Name: One Way To Deconstruct There Will Be Blood — Or Any Movie
Uploaded: 2026-03-14T17:20:50.000Z
Duration: 7 min 22 s
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Adverbs of degree

Whenever I want to learn how a movie is put together, one of the first things I do is get a pen and paper and just count the shots.

Adverbs of manner

Seriously, it's not very technical and it's a bit tedious, but

just tallying every time there's a cut forces you to see things in a different way.

It kills the illusion just enough that the nuts and bolts start to come into view.

For example, let's take a look at Pete D. Anderson's There Will Be Blood.

Already by the third shot, I noticed a camera technique that would be used again and again throughout the film.

Heavy emphasis on double and triple framing in single shots.

Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit were clearly interested in making a movie comprised largely of long takes, but

they keep up the momentum by collapsing multiple shots into one.

Things never drag on or get too boring, which is definitely a consideration when your movie is two and a half hours long.

In fact, by the end of the fourteen and a half minute dialogue free introduction, I was struck by the length of the shots and by how few there actually were.

And 14 and a half minutes divided by 73 means that each shot on average was about 12 seconds long.

That's a really long average shot length by today's standard, and

something I wasn't expecting Anderson to keep up throughout the rest of the film.

This graph, by the way, showing that average shot lengths have decreased over the years, comes from the work of Barry Salt, who's been writing about film metrics since the 60s and 70s.

And if you want to dive deeper into metrics like these, I highly recommend visiting his website Cinemetrics, where all kinds of data is listed out for literally thousands of movies.

But I think the best insights come from doing the counting yourself.

For example, one of the things that occurs to you watching There Will Be Blood like this is that the value of a simple cut increases as the number of cuts decreases.

It's amazing how impactful a cut can be when you're not watching them happen at breakneck speed.

I don't mean to say that films with more cuts are necessarily worse or better, just that a movie like There Will Be Blood finds a lot of power in a common cinematic device.

It's in stark relief to the audience and there's a lot of a big spotlight on.

With so few cuts, as Tikonor says, the contrast of each is dialed up considerably and Like Daniel Plainview, Anderson and Ticanor mine that contrast for meaning.

A lot of times it's literal cutting between dark frames and bright frames or loud moments and quiet ones.

Just a quick side note, this sequence right here, by the way, shots 256 to 263 are the quickest cutting in the film by far.

Anderson used so few shots that Tickenor had to find ways to artificially add more cuts to build up the momentum of this moment.

You can actually see that shots 258 and 260 are just alternate angles of the shots that came before them.

If you wanted to suggest that two characters were different sides of the same coin, for example, arch rivals, but

One tracking into a character mumbling to himself bathed in light.

Another tracking out from a character mumbling to himself covered in shadow.

What I realized after a while is that there's a domino effect.

Longer takes mean more impactful cuts mean more attention to composition.

If you want your framing to mean something, then your cuts have to mean something.

Because the cut is where the viewer really sees the framing.

And they see it with a fresh memory, almost an afterimage of a the frame that came before.

And if you want your cuts to mean something, then you have to use them sparingly and with care.

Every single shot is filled with a kind of anticipation because these cuts are registered consciously on the viewer's mind.

We're all waiting for the next one to come.

T.T. anderson knows that anticipation is just a form, form of focus.

And he's great at channeling that heightened focus toward the performances.

When you have an actor as magnetic as Daniel Day Lewis, the longer the take, the more you hang on his every word and pause.

I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need.

Watching this movie, I noticed that conversations like this are the place with the most frequent editing on average.

This sequence, for example, is 16 shots in three and a half minutes.

Ticanor holds firm on the wide until Eli makes the key comment.

Now, of course, within that are we're gonna develop a lease.

He cuts in, but only a little, while Daniel thinks he's still dealing with the father.

The scene locks on close ups as they battle back and forth, and

though I don't know for sure, it looks a lot like Ticanor extended the silences here to augment the intensity.

Giving the shots breathing room on both sides of the dialogue.

Far from making the scene drag dials up the emotion considerably.

This is something Anderson does throughout the film.

Close ups are used again and again for moments of silence, just as much for important pieces of dialogue.

Pete Anderson, like the Coen brothers, is great at casting for faces, and

he wants us to watch them as much as listen.

And of course he wants us to watch Daniel Plainview the most, who corrodes with bitterness across a series of close ups, even as he finds success in the solitude that he craves.

I drink the blood of lamb from Bandage tract.

There are 678 shots and there will be blood over two and a half hours.

That means that each shot is 13.3 seconds on average, more than the introduction.

The movie is remarkably consistent on this front.

Each hour or half hour taken alone will average somewhere around 12 to 14 seconds.

Maybe this is what gives the movie its steady but unrelenting pace, the feeling that you're watching a train you can't stop.

There are tons of ways to deconstruct a movie, but

it's amazing what you can learn just from looking at the shots one by one as they go by.

For many of us, loving a film means wanting to know how it works with the spirit of an engineer.

We take it apart, twist it, turn it, bend it, and put it back together.

A great movie will never give up all its secrets, but it will give up some of them.

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