Plainview Quotes

(on researching his role as Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)) I like to learn about things. It was just a great time trying to conceive of the impossibility of that thing. I didn`t know anything about mining at the turn of the century in America. My boarding school in Kent didn`t exactly teach that.

(on researching his role as Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)) Back then men would get the fever. They would keep digging, always with the idea that next time they`ll throw the dice and the money will fall out of the sky. It killed a lot of men, it broke others, still more were reduced to despair and poverty, but they still believed in the promise of the West.

(on researching his role as Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)) I read a lot of correspondence dating from that period. Decent middle-class lives with wives and children were abandoned to pursue this elusive possibility. They were bank clerks and shipping agents and teachers. They all fled West for a sniff of cheap money. And they made it up as they went along. No one knew how to drill for oil. Initially, they scooped it out of the ground in saucepans. It was man at his most animalistic, sifting through filth to find bright, sparkly things.