Nearly twenty years after “There Will Be Blood” became one of the defining American films of the 2000s, Paul Thomas Anderson has revealed that its early life was not exactly greeted with unanimous awe. In fact, according to Anderson, the New York Film Festival rejected the film before it found its first public audience in Austin.
Speaking with film critic David Ansen during a Festival Theaters conversation in Palm Springs pegged to the 30th anniversary of “Hard Eight,” Anderson recalled showing “There Will Be Blood” to NYFF before anyone else had seen it—and getting turned down.
“We showed ‘There Will Be Blood’ for the very first time we showed it to anybody at the New York Film Festival,” Anderson said. “I won’t name any names, but I thought, ‘Boy, this movie’s really good. I can’t wait to show this to somebody.’ And they came back, and they rejected the film.”
That would be striking enough on its own, given what “There Will Be Blood” became. Anderson’s 2007 epic went on to earn eight Oscar nominations, winning Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit. But in the room, Ansen added another wrinkle to the story, suggesting that the NYFF pass was not necessarily a full committee decision.
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“It wasn’t the scandal that they rejected it. It was one person who didn’t let the rest of the committee even see it,” Ansen said, reframing the story around a one-person gatekeeping decision rather than a full NYFF committee rejection. Naturally, the comment has already set off speculation about who made the call, but that is tricky territory: Richard Peña was still the festival’s longtime Program Director and Selection Committee Chair then, Kent Jones later ran the festival. Anderson’s subsequent history with NYFF included the 2014 Centerpiece premiere of “Inherent Vice.”
Anderson remembered the initial response as disorienting, especially because he felt confident in the film.
“I call, I said, ‘How did you like the film’? It was done,” Anderson said. “[The programmer] was like, ‘Are you, is it finished? Is this it?’ I was so confused and heartbroken. I thought this movie was really good. And the first person I showed it to, it was like eating something, like making a face, like, you know.”
At that point, Anderson seemed to realize he might have said too much, stopping himself for a second before continuing.
“Oh, God. Did I say maybe I shouldn’t have said that?” he said, before the conversation moved back into the memory. “That was a hard one. It was a hard couple of weeks, where it was, you know, those kinds of things are low. They can really hurt your… But they’re also great, you know, in a way. They make you get back in the ring.”
What happened next is now part of the film’s strange early history. Anderson said the rejection forced them to find another way to put the film in front of an audience, which led them to Tim League and Fantastic Fest in Austin. “There Will Be Blood” had its first public screening there as a secret closing-night presentation in September 2007, right as NYFF was happening in New York.
“We had to find a way to show that film,” Anderson said. “We went down to Tim League at a Fantastic Fest. So we went down there, and we showed it there for the first time. While the New York Film Festival was happening. We were down there. We were like, we’ll show you.”
The result, Anderson said, may have been the better outcome anyway. “There Will Be Blood” had been shot in Texas, and the Austin crowd gave it a warmer first public landing than he imagined it might have received at Lincoln Center.
“And we had a great time in Austin,” Anderson said. “It was the best place to show it for the first time because it’s such a great festival. The crowd was so great. We shot it in Texas. It was so welcoming and warm. And it was great. It was like we would have been at Alice Tully Hall with a bunch of fussy… And I was like, no, we got what needed to happen to happen. And it was really exciting.”
Anderson did not romanticize the sting too much, though. By the end of the anecdote, he still returned to the feeling of that first pass.
“But that rejection is super, super devastating,” he said.
The larger conversation found Anderson tracing his development from the Reno-rooted “Hard Eight” through the research-heavy process of “There Will Be Blood” and “Phantom Thread.” Nearly two decades later, “There Will Be Blood” hardly needs the NYFF laurels it never received, but the story is still a strange little footnote in the life of a film that quickly moved from bruising first rejection to modern canon. Watch the full interview below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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