Doing it in impeccable style

IT turns out Daniel DayLewis isn’t the only one Paul Thomas Anderson has driven into retirement with his latest movie, Phantom Thread.

At a cast and crew gathering in London last week, a year after the film was shot, the writer-director asked his colleagues if they had they been working lately.

One by one, he recalls, “They said, ‘No, I’m retired. I’m knackered after that movie’. I said, ‘Come on, it wasn’t that hard!’,” Anderson says with a laugh.

Three-time Oscar winner Day-Lewis issued a statement last June announcing he would “no longer be working as an actor”.

If Phantom Thread does turn out to be his last hurrah, he’s going out on a high with another Academy Award nomination for his performance as Reynolds Woodcock, a dress designer in post-war London whose fastidious world is up-ended by the arrival of his strongwilled new muse, Alma (Vicky Krieps).

Anderson, who previously steered Day-Lewis to Oscar glory in There Will Be Blood, isn’t certain this is the last we’ll see of his leading man.

“He’s been threatening to retire long before I ever came into the picture,’’ he says.

“You could look at it two ways. You could say, ‘He’s gone out on a high note and he’s given us so many great performances that we should all just respect his decision and be happy. Or you could protest and say, ‘That’s not good enough, we want more!’

“I would vote for the second one,” he says with a laugh.

“But aren’t retirement announcements made to be broken?”

Anderson, who has four children with his partner of 17 years, actor and comedian Maya Rudolph, considers Phantom Thread his “relationship” movie.

But it’s a heck of a strange relationship, where the tables are turned on a monstrous man by a woman determined not to be cast aside. At least five occurrences in the first date between Reynolds and Alma would have made a sane woman bolt.

“I agree,” declares Anderson. “But then again, I’d dare a lot of people to look back at their first dates and say, ‘Well, you could have seen all the red flags, yet there you are, you’re married with children now’.

“But yes, I’m going to show Phantom Thread to my daughters: ‘OK, if you go on a date with anybody like this, here are the red flags you should look out for’.”

Anderson has made a lot of

Neala Johnson

movies about men no daughter should go near, including the cult leader of The Master, the egotistical porn star of Boogie Nights, the greedy and violent prospector of There Will Be Blood.

But that’s not the angle he takes on Phantom Thread.

“It’s about a girl who’s an immigrant who falls in love with a man she probably shouldn’t go near,’’ Anderson says.

“But love is strange. And love is peculiar. And circumstances throw people together. And relationships can be dramatic. To heighten those relationships up for the purposes of a movie is what you’re supposed to do, I think, to make something that’s entertaining.”

The director says DayLewis never stopped surprising him on Phantom Thread.

“He’s a bottomless pit of new moves,’’ Anderson says.

“He doesn’t just play the hits or recycle the old ones. He’s so inventive and very spontaneous.”

might ring a faint bell), complete unknowns, and rapper 50 Cent, and there seems to be no chance

He reckons Day-Lewis is “underrated as a comedic actor”, and it was his perverse costume choices that tickled Anderson this time.

“Everybody takes him very seriously, as they should, but if you watch Gangs Of New York again there is some funny, funny stuff in that movie that he’s doing. Same with There

(MA15+) is now showing at Village Cinema Glenorchy. Rating: Will Be Blood,” Anderson says. Dark funny, perhaps. “Yeah, super dark,’’ Anderson says. “But funny.”

It’s been 21 years since Anderson made his name and made a movie star out of Mark Wahlberg with Boogie Nights. Wahlberg was recently quoted as saying he hoped God would forgive him his “poor choices” — Boogie Nights being “at the top of the list”.

Anderson reckons Wahlberg’s words were taken “wildly out of context by the internet” and that he was “just f---ing around”.

Besides, the director jokes, “he needs God’s forgiveness for a lot worse shit that he’s done than Boogie Nights!”

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