There Will Be Blood | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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Directed by | Paul Thomas Anderson |
Produced by | Paul Thomas Anderson Scott Rudin Daniel Lupi Joanne Sellar |
Screenplay by | Paul Thomas Anderson |
Based on | Oil! by Upton Sinclair |
Starring | Daniel Day-Lewis Paul Dano |
Music by | Jonny Greenwood |
Cinematography | Robert Elswit |
Editing by | Dylan Tichenor |
Distributed by | Paramount Vantage Miramax Films |
Release date(s) | December 26, 2007(Limited) January 25, 2008 (Wide) |
Running time | 158 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $25 million[1] |
Box office | $76,181,545[1] |
There Will Be Blood is a 2007 drama film written, co-produced, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!. It tells the story of a silver miner-turned-oilman on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California's oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.
The film received significant critical praise and numerous award nominations and victories. It appeared on many critics' "top ten" lists for the year, notably the American Film Institute,[2] the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Day-Lewis won Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, NYFCC, and IFTA Best Actor awards for his performance. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, winning Best Actor for Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit.
In late 2009, it was chosen by Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and At the Movies as the best film of the first decade of the 21st century.
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It is 1898. In the New Mexico wilderness, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) works his silver mine. He finds some silver ore while picking at the bottom of the mine shaft. He then places a stick of dynamite where he found the ore and ascends the ladder up the shaft to avoid the blast. On his way back down, the ladder breaks and he falls several feet. He's left at the bottom of the shaft with a broken leg. He manages to drag himself up the shaft and then all the way to town to sell the ore. He hires a crew, including a man caring for an infant son. When the silver mine plays out in 1902, Plainview discovers oil in the mine. He builds a pump and recreates himself as an oil man. The young father dies in a drilling accident. Plainview adopts the young boy as his own and names him H.W. Nine years later in 1911, Plainview is a successful, if still somewhat minor, oil man. He has several productive wells around New Mexico and, with H.W. (Dillon Freasier), travels the state to buy the drilling rights to private property.
At a meeting with local people of an unidentified town, Plainview lectures them on his business plan: he claims he does all the work himself, only hires men he can trust to complete the work and will eliminate the need for a "contractor", a middleman of sorts that will collect more money from the community that Daniel believes should go back to the landowners themselves. He also introduces his son as his partner and claims that his business is a family-run operation. When the people begin to question him rigorously and argue loudly among themselves, Daniel turns down the offer and leaves, knowing the community is a bit too smart to be taken advantage of.
Daniel later meets with a husband and wife and draws up a contract to drill on their land. The couple are reluctant but Daniel appeals to them by talking about their children. The well comes in as a gusher some time later.
One night, a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) visits Plainview's camp. Paul sells to Plainview information about his family's ranch in Little Boston, California, which he says has an ocean of oil underneath it. Plainview and H.W. travel to the Sunday Ranch and, while pretending to hunt quail, confirm what Paul told them. That night, Plainview negotiates with the Sunday patriarch, Abel (David Willis) and Paul's twin brother, Eli (Paul Dano). The price is $10,000 towards the building of the Church of the Third Revelation; Eli is a bland, uncharismatic but ambitious preacher and faith healer. Daniel agrees to pay Eli half of the money at first and will pay the rest when the derrick produces. Eli wants to pray to conclude the deal but Plainview refuses.
Plainview assembles his crew at the Sunday Ranch and builds the first derrick. He also buys almost all of the land surrounding the Sunday Ranch so he will have not only those drilling rights but also the right to build a pipeline to the ocean to circumvent the railroads and their shipping costs. Only a man named William Bandy refuses to sell. Eli wants to bless the derrick before drilling begins but Plainview rebuffs him and instead has Eli's little sister, Mary (Sydney McAllister), dedicate the new endeavor. Mary and H.W. become playmates and Plainview buys her a new dress. At dinner one night, he tells Mary in front of Abel that her father will never hit her again for refusing to pray. Eli and Plainview continue to irritate one another: Plainview resents that Eli solicits his workers to come to daily prayer services, but when a worker dies while trying to free the drill, Plainview has Eli arrange for the funeral. When meeting with Eli about the funeral at his ramshackle church, he watches Eli deliver a fiery sermon about casting out the Devil from a elderly woman with arthritis. After the service, Eli agrees to speak at the funeral and tells Daniel that, had he been permitted to bless the well, the accident might never have happened.
A few days later, the drill finally strikes oil. The escaping gases cause an explosion. H.W., who was watching the drill from the derrick, is deafened. He becomes sullen and mistrusting. Shortly thereafter, a man named Henry (Kevin O'Connor) appears on Plainview's doorstep, claiming to be Plainview's half brother. Because he knows details about Plainview's family and hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Plainview trusts him and takes him on as a worker. Plainview admits to Henry that he holds most people in contempt and uses them only to further his own goals. "I have a competition in me," he tells him. "I want no one else to succeed." He also admits that he can't do his work alone anymore. H.W. snoops through Henry's belongings and, jealous that Plainview has someone new in his life, attempts to burn down the house with Henry and Plainview in it. Plainview doesn't discipline H.W. but instead sends him away to a boarding school in San Francisco, callously leaving him on the train with his assistant, Fletcher, who accompanies him there.
Soon Plainview has three thriving oil wells in the Little Boston area. Eli goes to Daniel and demands the $5000 that Daniel promised him and his church. Daniel immediately attacks him, slapping him and dragging him to a pool of mud, which he smears all over Eli. Daniel also mocks Eli's supposed power of faith healing, saying that Eli did nothing to restore H.W.'s hearing.
Competitors try to buy Daniel's wells for $1 million but Plainview rejects the offer and their patronizing sympathy for H.W. When one competitor suggests Plainview should retire to take care of H.W., Plainview threatens his life. He and Henry go to the Bandy property to inquire about leasing the land to build the pipeline. After surveying the land, they swim in the ocean. When Henry doesn't seem to understand a reference about Fond du Lac, Plainview grows suspicious. That night, Plainview, brandishing a pistol, forces Henry to confess: Henry isn't his brother, but knew his brother in King City, CA. When the real brother died, Henry assumed his identity and made his way to California and found Daniel. Plainview kills Henry and buries him in a shallow grave on the Bandy property. The next morning, Bandy (Hans Howes) wakes Plainview and tells him that he can lease the land if he allows himself to be baptized at the Church of the Third Revelation. When Bandy reveals that he knows Plainview killed Henry, Plainview has no choice but to agree. He is baptized after he publicly and loudly announces that he is a sinner and abandoned H.W. and is warmly embraced by the church. Eli also announces to the church that Daniel has given them $5000, the original amount he owed to Eli.
H.W. returns from the boarding school and Plainview warmly greets him. H.W. now knows sign language and speaks through an interpreter. He and Mary play together, and she learns sign language too. When they are married in the late 1920s, she signs the minister's sermon and marriage rites to him. Plainview has become a drunkard, even more misanthropic and isolated than ever, living alone in a large mansion and shooting his valuables with a pistol. When H.W. announces his intention to move to Mexico and begin his own oil business, Plainview immediately becomes more despondent and reveals that H.W. was never his biological son and insultingly disowns him. Sometime later, Eli visits him in the mansion's bowling alley. As Plainview gnaws the cold steak leftover from his dinner, Eli reveals that old Bandy has died and that his grandson wants to sell the oil drilling rights to his grandfather's land in order to fund his goal of becoming a movie star -- with Eli as the broker for the deal. Plainview agrees but only if Eli will say that he is a "false prophet and God is a superstition." When Eli does so several times, Plainview reveals that, having owned all the wells around the Bandy ranch, he has already taken the oil from the Bandy property through drainage. Eli reveals that, despite a successful radio preaching career, he is broke due to bad investments. Plainview chases him around the bowling alley then bludgeons him to death with a bowling pin. When the butler comes to see what the commotion has been, Plainview announces to him, "I'm finished" .
After Eric Schlosser finished writing Fast Food Nation reporters kept asking him about Upton Sinclair, and although he had read Sinclair's The Jungle, he did not know about his other works or anything about Sinclair himself. He decided to read most of Sinclair's works, and eventually read the novel Oil!, which he loved. Schlosser, who found the book to be exciting and thought it would make a great film, sought out the Sinclair estate and purchased the film rights. He then thought that he would try to find a director that was as passionate about the book as he was, but Paul Thomas Anderson approached him first.[3]
Anderson had been working on a screenplay about two fighting families. He struggled with the script and soon realized it just was not working.[4] Homesick, he purchased a copy of Upton Sinclair's Oil! in London, drawn to its cover illustration of a California oilfield.[5] As he read, Anderson became even more fascinated with the novel, and after contacting Schlosser, adapted the first 150 pages to a screenplay. He began to get a real sense of where his script was going after making many trips to museums dedicated to early oilmen in Bakersfield.[6] He changed the title from Oil! to There Will Be Blood because, "there's not enough of the book to feel like it's a proper adaptation."[4]
Anderson, who had previously stated that he would like to work with Daniel Day-Lewis,[7] wrote the screenplay with Day-Lewis in mind and approached the actor when the script was nearly complete. Anderson had heard that Daniel Day-Lewis liked his earlier film Punch-Drunk Love, which gave him the confidence to hand Day-Lewis a copy of the incomplete script.[8] According to Day-Lewis, simply being asked to do the film was enough to convince him.[9] In an interview with The New York Observer, the actor elaborated on what drew him to the project. It was "the understanding that [Anderson] had already entered into that world. [He] wasn't observing it — [he'd] entered into it — and indeed [he'd] populated it with characters who [he] felt had lives of their own."[10]
The line in the final scene, "I drink your milkshake!", is paraphrased from a quote by U.S. Senator for New Mexico Albert Fall speaking before a Congressional investigation into the 1920s oil-related Teapot Dome scandal. Anderson was enamoured of the fact that a term like "milkshake" found its way into such official testimony, to explain the complicated technical process of oil drainage to senators.[11]
According to Joanne Sellar, one of the film's producers, it was a hard film to finance because "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture."[5] It took two years to acquire financing for the film.[6]
For the role of Plainview's "son," Anderson looked at people in Los Angeles and New York City, but he realized that they needed someone from Texas who knew how to shoot shotguns and "live in that world."[4] The filmmakers asked around at a school and the principal recommended Dillon Freasier. They did not have him read any scenes and instead talked to him, realizing that he was the perfect person for the role.[4]
To build his character, Day-Lewis started with the voice. Anderson sent him recordings from the late 19th century to 1927 and a copy of the 1948 film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, including documentaries on its director, John Huston, an important influence on Anderson's film.[5] According to Anderson, he was inspired by the fact that Sierra Madre is "about greed and ambition and paranoia and looking at the worst parts of yourself."[6] While writing the script, he would put the film on before he went to bed at night. To research for the role, Day-Lewis read letters from laborers and studied photographs from the time period. He also read up on oil tycoon Edward Doheny, upon whom Sinclair's book is loosely based.[12]
Principal photography began in June 2006 on a ranch in Marfa, Texas,[6] and took three months.[5] Other location shooting took place in Los Angeles. Anderson tried to shoot the script in sequence with most of the sets on the ranch.[6] Two weeks into the 60-day shoot, Anderson replaced the actor playing Eli Sunday with Paul Dano, who had originally only been cast in the much smaller role of Paul Sunday, the brother who tipped off Plainview about the oil on the Sunday ranch. A profile of Day-Lewis in The New York Times Magazine suggested that the original actor, Kel O'Neill, had been intimidated by Day-Lewis's intensity and habit of staying in character on and off the set.[6][12] Both Anderson and Day-Lewis deny this claim,[6][12] and Day-Lewis stated, "I absolutely don't believe that it was because he was intimidated by me. I happen to believe that — and I hope I'm right."[13]
Anderson first saw Dano in The Ballad of Jack and Rose (in which Dano co-starred with Day-Lewis) and thought that he would be perfect to play Paul Sunday, a role he originally envisioned to be a 12 or 13-year-old boy. Dano only had four days to prepare for the much larger role of Eli Sunday,[14] but he researched the time period that the film is set in as well as evangelical preachers.[4] Three weeks of scenes with Sunday and Plainview had to be re-shot with Dano instead of O'Neill.[6] The interior mansion scenes were filmed at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, the former real-life home of Edward Doheny Jr., a gift from his father, Edward Doheny. Scenes filmed at Greystone involved the careful renovation of the basement's two lane bowling alley.[15]
Anderson dedicated the film to Robert Altman, who died while Anderson was editing it.[4]
There Will Be Blood was shot using Panavision XL 35 mm cameras outfitted primarily with Panavision C series and high-speed anamorphic lenses.[16]
Day-Lewis broke a rib in a fall during filming.[17]
Anderson had been a fan of Radiohead's music and was impressed with Jonny Greenwood's scoring of the film Bodysong. While writing the script for There Will Be Blood, Anderson heard Greenwood's orchestral piece Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which prompted him to ask Greenwood to work with him. After initially agreeing to score the film, Greenwood had doubts and thought about backing out, but Anderson's reassurance and enthusiasm for the film convinced the musician to stick with the project.[18][19] Anderson gave Greenwood a copy of the film and three weeks later he came back with two hours of music recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London.[4] Concerning his approach to composing the soundtrack, Greenwood said to Entertainment Weekly:
I think it was about not necessarily just making period music, which very traditionally you would do. But because they were traditional orchestral sounds, I suppose that's what we hoped was a little unsettling, even though you know all the sounds you're hearing are coming from very old technology. You can just do things with the classical orchestra that do unsettle you, that are sort of slightly wrong, that have some kind of undercurrent that's slightly sinister.[20]
The film also contains the cello and piano transcription of Fratres by Arvo Pärt, and the third movement from Johannes Brahms's Violin Concerto. The recording is by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Berlin Philharmonic directed by Herbert von Karajan.
The song "Convergence", which can be heard during the tower explosion sequence, was taken straight from the Bodysong soundtrack.
In December 2008, Greenwood's score was nominated for a Grammy in the category of "Best Score Soundtrack Album For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media" for the 51st Grammy Awards.[21]
The film received critical acclaim from critics; as of October 4, 2010 on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 202 reviews.[22] On Metacritic, the film has an average score of 92 out of 100, based on 39 reviews.[23]
Andrew Sarris called the film "an impressive achievement in its confident expertness in rendering the simulated realities of a bygone time and place, largely with an inspired use of regional amateur actors and extras with all the right moves and sounds."[24] In Premiere magazine, Glenn Kenny praised Day-Lewis's performance: "Once his Plainview takes wing, the relentless focus of the performance makes the character unique."[25] Manohla Dargis wrote, in her review for The New York Times, "the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic."[26] Esquire magazine also praised Day-Lewis's performance: "what's most fun, albeit in a frightening way, is watching this greedmeister become more and more unhinged as he locks horns with Eli Sunday ... both Anderson and Day-Lewis go for broke. But it's a pleasure to be reminded, if only once every four years, that subtlety can be overrated."[27] Richard Schickel in Time magazine praised There Will Be Blood as "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made."[28] Critic Tom Charity, writing about CNN's ten-best films list, calls the film the only "flat-out masterpiece" of 2007.[29]
Schickel also named the film one of the Top 10 Movies of 2007, ranking it at #9, calling Daniel Day Lewis' performance "astonishing", and calling the film "a mesmerizing meditation on the American spirit in all its maddening ambiguities: mean and noble, angry and secretive, hypocritical and more than a little insane in its aspirations."[30]
The Times chief film critic, James Christopher, published a list in April 2008 of the Top 100 films of all time, placing There Will Be Blood at #2, behind Casablanca.[31]
However, some critics were more negative. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle shot out at the film's praises by saying "there should be no need to pretend There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make it one."[32] Several months after his initial review of the film, LaSalle reiterated that while he felt it was "clear" that There Will Be Blood was not a masterpiece, he wondered if its "style, an approach, an attitude... might become important in the future."[33] Carla Meyer, of the Sacramento Bee, gave the film three and a half out of four stars; while calling it a "masterpiece", she said that the final confrontation between Daniel and Eli marked when There Will Be Blood "stops being a masterpiece and becomes a really good movie. What was grand becomes petty, then overwrought."[34]
Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, saying that, "There Will Be Blood is the kind of film that is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness. It was filmed in the same area of Texas used by No Country for Old Men, and that is a great film, and a perfect one. But There Will Be Blood is not perfect, and in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp. Which is not a dishonorable thing."
The film was on the American Film Institute's 10 Movies of the Year; AFI's jury said:
There Will Be Blood is bravura film-making by one of American film's modern masters. Paul Thomas Anderson's epic poem of savagery, optimism and obsession is a true meditation on America. The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal. In a career defined by transcendent performances, Daniel Day-Lewis creates a character so rich and so towering, that "Daniel Plainview" will haunt the history of film for generations to come.[35]
The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007.[36][37]
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In December 2009, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone chose the film as the #1 best film of the decade, saying:
Two years after first seeing There Will Be Blood, I am convinced that Paul Thomas Anderson's profound portrait of an American primitive—take that, Citizen Kane—deserves pride of place among the decade's finest. Daniel Day-Lewis gave the best and ballsiest performance of the past 10 years. As Daniel Plainview, a prospector who loots the land of its natural resources in silver and oil to fill his pockets and gargantuan ego, he showed us a man draining his humanity for power. And Anderson, having extended Plainview's rage from Earth to heaven in the form of a corrupt preacher (Paul Dano), managed to "drink the milkshake" of other risk-taking directors. If I had to stake the future of film in the next decade on one filmmaker, I'd go with PTA. Even more than Boogie Nights and Magnolia—his rebel cries from the 1990s—Blood let Anderson put technology at the service of character. The score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood was a sonic explosion that reinvented what film music could be. And the images captured by Robert Elswit, a genius of camera and lighting, made visual poetry out of an oil well consumed by flame. For the final word on Blood, I'll quote Plainview: "It was one goddamn hell of a show."[40]
Chicago Tribune and At the Movies critic Michael Phillips named There Will Be Blood the decade’s best film. Phillips stated:
This most eccentric and haunting of modern epics is driven by oilman Daniel Plainview, who, in the hands of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, becomes a Horatio Alger story gone horribly wrong. Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s camera is as crucial to the films hypnotic pull as the performance at its center. For its evocation of the early 1900’s, its relentless focus on one man’s fascinating obsessions, and for its inspiring example of how to freely adapt a novel--plus, what I think is the performance of the new century--There Will Be Blood stands alone. The more I see it, the sadder, and stranger, and more visually astounding it grows--and the more it seems to say about the best and worst in the American ethos of rugged individualism. Awfully good![41]
Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum named There Will Be Blood the decade's best film as well. In her original review, Schwarzbaum stated:
Anyhow, a fierce story meshing big exterior-oriented themes of American character with an interior-oriented portrait of an impenetrable man (two men, really, including the false prophet Sunday) is only half Anderson's quest, and his exciting achievement. The other half lies in the innovation applied to the telling itself. For a huge picture, There Will Be Blood is exquisitely intimate, almost a collection of sketches. For a long, slow movie, it speeds. For a story set in the fabled bad-old-days past, it's got the terrors of modernity in its DNA. Leaps of romantic chordal grandeur from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major announce the launch of a fortune-changing oil well down the road from Eli Sunday's church — and then, much later, announce a kind of end of the world. For bleakness, the movie can't be beat — nor for brilliance.[42]
In December 2009, the website Gawker.com determined that There Will Be Blood is film critics' consensus best film of the decade when aggregating all Best of the Decade lists, stating: "And when the votes were all in, by a nose, There Will Be Blood stood alone at the top of the decade, its straw in the whole damn cinema's milkshake."[43]
The list of critics who lauded There Will Be Blood in their assessments of films from the past decade include:
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The first public screening of There Will Be Blood was on September 29, 2007, at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. The film was released on December 26, 2007, in New York and Los Angeles where it grossed US$190,739 on its opening weekend. The film then opened in 885 theaters in selected markets on January 25, 2008, grossing $4.8 million on its opening weekend. The film went on to make $40.2 million in North America and $35.9 million in the rest of the world, with a worldwide total of $76.1 million, well above its $25 million budget.[1] But the prints and advertising cost for the film's United States release was about $40 million.[60]
The film was released on DVD on April 8, 2008. It was released with one and two-disc editions, both are packaged in a cardboard case. Anderson has refused to record an audio commentary for the film.[61] A HD DVD release was confirmed, but later canceled due to the death of the format. A Blu-ray edition was released on June 3, 2008. The film has grossed $23,604,823 through DVD sales.[62]
The quote "I drink your milkshake" has been used in other media repeatedly. In season 24 of Jeopardy!, "I Drink Your Milkshake" was the title of a category about milkshakes.[77] Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show and the 80th Academy Awards (for which There Will Be Blood was nominated for eight Oscars), has referenced the phrase "I drink your milkshake" several times on his show in response to news involving oil drilling, including during interviews with Ted Koppel[78] and Nancy Pelosi.[79]
In February 2008, the night before the 80th Academy Awards, a Saturday Night Live skit featured a Food Network show starring Daniel Plainview (played by Bill Hader) and H.W. Plainview (played by Amy Poehler) called "I Drink Your Milkshake" in which Daniel and his son travel from state to state looking for the perfect milkshake.[80] "I drink your milkshake" has inspired a There Will Be Blood fansite of the same name.[81] Former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann also used this phrase on many occasions as part of his monologues of the stories he covered on Countdown.
Other media references include the South Park episode "Breast Cancer Show Ever", which parodied the final scene of the film: after Wendy beats up Cartman, Mr. Mackey approaches and says "Wendy!" to which she replies "I'm finished" as Cartman lies facedown in blood.[82] The December 8, 2008 episode of the stop-motion animation comedy show Robot Chicken featured a brief parody of the film in a segment titled "Just the Good Parts", which singled the oil rig explosion that robs H.W. of his hearing and the line "A BASTARD IN A BASKET" near the end of the film as the most notable parts of the film.[83] A Daily Show segment used a film clip of Daniel Plainview speaking to the residents of Little Boston to poke fun at real-life Big Oil executives,[84] while The Colbert Report utilized a clip from the film's oil derrick explosion scene in the segment "Aqua Colbert."[85] In the deleted scenes for the Academy Award-nominated film In the Loop, two characters debate the accuracy of the title of There Will Be Blood, with one proclaiming, "I went to see There Will Be Blood. And there wasn't any fucking blood."[86]
Awards | ||
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Preceded by Letters from Iwo Jima |
LAFCA Award for Best Film 2007 |
Succeeded by WALL-E |
Preceded by Pan's Labyrinth |
NSFC Award for Best Film 2007 |
Succeeded by Waltz with Bashir |
|