18 Years Ago Today, This Epic Masterpiece Released – and Quentin Tarantino Is Dead Wrong About It

Quentin Tarantino has a lot of opinions about movies and filmmakers, but he is wrong about one specific masterpiece. It has been 18 years since Paul Thomas Anderson released one of his greatest movies, There Will Be Blood. The movie was loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, and the film follows an oilman who goes from town to town finding oil, draining the towns dry, and moving on to his next conquest. The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis as the oilman Daniel Plainview and Paul Dano as the twin brothers Paul and Eli Sunday. In a recent interview, Tarantino had some unkind things to say about one of those actors.

It should come as no surprise that Tarantino wasn’t slamming Daniel Day-Lewis, who the director says is incredible in everything he does. However, Tarantino had some big complaints about Paul Dano.

Quentin Tarantino Is Wrong About Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood

Quentin Tarantino was on The Bret Easton Ellis podcast, and he shared his favorite 20 movies of the 21st century. He listed There Will Be Blood as his fifth favorite, as he loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie and Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting performance. However, he had little nice to say about Paul Dano, who he said was the movie’s flaw. “He is weak sauce, man,” Tarantino said. “He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy. The weakest f–king actor in SAG.”

If anything, this gave Hollywood and fans a chance to praise Paul Dano for his work, as people came out in masses on social media to praise the actor. Tarantino explained that Dano didn’t deliver a “yterrible performance,” but he instead said he gave a “non-entitiy performance.” If anything, this is Tarantino’s opinion, and he is allowed to have it and even to express it. However, Dano’s performance was exactly what the movie’s characters needed.

There was no way that Paul Dano should have delivered a performance that was equal to Daniel Day-Lewis. He was always meant to be weak next to Day-Lewis’s character. When Dano’s preacher embarrassed and humiliated Daniel Plainview in the church, it was always meant to be a little man dressing down someone who was always bigger than him. This was a little man who wanted to be so much bigger, and Dano’s performance perfectly revealed that.

It also isn’t fair to say that Dano is a non-entity performer in Hollywood in general. His performance as The Riddler in The Batman was perfection, as he was once again a little man who got other little men to rise in rebellion because they were never strong enough to matter on their own. It was the exact purpose of the character. Look at films like Swiss Army Man, Prisoners, and The Fabelmans to see that Paul Dano is a character actor who serves a specific purpose in his movies. In that role, he is perfect.

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There Will Be Blood Is an Underrated Horror Movie Masterpiece

There Will Be Blood is a masterwork of cinema, which should come as no surprise to anyone who follows Paul Thomas Anderson’s career. What makes it work so well is that it is a mixture of genres. It is a Western movie, and it is also an underrated horror film. This is something that a lot of people might not have recognized when it came out. While it is clearly a Western about a dying Old West town, it is also a horror movie that can be seen as a loose remake of Dracula.

There Will Be Blood is a movie about a vampire who comes into a new town and bleeds it dry. The vampire in this case is an oilman named Daniel Plainville, and he even has his own Renfields who come into the town to set it up for the taking. Eli Sunday was clearly a Van Helsing to this Dracula, although he never had the power, and he fell hard when Plainville sought his vengeance. The idea that oil can always be symbolically compared to blood is easy to see.

In the New York Times poll of the best movies of the 21st century so far, as voted on by industry professionals, There Will Be Blood was in the top 10, and along with No Country For Old Men, was the only two Westerns at the top portion of the list. However, it was also a fantastic horror movie, and it worked so well thanks to the performances of Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, who both played their roles masterfully.

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