joewright:Academy Award Winners for Best Cinematography:2008 — Robert Elswit, ASCThere Will Be Blood
joewright:Academy Award Winners for Best Cinematography:2008 — Robert Elswit, ASCThere Will Be Blood (2007)Directed by Paul Thomas AndersonAspect Ratio: 2.39 : 1The authentic look and feel of Blood are a credit to the camera, production-design and costume departments, but the project also benefited from exhaustive research and carefully considered influences. Anderson based his screenplay on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, drawing mainly from the first 150 pages, which he lauds for “incredible descriptions of the oil work at the time, whether it was the details of the drilling or what it would be like to be in charge of a group of 20 or 40 men. The book is set in the 1920s, so we crossed a bit of our research and fudged some dates to put us at the beginning of the oil boom in California.” The story is also partly based on the life of American oil tycoon Edward Doheny, whose former home in Beverly Hills provided the setting for the film’s shocking climax. Additionally, Anderson and his collaborators visited museums, pored over period photographs and studied old, industrial, silent footage of actual oil crews at work. “An enormous amount of footage was shot back then,” Elswit notes. “We watched all these old-time guys working on wooden rigs, and we could see what early rotary or cable-tool rigs looked like.” A key cinematic influence was John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). “I have such love for that film it’s kind of hard to talk about it without gushing,” says Anderson, who chuckles after realizing his pun. “On this film, we were trying to keep things simple — the simplest kinds of frames, the simplest number of shots — and we tried to follow the influence of filmmakers like Huston. The movies of the ’40s are incredibly straightforward. They’re the ones I love the most, really.” — [x] -- source link
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