There Will Be Blood

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• Dillon Freasier (who plays H.W. Plainview, the son of the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis) was not an actor; he was an elementary student near the film's West Texas shooting location. On the radio program "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," Paul Thomas Anderson told Gross that when the production was trying to convince Dillon's mother to allow Dillon to be in the movie, his mother wanted to figure out who Day-Lewis was, so she rented a copy of Gangs of New York (in which Day-Lewis plays a murderous gang leader nicknamed "The Butcher"). She panicked at the idea of her son spending time with the man she saw in that movie, so the 'There Will Be Blood' casting department rushed to her a copy of The Age of Innocence, in which Day-Lewis plays a civilized and gentle man.
• While on location in Marfa, Texas, No Country for Old Men was the neighboring film production. One day, director Paul Thomas Anderson and his crew tested the pyrotechnical effects of the oil derrick fire, causing an enormous billowing of smoke, intruding the shot that Joel Coen and Ethan Coen were shooting. This caused them to put off filming until the next day when the smoke dissipated from view. Both this film and No Country for Old Men would eventually become the leading contenders at the Academy Awards a year and a half later.
• Daniel Day-Lewis improvised the speech he gives to the citizens of Little Boston, about building schools, bringing bread to the town, etc. Paul Thomas Anderson says of this, "It was delicious. It was Plainview on a platter."
• Although the screenplay is based on the Upton Sinclair novel 'Oil!', Paul Thomas Anderson used only the first 150 pages for a big portion of the material. The rest was made up. The novel's setting was in 1920s but it was moved to the beginning of the oil boom in California.