the source novel is rich with allusions to the big issues that confronted America's rapid expansion.

"[I was] aware of it [enough] to know that if we indulged too much in it or let that stuff rise to the top that it could get kind of murky. And it [becomes] a slippery slope when you start thinking about something other than just a good battle between two guys that see each other for what they are. [I was] just trying to work from that first and foremost…everything that is there falls into place behind it. It would be horrible to make a political film or anything like that," he says.

With a story and a setting firmly in his mind, Anderson then realized that Blood would be the ideal chance for him to work with an actor he admired and longed to collaborate with: Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis accepted the role two years before he finally got a chance to play it and says he relished the chance to put his unique spin on Plainveiw's forceful egoism and dark misanthropy.

"I never really saw him as a miserable prick," the actor says. "The challenge, I dare say, is the same as it always is, which is just to try and discover a life that isn't your own. And Plainview, as he came to me in Paul's beautiful script, was a man whose life I didn't understand at all. It was a life that was completely mysterious to me, and that unleashed a fatal curiosity, which I had no choice but to pursue. He's just a fellow trying to make a living. I believe you see the seeds of the man you meet at the end in the man you meet at the beginning. So it never occurred to me to think that his journey was a short one."

Shooting took place primarily in Marfa, Texas — the same setting for the Cohen Brothers' No Country for Old Men and, perhaps more famously, for Giant, the 1955 classic starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor. As a prospector, Plainview works the unyielding earth in solitude and, in an early scene in the film, falls down a mineshaft and breaks his leg. Taking on the role of Plainview was not just a physically demanding part; it also permitted Day-Lewis to experience first-hand the difficulties with which early pioneers of oil drilling struggled in order to learn and ultimately excel.