Director Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" has been hailed as one of the best American films of the year. (AP Photo / Jim Cooper)

In the last conversation Paul Thomas Anderson had with Robert Altman, his friend and mentor told him: "I think this film is something different for you."

"It was so sweet," Anderson recently recalled. "He had no reason to base it on anything except just a feeling."

Altman died in November 2006, a month before Anderson planned to show him a rough cut of "There Will Be Blood," which was a best-!picture nominee for an Academy Award.

But Altman's hunch turned out to be accurate.

Anderson's new movie stands apart from his first four films -- "Sydney" (aka "Hard Eight"), "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia" and "Punch-Drunk Love." And it's been hailed as one of the best films of the year and a remarkable advancement for a maturing auteur.

"Your paranoia becomes 'What does that mean? Does that mean at the expense of the other films this is something else?'." the 37-year-old writer-director said. "But I'd be lying if I didn't say that every time you go to make a film, you're desperate to either do it better than you did it last time or to not repeat yourself."

The scruffy Anderson speaks passionately about film and can discuss movie history with authority. When he began directing in his early 20s, he was seen as an L.A.-bred cinematic phenom who quickly became a star in the '90s independent film scene, specializing in movies set in his native San Fernando Valley.

With large ensemble casts, ever-moving cameras, memorable music and lengthy running times, Anderson established a bold style. This, combined with realistically flawed, often desperate characters, made Anderson not just a film-geek hero, but a sought-after talent.

Anderson's previous films all had notable autobiographical elements, but for "There Will Be Blood," he sought to expand outside of himself and began the script as a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!"

The director used roughly the first 100 pages of Sinclair's book and drew on other sources, particularly Margaret Leslie Davis' 1998 biography of oil tycoon Edward Doheny, "The Dark Side of Fortune."

"The benefit of the adaptation was that it helped me do things that my natural instincts wouldn't lead me to do," said Anderson, who acknowledged that, if left to his own devices, he's more liable to "spin off the rails a bit more."

"It was like collaborating with somebody," he said.

- By Jake Coyle Associated Press