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Daniel Day-Lewis exclusive

The actor discusses 'There Will Be Blood', his forthcoming collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson.

Mar 13 2006

Time Out recently caught up with Daniel Day-Lewis, and as well as discussing new film 'The Ballad of Jack and Rose', the actor also spilled the beans about 'There Will Be Blood', his forthcoming collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson (first reported on here).

'It's set at the end of the 19th Century and it's centred on the life of an independent wildcat oil driller' he explained. 'Standard Oil and Union Oil basically had all the territories bought and paid for, but there were wildcatters who were discovering wells all over that part of the country.

'They were almost always finally broken by the companies because they controlled the railways – at the time there were no pipelines to the coast so they controlled the price of shipping barrels of oil. Wildcatters could get three or four wells gushing at 1,000 barrels a day but they couldn't transport it.'

Day-Lewis will play the central character, who is loosely based on Edward Doheny, a wildcatter who ended up fighting the monopolies in court.

However, although the script is based on the 1920s novel 'Oil' by Upton Sinclair, the actor says it's misleading to call it an adaptation. 'Paul has made something so entirely original out of it that the connection is almost unrecognisable.

'It's an astonishing piece of work as it is on the page, and we've just got to try and make some sense of that. It's not a big budget film, but it's a big film. A big story.'

'There Will Be Blood' is set to start shooting this summer. Dave Calhoun's full interview with Daniel Day-Lewis will appear in tomorrow's issue of Time Out London.