There Will Be Blood (2007) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A brutal character study about ambition, performance, and the cost of wanting everything.
There Will Be Blood is Paul Thomas Anderson’s scorched-earth study of Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector who turns survival instinct into empire, then empire into isolation. The screenplay opens almost wordlessly in the New Mexico desert, watching Daniel dig, fall, crawl, and endure before he ever becomes the polished salesman who can bend a room to his will. From there, the script builds a grim American fable about oil, family, faith, capitalism, and the rotten little engine room where all four start grinding against each other.
For writers and film students, this screenplay is a masterclass in character construction through behavior. Daniel’s psychology is not explained with soft-focus confession. It is revealed through labor, negotiation, silence, violence, strategy, and the way he uses H.W. as both son and symbol. Study how the script lets image, rhythm, and power dynamics do the talking before the dialogue arrives with a knife hidden in its boot.
Ready to get to work? Check out the Study Notes just below. When you're ready, download the There Will Be Blood screenplay.
There Will Be Blood Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
There Will Be Blood is useful to study because it builds one of modern cinema’s great character portraits through action before explanation. Daniel Plainview does not enter the story as a fully formed tyrant. He enters as a body in the desert, digging, sweating, breaking, crawling, surviving. The screenplay tracks how that survival instinct mutates into business genius, then domination, then spiritual rot. Every major relationship in the script becomes a transaction: Daniel and H.W., Daniel and Eli, Daniel and Henry, Daniel and the land itself. The result is a story where oil is not just the prize. It is the substance that reveals what people are already willing to become.
Craft Focus
- Character through behavior: The opening pages rely on labor, pain, silence, and persistence rather than exposition. Daniel’s worldview is established through what he survives before he ever sells himself to another room.
- Power as performance: Daniel changes masks depending on the audience. He can be father, businessman, neighbor, believer, victim, or benefactor, but the script keeps showing the calculation underneath the costume.
- Opposing belief systems: Daniel and Eli are not just enemies. They are rival salesmen. One sells industry, the other sells salvation, and both understand that spectacle can move people faster than truth.
- Escalation by moral corrosion: The plot does not simply get bigger as the wells grow. Daniel’s victories narrow his soul, turning each new success into another locked door between him and human connection.
Questions for Writers
- How does the screenplay make Daniel compelling without making him emotionally safe?
- Where does the script use silence, process, and physical action to replace traditional exposition?
- How does H.W. function as both Daniel’s human connection and part of his public-facing business mythology?
- Why is Eli such an effective antagonist even though he often appears weaker than Daniel?
- How does the final act turn earlier humiliations, bargains, and performances into one last grotesque reckoning?
While reading, pay attention to how There Will Be Blood lets structure behave like a slow extraction process. The screenplay digs into Daniel scene by scene, removing everything that might soften him: partnership, family, brotherhood, faith, community, even the usefulness of money once he has more than enough of it. The craft lesson is savage but clean: a character study becomes unforgettable when the plot does not change the protagonist so much as uncover what was buried in him all along.
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There Will Be Blood (2007)
A story of family, religion, hatred, oil and madness, focusing on a turn-of-the-century prospector in the early days of the business.
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