DANIEL DAY-LEWIS
PHANTOM THREAD WILL BE THE SWAN SONG OF THE LEGENDARY DANIEL DAY-LEWIS. FIVE FILMMAKERS WHO WORKED WITH HIM REFLECT ON THE CHAMELEONIC MASTER
As The World’s Greatest Actor™ retires, we canvas his former colleagues for tales of his genius. There’s Method in our madness.
STEPHEN FREARS DIRECTOR, My Beautiful laundrette (1985)
Despite leading roles on stage, on film Day-lewis had only played a couple of bit parts before he came to Stephen Frears’ attention. After meeting the director, determined to get the part as big-hearted gay thug Johnny in the London-set drama about class and community, Day-lewis wrote him a threatening letter (which the actor himself has described as “fairly vile”) saying that he’d break Frears’ legs if he didn’t cast him. “The first time I met him was in 1983, when I was originally going to make Prick Up Your Ears. I hadn’t seen his work. He came in to see me and he had a south London accent. I said, ‘You’re the son of a poet laureate, why are you speaking like that?’ He said, ‘I went to a comprehensive, so I learned to conceal myself.’
“For My Beautiful Laundrette, there was a shortlist of four actors: Gary Oldman, Ken Branagh, Tim Roth, and Dan. And the girls all said, ‘You want Dan. He’s top of the crumpet list.’ The search for the other boy, Omar, was much harder. I said I had to cast them on the same day. I knew I was going to cast Dan, but I made him wait. That’s when he wrote this letter saying he’d break my legs, or was going to take a knife to me. I didn’t take it seriously, not for a second. It made me laugh. He wanted the job. Good for him. But it didn’t get him the part — I’d already made that decision.
“He used to look after Gordon Warnecke [Omar], it was wonderful. If it was a big break for Dan, it was inconceivable for Gordon, suddenly playing a lead. So he was very kind to Gordon. They used to come round to my house and sit and watch Badlands. I think they used to go to Millwall to watch football.
“Afterwards I saw A Room With A View, and I said to someone, ‘Oh, I didn’t know Dan could do things like that.’ And they said, ‘No, you don’t understand — you were the original one, casting him as Johnny was the original thing.’ He generally played upper-class blokes. And I had gone the other way, completely oblivious to what he’d done in the past. Nobody said to me, ‘This chap is gonna be a big star.’ But he was jolly good.”
JAMES IVORY DIRECTOR, a room With a View (1985)
Having finished My Beautiful Laundrette, Day-lewis went to work as upper-class buffoon Cecil Vyse in Merchant Ivory’s E.M. Forster adaptation. It was an extraordinary double-whammy. “When Daniel came to be interviewed he was still shooting My Beautiful Laundrette and his hair was blond with pink streaks. I didn’t know who he was, but immediately I wanted him for the film. He left the office that day with that part. He didn’t read — I just knew somehow. I had a
feeling he’d be right.
“He wasn’t living the part every moment off-camera, there wasn’t any of that. He is a very sharp observer and I loved the things that he did with the dialogue — he really went over the top with it, but that is what makes the performance so interesting. All of the things you find so preposterous on the page as E.M. Forster wrote them, he really made them into little wonders. In the window he sees Lucy coming up and the way he’s leaning out, speaking half in Italian and half in English, it’s just wonderful. And swatting the bee when he has a teacup in his hand, that’s just such a brilliant thing he does.
“And then of course, when he’s turned down by Lucy at the end, his affectation disappears and there is a humbled person there, sitting on the stairs tying his shoes. That appeals to people very much, how one moment he was this insufferable know-it-all snob, and then the next moment there’s this young man who’s been turned down by this girl who didn’t want to marry him, and it’s affected him.
“The films opened on the same day in New York, and it was interesting the way that Daniel was written about. It was almost as if the writers couldn’t understand how this same young unknown actor could play two such different parts, and look so different in both of them. There was just this astonishment in New York.
“Later, when we were finishing The Remains Of The Day, I got involved in plans to make Richard II into a film and I wanted Daniel to play Richard. I thought he would make an extraordinary Richard II. But it never really got off the ground. I wanted Kenneth Branagh to play Bolingbroke, and Emma Thompson to play the Queen. Daniel would have been my Richard. I remember later telling him that, and Kenneth Branagh, which did not please Kenneth Branagh — he wanted to play Richard. But it never happened.”
PHILIP KAUFMAN DIRECTOR AND CO-WRITER, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988)
In Kaufman’s adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel, Day-lewis scorched the screen as Czech brain surgeon Tomas, who positively vibrates with sex. “I had never seen Daniel in a movie. I was with [producer] Saul Zaentz in London, preparing the film. We interviewed a number of actors for Tomas and couldn’t find the right guy. We were about to leave for Sweden, it was about 7am. I turned on the television and there was this young, bald-headed skinny guy being interviewed about a play about the Russian poets [Futurists], he was playing Mayakovsky. As Daniel went on I became infatuated with him — how witty and thoughtful and sharp he was. And we called our casting director and within two hours, he was in our hotel suite. We had a conversation and his thoughtfulness came through: he ponders every moment. Right away, I said he would be the perfect guy for it.
“We went to dinner in Paris with Milan Kundera, where Daniel digested Kundera’s stare — he put it into the film. After that dinner we went to Kundera’s apartment. Daniel and I were laughing and I said, ‘I’ll race you upstairs.’ I was in pretty good shape, but I didn’t know what great shape Daniel was in — he chased me up four or five storeys and I almost died of a heart attack... I was lying there outside Kundera’s apartment gasping for breath and Daniel was totally chipper. He used to run to work in Paris. I wasn’t always happy with that, because one time I saw him almost get hit by a car.
“He was in character all the time, and was very intense. We’d have dinner sometimes and he wouldn’t say anything. And you could either interpret it as being moody or critical, but I just respected that he was inhabiting the character. It was a very difficult, daunting film for Daniel.
He had to work hard to sculpt the character, who was in a way a philosophic angel brought to Earth. I think it’s encapsulated a little in that stare he and Kundera had with each other at the dinner.
“He’s a very masculine guy but he has a feminine perception of things. I think that’s why women feel something there. There’s a carefulness that he might himself deny, but his perceptions are not group-male-sperm-backed-up-into-the-brain perceptions that men often have.
“You know he once went to Florence and made shoes for about a year. Maybe he’s going to be happy being at home. I’m looking forward to getting a pair of Daniel Day-lewis shoes or something like that.”
KENNETH LONERGAN CO-WRITER, GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)
To get into the headspace of menacing gang leader Bill The Butcher, in Martin Scorsese’s 19th-century passion project Gangs Of New York, Day-lewis learned how to cut up carcasses, throw knives with deadly accuracy, and just generally terrified everybody. “I absolutely loved working with him, he was so nice to me. He would come and visit me in my little cubicle with his moustache and costume and his New York accent. He was so gentle and kind. And if he didn’t like something he’d be very serious and concerned and say, ‘This part was very difficult.’ If he did like something, he’d let you know. There was a little speech that I wrote, where he’s describing how he plucked out his own eye, while he’s sitting wrapped in an American flag. And he came into my office and said, ‘This is poetry, Kenny.’ I’d never dreamed of writing poetry and I don’t know that it was poetry, but Daniel Day-lewis telling you that your dialogue is poetry is pretty nifty. It was one of the greatest compliments I ever got.
“On Gangs he was himself on the weekends — there were a couple of weekend events where he would show up in his tweeds with his English accent. But on the set he was always in Bill The Butcher mode, and he said it was the first time he’d done that. He didn’t want to go home to his two young sons and be this horrible, murdering butcher from 19th-century New York.
“Everybody called him Bill. I called him Daniel and he didn’t mind. It felt silly calling him Bill. But I don’t think it was done in quite the way that people think. He’d come on set and Marty would go, ‘Bill!’ I never got the sense that I hadn’t met Daniel Day-lewis. A lot of actors have trouble just switching it on when the camera’s on, so they’ll be in the mood of the part or doing the accent during the day. I actually discussed this with him at some length later on, when we were having a drink together in New York, and he started talking about My Left Foot. He said he spent a lot of time in hospital with people with cerebral palsy and felt it would be very disrespectful to hop out of the wheelchair when he was on the set. He also said to me this very interesting thing. He said, with a laugh, ‘Maybe I’m not that imaginative, because I really have to be very literal. I really have to just be that person as much as I can be, because it’s hard for me to imagine it.’”
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON DIRECTOR AND WRITER, THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007) AND PHANTOM THREAD (2017)
Day-lewis’ performance as Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s frenzied oil saga There Will Be Blood, for which the actor spent two years studying the era and learning about mining, is one of cinema’s fiercest. For Anderson’s latest, the sublime, surreal romantic opus Phantom Thread, the director involved him from the start, taking inspiration from 1950s fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga — and Day-lewis, preparing to play the demanding Reynolds Woodcock, didn’t scrimp on the crimping. “My Beautiful Laundrette came out the same year as A Room With A View. I saw both and I didn’t know that was the same actor. Even at that age I was a pretty savvy, smart filmgoer, but that was, whooosh, right over my head. My Left Foot came out
and I had no idea that that was the same person. I finally figured out what the hell was in front of me when I saw In The Name Of The Father. I was like, ‘Okay — so that’s all the same person. Right, so in the history of the world, that guy’s the best.’ It was so amazing to me. And ever since, I was just obsessed. He could do no wrong in my eyes.
“I’m hard-pressed to pick a favourite performance. Bill The Butcher’s right up near the top. That is as devilish fun as you can get. Even in the insanity and darkness of all that, I just get this sense of joy coming out of Daniel. I know that sounds peculiar, but seeing somebody loving the work that they do so much and just enjoying every last bite of it…
“We’d stayed in touch since There Will Be Blood, and the idea for Phantom Thread came hand-in-hand with wanting to work with him again. It was around the end of 2014; it was time — we were running out of runway, I felt like, in terms of trying to get back together and cook something up. Some of the ideas I had as vague notions without Daniel, but when the story started to really formulate and become clear I got him involved. The practical side of things there is that, as I’m researching something and learning something which I know nothing about, he can be doing the same exact thing. I was sharing information with him, we were discovering stuff together.
To what extent did he get into the dressmaking and the designing? What do you think? It’s Daniel Day-lewis! He learned how to sew and make dresses like Balenciaga. I’m exaggerating; as he will tell you, these dressmakers served in that classic way as apprentices. And an apprenticeship lasts between ten and 15 years. Daniel will be the first to admit, an apprenticeship is not two years of learning how to sew, but it’s as close as you can get in a realistic time frame to be able to get a sense of what these designers might be up against, or the world that they inhabit. Starting quite simply with a needle and thread and learning how to do that from the beginning was the first thing that he did. We had a great tutor, Mark Happel, teaching Daniel the basics. Cutting, sewing, draping, all those kinds of things, which Daniel, of course, because it’s Daniel, was fucking great at! He has a particular skill with his hands that is pretty impressive, so he took to it pretty quickly. He’ll be very humble about it and kind of shy, and I won’t be, because it really was astonishing how good he was at it.
“The guy I was with for four months was Reynolds Woodcock. The reality of the world is Daniel is also a man who gets in a car and goes home each night and has to put one foot in front of the other. But backing up from that to within the allotted time in one day, to try as deeply as you possibly can make-believe, that is the challenge and the joy of four months at work. So you get all that that implies. Was he easier to deal with than Daniel Plainview? I don’t know, they’re both tricky. Although when Plainview was cranky you did have to look out, he may in fact kill you. Like, murder you. There was always that danger. I never felt the danger that Reynolds Woodcock would murder me in my sleep.
“The retirement, it would be a shame. I hope that he reconsiders. But if this is his last one, I think it’s a good one. For sure. But here’s hoping to his reconsideration of the idea.”
Phantom thread is in cinemas from 2 february