INTERVIEW: DANIEL DAY-LEWIS

Interview

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS

Chris Sullivan meets the triple Oscar-winning actor to look back at his entire cinematic career, and tries to find out why Daniel Day-Lewis works so damn hard at immersing himself in the difficult roles he chooses

n meeting actor Daniel Day-Lewis,

Oone gets the distinct impression that, whether successful or not, he has no other option than to do things his way. A man who subconsciously defies convention at every turn, he is rarely seen at Hollywood shindigs, only acts in films he really believes in and doesn’t give two hoots about money or fame.

Furthermore, since 1997 he has lived as far from the madding crowd as possible, basing himself in Ireland’s wild and wet Wicklow Mountains with his writer-director wife Rebecca Miller ‒ daughter of US playwright Arthur Miller ‒ and his two teenage boys Ronan and Cashel. A several year hiatus between movies is par for the course for the London-born actor, who is known to choose his projects carefully and sparingly. “And of course I had to prepare, so I just went mad and remembered the halcyon days of fighting on the terraces at the Den, memories that stood me in good stead as Bill the Butcher. He was a bit of a punk and a marvellous character and a joy to be – although not so good for my physical or mental health”

As Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (2002)

“Others might use that frenzy to find out who they are,” says the affable, down-to-earth actor, dressed in black jeans, a T-shirt and scuffed steel toecap work boots, his long curly hair barely concealing two large gold hoop earrings. “But I need tranquility and absolute quiet after a film, and that is that.”

His modus operandi is certainly effective. He is the only man ever to win three Best Actor Academy Awards ‒ an achievement all the more remarkable as he’s made just 17 films in 34 years. He made his last film, Phantom Thread, in 2017, after which he announced his retirement from acting. DayLewis has always picked roles that were not only extremely challenging but completely disparate. Who could forget his rendering of Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans?

“It took me about six months to get myself in shape, then it all fell off during the last few weeks of the production. I did a hell of a lot of running around. If you notice, I get progressively thinner throughout the film because all I did was run.”

Other roles, such as the psychopathic gang leader Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) drove him to distraction.

“At first I was reluctant, because I had been out of the game for five years. I’d got married and had children and wasn’t sure that I was ready to get back into it, because when you go into that tunnel with someone, you have to be sure you’re not looking for the escape hatch half way through.

“I knew what doing the part would entail, as I knew what I am like and Martin didn’t need to convince me. He told me the story on the phone and I thought, here we go, not again! But I had to need to know I was up for it because I don’t want to let anyone down, especially not him, as when you work with him it’s hard work and you have to be an ally, to be someone you can count on and who has the strength of purpose to sustain you through eight months of mayhem.

“And of course I had to prepare, so I just went mad and remembered the halcyon days of fighting on the terraces at the Den, memories that stood me in good stead as Bill the Butcher. He was a bit of a punk and a marvellous character and a joy to be ‒ although not so good for my physical or mental health.”

He grew up in Greenwich, South East London, and despite being the son of the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon, he was hardly sheltered. However fine and dandy Greenwich might be, it’s an area surrounded by less salubrious boroughs, which were once home to many of London’s dockworkers. As a young teenager, Day-Lewis soon found himself strolling through sprawling council estates and, being both posh and Jewish, had to defend himself physically.

“I was fascinated by the streets that were close by – Lewisham, New Cross, Deptford – and I roamed the streets of South London and supported Millwall with great gusto, and was on the terraces every Saturday with the rest of the lads. That part of my life means a lot to me – that time before I went to boarding school, when I was roaming the streets of Deptford. It was heaven, just discovering that world.”

As Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

“It took me about six months to get myself in shape for The Last of The Mohicans, then it all fell off during the last few weeks of the production. I did a hell of a lot of running around for that. If you notice, I get progressively thinner throughout the film because all I did was run”

Nevertheless, his parents, seeing their wayward son advancing rapidly towards a life less ordinary, and certainly more hazardous, sent him to the Sevenoaks boarding school in Kent, where he lasted just two years. Transferred at 14 to Bedales, a famously liberal private school in Hampshire, he dabbled in drama and soon acquired his first role as a vandal in John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. He was overjoyed. “They paid me a couple of quid a day to smash up a few cars. I was 14 and in heaven. Once I discovered great film I was voracious. I just devoured all I could get my hands on. I looked up in awe at Michel Simon in L’Atalante; Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants Du Paradis and Jean Gabin in Le Quai Des Brumes. But there were the British actors who influenced me as well: Richard Harris in This Sporting Life; Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, David Bradley in Kes.”

In 1973, at the age of 16, Day-Lewis saw Martin Scorsese’s seminal Mean Streets.

“You could not imagine the effect that had on me. I was this young and slightly wayward guy from South London who just didn’t know what to do with his life. It was like a light going on in my head. It was so influential for me as a young person, never mind as a young actor. Then I saw that there could be a purpose for this acting, and that it wasn’t all about prancing around on stage in tights.”

Consequently the young man joined the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He performed with them before going on to cut his teeth in film and TV. It was director Stephen Frears who first saw the young thespian’s true potential and cast him as Johnny, a tough London right-wing extremist street kid who embarks on a romantic relationship with the son of a left-wing Pakistani journalist in Thatcher’s Britain.

“You could see the producer’s bewilderment. My Beautiful Launderette felt to me as if we were like

As Cecil Vyse in A Room With A View (1985)

a continuation of this tradition of looking at this ludicrous divided society we inhabit. I loved the sense of mischief, and it’s a very sustaining feeling to feel you are all partaking of this mischievous enterprise.

“I did the Merchant Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View the same time as Launderette, and I believe they premiered in New York on the same day. I relished the opportunity to do both. In Launderette I was this working-class outcast and in Room I was this upper-class twit. It was great, great fun.”

But there are roles that he doesn’t look back upon with such fondness, such as the adaptation of Milan Kundera’s overrated, confusing novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

“I made it against my better judgement. People ask me about those sex scenes and I say I shouldn’t have done them and I shouldn’t have done the film – there is a sense of despair in those scenes and it left me feeling a little bit down in the mouth.”

Enjoying himself both creatively and otherwise on set is of paramount importance, and that entails not only empathising with the characters themselves, but suffering the same hardships and enjoying the same pleasures.

“I love the pure pleasure of doing the work, no matter if that work involves some kind of discomfort, even though I don’t see it as discomfort. And it’s not that one deals with the problems, so much as one deals with the day-to-day challenges of the character. It’s a big game. It’s not life and death. Acting and theatre and film are just one big game and some people forget that. I understand that some might not understand the lengths that I go to, but does it really matter?”

Day-Lewis’s preparation has been the cause of much hyperbole and, occasionally, scorn. He

As Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (2002)

crudely tattooed his own hands and trained for three years as a professional pugilist in preparation for The Boxer (1997), built his character’s dwelling out of 17th-century tools for The Crucible (1996) then lived in it for three months without electricity or running water, and remained in a wheelchair for the duration of the shoot as cerebral palsied Irish writer Christy Brown in 1989’s My Left Foot, for which he received his first Oscar.

Unsurprisingly he is sick to death of the likes of me asking about his method.

“Nothing I say in answer to these questions will make the work better or worse, but I understand the impulse that causes people even to consider why I do what I do. But that thirst for information as to what I do and how I do it has been developed and encouraged by I don’t know what. I was on Parkinson and I knew he would ask me about all this, and I thought I was ready for it and I wasn’t at all, and so I made a right knob of myself.”

But it has to be easier rendering a character if one walks a few miles in their shoes, albeit with pebbles in them?

“I’ve always been intrigued by the life I have never experienced. I go with that feeling, but more than anything else I enjoy it. It is a game. But the way people would have it, it is like a game of selfchastisement, and it has never been that way for me, as it is a pleasurable and intriguing game. What I tended to do in the past was keep my mouth shut, but then people speak on your behalf, which creates a whole absurdity around it. So then you try to talk a bit to address the balance, and then you make an even bigger dick of yourself. So essentially there’s nothing to say.”

In 2007 he received his second Oscar for his rendering of renegade oil man Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. He

As Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread (2017) As Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)

remained in character day and night throughout filming, having worked on becoming the man for three whole years. How long he was in full-blown character?

“I really don’t know – maybe 12-14 weeks. Luckily I had my family with me and, to be honest, the joy about great work is that you are not looking for the finishing line – quite the opposite – and one of the great things about such work is that you lose yourself, as with all artistic endeavour. My wife and kids went a bit crazy, as I was there all the time. All creative work involves the loss of the self, and it’s like time out of time – a period when I lose myself and the clocks stop and this is the joy.

“You go to these great lengths to imagine another world and another time; and you go to those lengths to imagine a man living in those times and, having spent your imagination on that, it seems more fun to live there than jumping in and out. That is the playground that you’ve created so why not stay there and play?”

Day-Lewis oozed Plainview’s seething malevolence, so considering the actor is such an affable chap, where did it come from?

“We all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week, do we not? Any form of coexistence we live under involves some repression. We have to do that ‒ it’s part of the deal ‒ and we all have some of that in us. And what’s more invigorating than to unleash it? But I cannot account for where any of this comes from me – it comes from the unconscious and I cannot account for what ferments in my unconscious. One just hopes there is a cave somewhere that you can ransack.

“I wasn’t working in isolation as Paul [Thomas Anderson] and I were in very close touch, but still it’s like a little secret that you have to share with yourself and then 200 people. It’s quite an alarming moment and they’re like, ‘Who the fuck is that and what is he doing – well he seems to know what he’s doing, so let him get on with it.’”

Considering that his wife and children accompany him on set wherever he goes, I would have thought that they’d be far more terrified seeing

With Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of There Will Be Blood (2007)

their beloved husband and father morph into a misanthropic, mercurial monster for months on end.

“They think it’s a right laugh and both boys did a pretty decent impersonation of me. And my wife is amazingly tolerant. I knew that from the word go. She just believes, like I do, that if you are attempting anything of a creative nature, no rules apply. I don’t ask her how she comes up with her stories. I just read them and love them. And that is all I need to know. And I really would rather not know.”

He admits, however, that sometimes stepping out of character can be problematic.

“Absurd as it might seem, when you’ve been someone else for that amount of time, conceiving such an enterprise, it’s even more absurd when it’s all over. Then the joke is on all of us because once a curiosity is unleashed you can’t just tie it up again. There is a period of leakage.

“Plainview probably had a lot of leakage, or rather seepage. And that is why there was no Mrs Plainview in sight. But it does take time to leave your man, as there is no great part of you that wants to stop doing that work, and no matter how much you’re begging for it to stop, you need someone to put a restraining order on it.”

Since There Will Be Blood, Day-Lewis has taken on just three roles, as Italian film director Guido Contini in Nine (2009), as the title role in Steven Spielberg’s 2012 epic Lincoln, which gave him his third Best Actor Academy Award, and as haughty haute couture tailor Reynolds Woodcock in 2017’s Phantom Thread.

When I first interviewed Daniel Day-Lewis in 2005, he had just delivered a cracking turn as an over-protective father in The Ballad of Jack and Rose. Naturally the conversation swung round to parenthood and my recently born son Finbar. Interviewing him a few years later for There Will Be Blood, he straight away asked, “How’s Finbar?”

Now how many Oscar-winning actors would remember that? Needless to say, the man is unlike any other actor. He’s not even like any other person. No, siree. Daniel Day-Lewis is a total one-off. n