At the recent junket for the film, which stars the amazingly adept Daniel Day-Lewis, we paid close attention while Anderson dished on his inspiration for making the film, why he changed the title, his time spent with Robert Altman, and how he landed Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood to score the movie.

Paul Thomas Anderson on the inspiration for the movie and the plodding misery within the arch of the character:

"I think the arc goes like that, from miserable to more miserable, hopefully. The inspiration for the movie comes first and foremost from the book. I had been trying to write something, anything, just to get something written. And I had a story that wasn’t really working that was about fighting families, that was two families sort of fighting and it didn’t really have anything - it just had that premise. And when I read the book, it has so many ready-made scenes and the great venue of the oil fields and all that. So those are the kind of obvious things that seemed worth making a film about. And the desire to work with Daniel [Day-Lewis], certainly, once that presented itself as a possibility certainly drove the engine for me to write it and to finish it and to get it to him. And arcs, well, I guess that’s your job, arcs."

Anderson on his awareness of the film's subtext about class, religion and money:

"Well, aware of it 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’s a slippery slope when you start thinking about something other than just a good battle between two guys that kind of see each other for what they are, just trying to work from that first and foremost and let everything that is there fall into place behind it. I would be wrong - it would be horrible to make a political film or anything like that. Tell a nasty story and let the rest take care of itself."

PTA on changing the title of the book and dealing with the lust for oil and its impact on humanity and America:

"Well, we changed the title of the book because, at the end of the day, there’s not enough of the book probably left to feel like it’s a proper adaption of the book. And probably, selfishly, I wrote the title down and it looked really good, you know, and I thought we should call the film that.... The U.S. liking oil and all that, well, I grew up in California and there’s a lot of oil out there. I don’t live that far from Bakersfield, which is where the initial discoveries of oil were in California and still are pumping away. And I suppose I’ve always wondered what the stuff is, how we get it out of the ground, why we like it so much, and what the story was. And the story of oil in California in particular, and probably in this country, was really well told in the first couple hundred pages of the Upton Sinclair book. He started to write the book in the 1920s when he went with his wife to the Signal Hill area, which is down near Long Beach, was essentially set up to be vacation homes overlooking the Long Beach Bay.

"What happened was somebody decided instead of building a vacation home, they decided to drill for oil and they struck oil. So this community went absolutely mad. His wife owned a plot land. They took a ride down there. This community was trying to get a lease together. So they were trying to kind of meet independent prospectors to see if they could get together and potentially get a bigger pie made up. But when he witnessed this group try [and] get this lease together, he, in his words, said he witnessed human greed laid bare. He just saw these people go absolutely crazy and he knew what he wanted to write about. And that’s what started him on the road of that story. And, you know, we just picked up where he left off, I suppose. There were a lot of other things that go on the in the book. It goes to Hollywood, it goes to Washington, D.C., it takes care of the Teapot Dome scandal, it takes care of the Russian Revolution, all these massive things that we couldn’t do. But at the core of the story was the drive and ambition not only from this independent oil men, but also from the people he was supposedly getting the better of in leasing their land. The ambition was on both sides, equally."

On landing Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood to score the film:

"Johnny Greenwood, it sort of begins and ends with Johnny Greenwood and, I suppose, the good idea that I had to ask him to do it. He had a couple of pieces that existed before that he’d written for an orchestra. He’s better known for his day job. He’s in a band called Radiohead and... but he’s written a few orchestral pieces that I heard that I thought were terrific. He also did an experimental film called Body Song that he wrote the score for. Anyway, I’d known him for a few years and asked him to do it and showed him the film and he said, 'Okay, great.' I gave him a copy of the movie and about three weeks later he came back with two hours of music. I have no idea how or when he did it, but he did it and it’s kind of amazing. I can’t say that I did any real guiding or had any contribution to it except to just take what he gave us and find the right places for it. There were a couple of pieces that he’d written on piano that we then took to an orchestra, a couple of things that he’d written for a string quartet that just went straight into the film, and a few things that we thought would be better again for orchestra. And [we] just sort of did that over the course of a couple of months and it was a great experience working with him."

Anderson being inspired by Robert Altman the impact it had on the film:

"Well, everything from Robert’s films have been an inspiration for me seeing [how] I saw his films when I was starting out. And McCabe and Mrs. Miller was certainly one of them, and Nashville, everything, on and one. We became pretty close in the last few years of his life and I got the job of sitting next to him on A Prarie Home Companion for insurance reasons. My partner was in the film and she was pregnant at the time and just in case anything happened with Bob, I was hired to sit there next to him. I can’t tell you what I took from it. Obviously it was such an honor and a privilege and all that, but just such an amazing good time for thirty days to sit next to him. Bob is very good at relaxing, he’s a very relaxed director. I don’t know if it always was like that. I think he might have been. I’d find myself getting uptight about things and he’d just sort of look at me like, ‘What are you worried about? It’s all going to be fine.’ And maybe I learned that from just sitting around with him; relax a little bit more. And he died while we were cutting the film. I was planning to show it to him, actually. I was in Ireland with Daniel, we were working on the film and was planning to come back and show it to him. Never got a chance to, so that’s a really a drag that he didn’t get to see it. So yeah, we dedicated the film to him."

Paul Thomas Anderson on the language and dialect within There Will Be Blood:

"Well, the first speech in the movie is taken pretty directly from the Upton Sinclair book: 'Ladies and gentleman, I’ve traveled over half our State.' And the one thing that I did to it was there was an accent applied to it the way Upton Sinclair wrote it: 'Drill in.' And I just, as a way to not - I didn’t want to impose any kind of accent or something like that on whoever was going to play the part. I just wrote it out clearly, filled in the final consonants along the way, you know. And it was just incredibly simple, very direct. And whether I thought this then or not - I mean, I can remember feeling just ‘keep it simple, keep the language simple’, but I just couldn’t imagine these guys using more words than they had to use. Anybody in this venue, I just couldn’t see it. You see pictures of these guys in these oil camps and you just think, ‘I’m pretty positive they’re so economical with what they say,’ which became a nice way to attack it. Ideally, it gets to the point where it’s just happening, going well. You can write something, wake up the next morning and say, 'God, who wrote that? That’s pretty good.'"