For Daniel Day-Lewis, a Final Turn as an Obsessive
Daniel Day-Lewis was riffing on the mysteries and curiosities of romantic entanglements — how people can be governed by desires that seem alien even to themselves.
“There’s no strangeness you can imagine that is more strange than the lives of apparently conventional people behind closed doors,” he said.
He was offering, with some provocation, a defense of his latest character — a brilliant, mercurial midcentury couture designer at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s lush new psychosexual drama “Phantom Thread.”
But the observation could also serve as the thesis for the film as a whole. Set in 1950s London, it explores the borders between love and masochism in a distinctly Andersonian twist on old Hollywood gothic romances.
Given that Mr. Day-Lewis has announced, at 60, that this will be his last performance — despite having won the Academy Award for best actor twice over the last decade ( bringing his total wins in the male category to a record- setting three) — he was a convincing messenger. “We can’t begin to know,” why peo- ple make the decisions they make,” he said, “but it works for them.”
Mr. Day-Lewis is once again the subject of Oscar buzz this season for his performance in “Phantom Thread” as the fictional designer Reynolds Woodcock.
Mr. Day-Lewis and the film’s other stars — the British actress Lesley Manville, who appears as Reynolds’s imperious sister and business manager, Cyril; and the Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps, who plays Alma, the designer’s headstrong muse and love interest — were gathered in New York recently to discuss the film, which opened in the United States this month, with worldwide release scheduled for February.
Mr. Day- Lewis declined to explain his decision to retire, which he disclosed this summer and which his co- stars said they had no prior knowledge of during filming. “It’s a decision made with conviction, but not full understanding,” he said.
He spoke reverently of his experience making “Phantom Thread,” which grew out of years of creative collaboration with Mr. Anderson. Mr. Day-Lewis, who is known for thoroughly immersing himself in a character before setting foot on set, apprenticed for nearly a year under Marc Happel, the costume director of New York City Ballet, to transform himself into Reynolds — a control freak with a monomaniacal zeal for dressmaking largely based on the real-life fashion forefather Cristóbal Balenciaga.
Mr. Day-Lewis studied drawing, hand sewing and draping, ultimately sewing 100 buttonholes and remaking a Balenciaga sheath dress from scratch.
“I’ve explored so many different worlds, but the thing they have in common is they were always entirely mysterious to me in the beginning,” he said. That is “probably a great part of the allure — discovering something that seems beyond reach, sometimes impossibly beyond reach, that pulls you forward into its orbit somehow.”
What became “Phantom Thread” was originally conceived around three years ago while Mr. Anderson was briefly bedridden with an illness. More dependent on the care of his partner, the actress Maya Rudolph, than usual, he outlined a story about an intensely intimate relationship between a man, a woman and his sister. Later, after Mr. Anderson picked up a biography of Balenciaga in an airport, the man in his story became a master designer with a monastic lifestyle that is disrupted by new love.
“Clothing designers i n general have reputations of being controlling, exacting, demanding,” the director said. “Those traits are very, very helpful for our character.”
Mr. Anderson is an admirer of suspenseful romances like “Rebecca” ( 1940) and “Gaslight” ( 1944) and pictured Mr. Day-Lewis as a darkly debonair leading man in the mold of Laurence Olivier.
The two men also developed a mutual fascination with Balenciaga, who had a reputation for being utterly consumed by his trade.
“His attack on his work was very relatable to me,” said Mr. Anderson, whose earlier films include “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia.” “I’m kind of a hobby-less person — the only hobby I have is making films — so I could relate to his passion and single-minded preoccupation.”
Mr. Anderson said he was trying not to think about the possibility that he and Mr. Day-Lewis will not work together again.
“He’s an actor and a movie star,” he said, “and movie star isn’t a negative — movie star means that when you sit down in a theater, the lights go down and the big screen opens up, you have somebody who can fill that space.”