This is a controversial one. It’s a pragmatic piece of advice, that doesn’t feel very pure to me because it’s based on my personal taste rather than any rules of drama (if there are such things) - and it also flies in the face of the success of one of the biggest movie successes in recent years.

OK.

My basic proposition is that There Will Be Blood, that celebrated look at the dark side of the birth of the oil industry, with that elemental performance from Daniel Day Lewis and that script that boils and fumes with energy, is pretty well unwatchable.

More than that, I think it’s a severe case of Emperor’s New Clothes.

I think the film is BORING…

I think after the fuss dies down, it will quickly slip into being one of those movies that is referenced by film buffs, acquire a small, vehement fan(atic) base, and never again be watched by the vast majority of the world.

And it’s all because of a simple mistake the writer makes.

I started thinking about this because I couldn’t understand why the director and the director of photography had made the lighting choices they did. I’ve never seen such a lack of illumination on screen.

All the time I was in the cinema I felt I was constantly peering into a darkened room, and as the hours passed and the story unrolled, and dimly lit scene after dimly lit scene came by I grew increasingly desperate for someone to just put the electricity back on and let me see what was going on.

But then I realised that this lighting is very true to the emotional character of the film.

Watching the movie is one, long, darkness. Morally, aesthetically, so even physically. There isn’t a single character in the movie that you can like. Admire, maybe. Respect, certainly - but like? Not a chance.

The audience were strange too. The place was packed, as you’d expect with a movie that has had such universally great reviews, but I’ve never seen a more restless group of people. Shifting in their seats, people checking their watches, going in and out to the toilet, even the odd low conversation with no-one complaining. (I watched this in an art house movie theatre - believe me, that place has a solid respect for film, and wouldn’t normally tolerate conversations even for a few seconds.)

Let’s be honest. Watching that movie was duty for a lot of that audience. An awful lot of them came with the hunger to see great movie making - and an awful lot of them were bored stiff by the end.

Emperor’s New Clothes. They won’t admit it, but in ten years time, who’s going to be watching There Will Be Blood?

Don’t make that mistake.

It’s your absolute god given right to write whatever you want, and if that includes writing one long howl of despair, or darkness, or misery, then you go for it. But just consider letting us into what you are saying.

I think Paul Thomas Anderson [the writer/director] got swept away with the undeniable strength, the terrible grandeur of his vision for those characters, and forgot to give us, the audience, a way into the movie.

We viewers are weak, we get tired, we need things to hold onto.

More importantly, and forget this at your peril, we need to like some aspect of the things we are watching.

If you’ve ever seen the British TV serial of Brideshead Revisited from 1980 - or read the
Evelyn Waugh novel it dramatised - you might well remember how that is the perfect example of what I mean.

The series runs for 11 episodes, and as they go by the story gets bleaker and more and more depressing, plunging into the impossibility of love, the impossibility of surviving the Catholic faith, and the way people’s lives can be destroyed by their belief in God, ending with broken hearts and loneliness in the depths of World War 2.

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker tale in some ways - it certainly has a far wider, far more genuinely apocalyptic canvas than There Will Be Blood - yet we stay with it all the way, for more than 11 hours.

I think that’s primarily because of the fantastic power of the first two episodes, which are delightfully warm, sumptuous, and charming, full of open hearted wit, full of and love. All of which seduces us - as it should. (It’s going to be interesting to see whether the upcoming movie works as well.)

If you want your audience to immerse themselves in your story, if you want them to come back in 30 years to enjoy it all again, then I strongly recommend you give us something to like about your world somewhere early on.

Even at the most basic level, even if you really don’t want to do anything charming, then just give us something warm, funny, engaging about the characters up front - just a beat or two - so when you strip that from them and take them to hell and leave them there, then we will have to follow, because you will like the people you are torturing and we will want to see what happens to them.

Your deep, dark, sombre masterpiece movie will have all the more impact in the end.