Marfa Film Festival 2008 – There Will Be Blood on the set of Little Boston
The city of Marfa, Texas, is always the kid in the back of class that wildly raises its hand when anyone states Texas is one long flat state. Sitting at an elevation of 4,685 feet, its picturesque mountain ranges and sparse signs of modern human fixtures make it an oasis and retreat from everyday life. Where else can you revel in such land that would make any Spaghetti Western fan drool with awe at the surrounding landscapes that encompass them from all sides as if they had just stepped back into time. Years ago when Paul Thomas Anderson was at his wits end trying to find a place in California to film There Will Be Blood, his location scouts came across the nearly 60,000 acre plus McGuire Ranch that sits several miles south of Marfa. It not only provided a perfect backdrop with its horizon-to-horizon views void of any modern signs of life, but it also had an unused railroad track that ran through its property. It wasn’t California yet it certainly could evoke the Bakersfield, California circa the early 1910’s that Paul Thomas Anderson envisioned for his film (view ScreenAnarchy exclusive pictures from the set and day one of the Marfa Film Festival here).
Production Designer Jack Frisk and Paul Thomas Anderson scoured the McGuire Ranch dreaming up ideas for where to plant Little Boston, only to return to a location close by an old water tank that ran by the railroad track. It was at this location that Little Boston sprang to life. The current set while still standing is looking like it’s feeling the effects of the very dusty and cross heavy winds that rake across the plains. Electrical wires you would expect to see dotting around the set are nowhere to be found. When it came to building the set they found ropes looked much better onscreen.
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The train depot, which is just west of the Little Boston along its unused tracks, also had its interiors re-purposed for key scenes in the movie. Inside its north end the key meetings of the film were shot. The railroad tracks outside were all touched up to look real for their time period. Just standing on the train depots platform which faces to the west, causes one to instantly think of the scene with H.W. being taken away.
Just south and a bit east of the Little Boston set you can see the famous small church from the film. This area in between Chapel and Goat Mountain is the home for the sets of the small church, the Sunday house, the oil derrick platform (now reduced to just a platform) and various buildings that made up the oil set. The small church overlooks this area on a small hill where you can gaze down south to see the Sunday house and remaining oil set. Although there are rumored the church and Sunday house will be torn down, both will remain on the land and currently have no plans of being torn down.
The small church is the one featured earlier on in the film and not the newer church we see towards the very end of the film (that features the very famous “I’ve abandoned my child” lines). The most startling thing about the church when entering is at how tiny it is in actuality. It houses only a handful of rows of pews and doesn’t feature any break away walls that would have allowed for easier filming. Instead this church has been entirely constructed as if it were a real one around its time period. The pews sit as rough pieces of wood and not as wooden polished pews with cushions. It’s amazing to sit inside and marvel how local extras improvised their religious fanaticism in their scenes here with screaming and bible raising. Several window frames mark the exterior of the small wooden building that suggest perhaps in its time period this would have been used as a way of facilitating church but allowing for air conditioning, since if these large wooden window frames weren’t there then the heat inside would have been unbearable. A small wooden platform serves as the centerpiece of the small church where seemingly a preacher would have given his sermons. Towards the back of the church in a seemingly hidden spot a friend found a 1904 newspaper tucked inside and neatly folded. Its origins and being hidden so well is still a mystery of sorts. You often times never know what you will find on a movie set and this was no exception.
Other set pieces that were on the land were burned down over a two-day window of time at the end of the shooting. All the set pieces I encountered looked built first and then everyone must have gone back in later to figure out how they would film inside and around them. There weren’t any fake walls or many typical tricks you would expect. There is a real painstaking attention to building authentic feeling set pieces here that breath with their time period versus feeling like manufactured sets. You can see how by doing this it works perfectly into Anderson’s very naturalistic directing style of immersion, layers of details and very actor focused. By actor focused he seems to take great strides at letting his cast get the proper room, acting space and setting to really walk in their characters shoes. All the details on his sets in even their smallest forms have beating hearts.
The McGuire Ranch served as a nice remote location shoot for the cast and crew of There Will Be Blood. Inside its confines with no modern touches in sight everyone could completely get lost in the spirit and times of the film. It was a complete immersion into filming that cast and crews don’t often always get with often times shooting in big cities and sprawling cityscapes. The only downside of shooting on the ranch seemed to be the endless dust that the steady flow of strong winds brought, the entry road to get to the sets on the ranch which is like 10 miles of the most rugged and winding of dirt roads you could ever imagine, and Mojave Green rattlers. I’ve driven on many dirt roads in my time and I have to say the one on the McGuire Ranch is the most rugged I’ve ever been on. Imagine driving at 5 mph as your car feels like it’s encountering an earthquake. For the Mojave Greens that are incredibly venomous they used the ranch’s foreman, David Williams (who gets an Executive Producer nod and small role in the film as well), to assist with removal duty. It’s reported he got about 3-5 he removed from the surrounding sets each day in addition to helping with all overall production duties. In addition several of the principal cast lived on set on his ranch in trailers. Most of the crew stayed close by on the Kerr Mitchell Ranch. Everyone else stayed in Marfa hotels and houses. The McGuire Ranch road most certainly must have grown comfortable to everyone by the end of the shoot and regular roads and highways with smooth surfaces as then being strange. It adds this certain feel to the ranch as if your being whisked away on a stagecoach on a journey inside some majestic lands untouched by modern man.
The cast and crew mingled very easily with the locals of Marfa. There was no Hollywood approach while they were in town of trying to set themselves apart. They quickly blended themselves into daily life when they weren’t shooting marked sometimes with quick karaoke nights or on set fireworks mayhem. Despite the warm and often times harsh West Texas conditions the overall shoot seemed to have a vibrant and buoyant spirit that Anderson helped to facilitate. With so many outside directions gone that might otherwise complicate many movie sets, on There Will Be Blood the cast and crew were able to completely get away and focus in making movie magic. They had the perfect communion to form a film family with the Marfa setting and its nights of enveloping billions of stars dancing overhead as they journeyed through several months of shooting.
I would think one problem of shooting on the McGuire Ranch would have been the lack of restrooms and with the added extra attention everyone on set would have had to make with constantly drinking water and staying hydrating in the very dry and 100 degree plus setting. I would think there were many a people using the safety of running over hills to take care of business. Especially as you can see in the movie with endless horizons shown that restrooms were clearly kept far away.
On Thursday, May 1st, 2008, the Marfa Film Festival kicked off with a new offering of annual cinema glory by showing There Will Be Blood on the set of Little Boston. This screening was facilitated by the Alamo Drafthouse’s Rolling Roadshow. They put up the giant inflatable screen just north of Little Boston so that to the left you had the train depot set and to the right you had the small city of Little Boston staring at you. To kick-start a new film festival on this site of new movie lore was one hell of a way to get going! In many ways it felt like a full circle of cinema tradition coming around. The town of Marfa which is nestled in the minds of many moviegoers for Giant being filmed there decades ago and most recently There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, was now providing an outlet for new and past cinema to be shown and embraced. The grounds of the city helped make movies and now it had become ground for cinema itself to be shown and discovered. Daniel Plainview’s milkshake was now pouring out of its straw the start of a new explosion of cinema in an idyllic remote setting where now film lovers could enjoy cinema in complete immersion and away from everything, much the same way film crews had but for making them. So now we have the Marfa Film Festival where people can not only make an annual pilgrimage for a cinema rich vacation, but also can make an annual pilgrimage to Little Boston and the homes of one of the best movies ever made. You get to see new cinema while celebrating its history.
Since the location of the McGuire Ranch set several miles south of town, the Marfa Film Festival had several shuttles that raced back and forth taking people to and from the kick off screening. On the screening location of Little Boston a full menu of Texas Style Bar BBQ was available as were several potent margaritas that were made with tequila from one of the main festival sponsors of Patron. Before you could get a margarita you had to get a special small cup filled with tequila and pour it into your main cup, which certainly was a nice and entertaining touch. If margaritas weren’t your thing they had free beer courtesy of upstart brewery Alamo Beer (very tasty beer I might add).
As the sun became nearly gone over the horizon the Rolling Roadshow crew started inflating the giant inflatable screen. In no time the land was black and billions of stars were shining overhead. Many on hand for the screening had in some way been a part of the making of There Will Be Blood and had yet to see the film. In many ways it had the feeling of being a festival screening and a cast and crew screening at the same time. Most notably on hand was Sydney McCallister who played Young Mary Sunday in the film. There was an electric buzz sweeping through the crowd of roughly 350 people. Some had seen the movie and knew what to expect and many others only knew of it from what they saw in its trailer, so there was a certain sense of awe and mystery at having no idea what to expect of it.
With the soft roar of the projector from the Rolling Roadshow truck the first image beamed onto the screen as the movie started was of a very recognizable Marfa mountain. While this would be lost on most audiences, everyone instantly greeted this quick nod to the city of Marfa on hand with a deafening praise and clapping. I hadn’t really noticed this touch when I had previously seen it at its world premiere at Fantastic Fest. I thought it was an amazing touch that Quentin Tarantino also did in the same fashion for the original downtown Alamo Drafthouse on Colorado that marks the start of Death Proof. It really is amazing sometimes at finding these nods from filmmakers in films that sit perfectly in the flow of their narratives while at the same time giving a wink back to certain audiences.
Throughout the screening the crowd was completely transfixed by the experience of seeing the movie for the first time and being in Little Boston. This synthesis of film set and film it became made everything on screen dance with even more luminance and feeling. Every word spoken and nuisance by lead actor Daniel Day-Lewis seemed to just dazzle the crowd. You could hear throughout the crowd, people say, “Wow”, after several of his acting moments throughout the film. The church scenes drew applause from the crowd who couldn’t believe how well they turned out. By the end of the film the crowd seemed to be absolutely beside themselves, to such a degree they were walking in a near daze of cinema nirvana. They had gone to the cinema church of Paul Thomas Anderson where they had sang in his chorus and now at last got to see his vision before their eyes and it was a journey that proved well worth the effort and dedication.
The Marfa Film Festival in only its first year with just this one special screening proved itself to be an important destination on the festival circuit for years to come. This was a transformative film experience I won’t soon forget. And of special note once you visit Marfa your appreciation for Robert Elswit lensing of it will grow even more, as well as wonder why more films aren’t shot there.
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So currently for Marfa, Texas, we have the films Giant, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men that have all filmed there. The next closest film done around its parts was in Shafter, Texas, where The Andromeda Strain was shot back in the early 70's. There apparently is not a movie theater for hundreds of miles around Marfa, although they do screen a regular summer series of films at the Thunderbird Hotel there. The Marfa Film Festival in that regard provides a rare chance for people to see film on the big screen and in the dark to enjoy with others.
For anyone around Marfa, Texas on Monday, you should certainly stop by to attend an incredibly rare screening of Dennis Hopper's 1971 rarely screened film, The Last Movie. Only three film prints of this film are currently in existence.
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I should probably also say that I still prefer the original cut of the There Will Be Blood I saw at its world premiere at Fantastic Fest. This particular cut is my favorite for it. The theatrical cut is missing pieces of it just enough that I notice it. Most notably is the ending sequence is trimmed down, which seems to work at balancing out the overall scene without being too intense. I prefer the longer version of this scene that is much more dark and intense. Sometimes longer cuts of films don't entirely work as you can easily point out scenes or moments that clearly don't gel. However, with the longer cut of There Will Be Blood I felt everything worked perfectly. There wasn't any moment that jumped out to me. While I'm sad that only this shorter cut is available, it certainly adds more sentimental value and magic to its first screening as I won't have a DVD I can just pop in to relive... all I will have will be the memories dancing around in my head.
