You could not find a more courteous man than Daniel Day-Lewis. He smiles uneasily, rubs his long, unruly hair out of his eyes, and apologises for his lack of articulation. “When you try to put this into words, you invariably sound self-important,” he fusses, concerned he is sounding pretentious. “It’s just not something that can be put easily into words.” He is speaking of the seemingly simple task of choosing his next role, but it is both a mark of the importance he attaches to each part he plays and the inordinately complicated processes that bring about that choice, that he’s having trouble getting it out. “I am sorry I am not being clear.”
The 50 year-old Day-Lewis is arguably (although he would never be so uncouth to suggest this himself) the finest actor of his generation. He is one of those singular talents who have elevated the art of acting, like Marlon Brando (an inspiration) or Lawrence Olivier (less regarded) – a craftsman who merges with a screen persona with such heightened ability it is more a state of becoming than playing. In his Oscar-winning performance as Christy Brown, the Irish writer crippled by cerebral palsy, he learned to lower the needle of a gramophone onto a record with his left foot (as Brown could do). “I knew it couldn’t be done,” he claimed, “and that intrigued me.” A comment that says so much about him — seek out the impossible and tame it.
A series of intermittent but brilliant performances followed that Oscar, searing portrayals of contrasting but uniformly complicated characters from the heroics of Nathanial ‘Hawkeye’ Poe in The Last of the Mohicans to the charismatic brutality of Bill ‘The Butcher’ Cutting, the redeeming feature of Gangs of New York. On every occasion there is this sense of heaving his soul into a new body rather than turning up and doing his own stunts.
“I begin with a sense of mystery,” he continues on the elusive ingredients that draw him to a spiky but wronged reprobate like Gerry Conlon (In The Name Of the Father) or the self-sacrificing nobility of a Newland Archer (The Age of Innocence). “In other words, I am intrigued by a life that seems very far removed from my own. And I have a sense of curiosity to discover that life and maybe change places with it for a while.”
Which brings us to Daniel Plainview, the reason we are currently talking on a crisp November morning in London. Not simply the lead character of Paul Thomas Anderson’s period drama There Will Be Blood, he is the movie. Extraordinary in every sense, this is the Day-Lewis technique taken to volcanic levels of performance, exhausting the watcher as much as enthralling them. An oilman at the cusp of the 20th century as both the industry and America took shape, Plainview (the name rippling with interior irony) is a monomaniacal sociopath driven to destroy those he could love as much as he amasses the financial success that measures the American Dream.
Drawn by Anderson’s virulent script (based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!), Day-Lewis, as opposite to Plainview’s demonic force as light to dark, sees choosing Plainview as relatively simple: “This was an unflinching examination of life.”
Like all the characters he has made so deep and rich, Day-Lewis, surely heading for his fourth Oscar nomination, seems blunted when asked to put Plainview into words. “I would very, very strongly resist any temptation to try and describe him,” he says — descriptions, boxes and categories work against the ‘becoming’. “Luckily that isn’t my job. It would be a falsification to try and describe him now really… I would just be the wrong person to ask.”
Still, press a bit harder and his politeness grants some degree of explanation. Plainview embodies American capitalism, its worship of Mammon. He is loosely based on Edward Doheny, a gold prospector who hit oil instead and eventually headed up Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company. The parallels between Anderson’s movie and Citizen Kane are all too clear. With its Western trappings, and the corrupting power of greed, another major touchstone is Treasure of the Sierra Madre — Anderson would put on the film as he wrote There Will Be Blood, falling asleep with Humphrey Bogart’s voice in his ears, and required his leading man to the study John Huston’s classic. Day-Lewis accordingly injects plenty of Huston’s bone-dry drawl into his performance.
“I was deeply unsettled by the script,” allows the actor. “Back then men would get the fever. No one knew how to drill for oil, they scooped it out of the land with saucepans. It killed a lot of men, it broke others, still more were reduced to despair and poverty, but they still believed in the promise of the West.”
Perusing his sparse filmography (he has only made four films in a decade) patterns of behaviour emerge. Day-Lewis would abhor such pigeonholing, but there are distinct fascinations: there’s his trilogy of troubled Irishmen with director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In The Name Of The Father and The Boxer), while Plainview and There Will Be Blood sit squarely in that subsection of his work marked: Birth Of America, Difficult. The Last of the Mohicans, Gangs of New York, even Age of Innocence all reveal contrasting aspects of the nations’ childhood. “I suppose that’s there,” he admits, looking away. America has always figured in the Day-Lewis myth.
The details of Day-Lewis’ own childhood are well-known. The son of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, he was brought up in England, but is technically half-Irish, and has now adopted Ireland, specifically Luggala, as his home. His wife, director Rebecca Miller, is also the scion of a famous writer — playwright Arthur Miller. They share a weighty sense of artistic legacy. Significantly, Day-Lewis grew-up idolising the American greats, not the lauded Shakespearean crew: Gary Cooper, the aforementioned Brando and De Niro, and Clint Eastwood. Mention Olivier and he’ll sigh.
“People always refer back to Olivier’s remark, ‘Why don’t you just try acting, my boy.’ Which always feels more indicative to me about what Olivier sometimes didn’t understand about that work.” The British no-nonsense attitude — learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture — seems to Day-Lewis reductive, belittling of what can be achieved.
So, he may have debuted in Sunday Bloody Sunday (albeit very briefly), and made his name with two very distinct sides of ‘Englishness’: as a punk hoodlum in My Beautiful Laundrette and an emotionally stunted prig in Room with a View, but America was in his blood. “Contrary to expectations, I wanted to tell American stories.”
But they couldn’t be just any stories. For his craft to flourish, it would take careful handling. “I’d find it very hard to work with a director, no matter how talented, if I felt there was
not real kinship there,” he confirms. “Certainly with Paul I recognised that there was kin of some kind.”
Day-Lewis couldn’t think more highly of Anderson, who now sits alongside Jim Sheridan and Martin Scorsese as the specific directors who have fired up his recalcitrant muse. “It’s this visceral need,” he explains of the three. “Much more than a technical thing, it’s a need expressed.” Directors who direct as he acts — driven by fantastic forces. We’re back to the indescribable. The stuff of myth.
So it’s time we talked method — not Method the big joke — but Stanislavsky’s full-immersion school of acting championed by the likes of Brando, De Niro, and Day-Lewis (“It was like happening on utopia,” he says of studying the system). Yet, more than any contemporary (even De Niro) around Day-Lewis hover tales of madness in his method. How he learned to build a canoe, live hand-to-mouth in the forest, and got so attached to his rifle he took it to Christmas dinner on The Last Of The Mohicans. Or how he had himself locked in a cell and hosed down with ice-cold water on In The Name Of The Father. Or how he learned to chop meat with archaic butcher knives and glared balefully at Leonardo DiCaprio even away from the camera on Gangs Of New York. Most notoriously, that he fled, mid-performance, while playing Hamlet in 1989 when he reputedly saw the ghost of his own father (Cecil Day-Lewis died in 1972). It has him viewed as borderline insane, the artist as pure obsessive. But, here and now, there is no pretension, no tortured soul, just a mild embarrassment at the attention.
“Look, I’ve done a lot of the things I’ve been held to account for,” he replies, ”but my main argument is that is not where the centre of the work is. Those are just details. If you are trying to imagine a world, you use whatever means you can to stimulate that imagination. You try to understand things you don’t understand.” He stops, gathering his thoughts. “I try to avoid talking about it as much as I can, I have often been misrepresented… It feels like I’m involved in some form of sophisticated sado-masochism most of the time, but that’s not my experience at all. It is a thoroughly joyful thing to work.”
He likens the process to that of a child who would never have to define pretending to be Robin Hood or Cruella De Ville. “They believe they see the world through a different pair of eyes.”
It has not always worked. He cites The Unbearable Likeness Of Being as a low point. “I was all at sea,” was his description. But it only calcified his determination to only take what fits. “It is a horrible experience when it doesn’t work. There is no guarantee.” And there have been films – good films with good directors – he has turned down because he felt couldn’t see it: “When I genuinely thought I was the wrong person.” He refuses to divulge the titles, but rumour has him offered as diverse a pair as Oskar Schindler (while it was still Scorsese’s project) and Aragorn (never admitted by Peter Jackson – but God knows what kind of immersion that would require).
The intensity of his technique can also be difficult for other actors to swallow. Little Miss Sunshine’s Paul Dano, who plays his ostensible co-star, the evangelical preacher Eli Sunday, in There Will Be Blood, was an 11th-hour replacement. In fact, they had already shot half the movie when it became to clear to Anderson his original choice wasn’t coping. As ever the rumours boiled away — that the actor was the unknown Kel O’Neil and was suffering under the intimidation of Day-Lewis in the Plainview zone. The subject is off-limits. “We were struggling,” is about as far as Day-Lewis wants to go with it.
The care with which he chooses projects has inevitably led to long, silent periods of downtime, allowing the myth to grow. Following The Boxer in 1997, he made signals that he may have jacked in acting all together, and was spotted working as a cobbler in Florence. The tabloids had a field day, but the reality was the muse hadn’t struck (and he does have a passion for shoes) and he was sinking away from acting, but Scorsese was on the hunt for him to be in Gangs Of New York. “I was in dread when I knew Martin was looking for me, dread of the thing I’d most been hoping for,” he explains. “I find I need a lot of time away from it as well. There is this view that I am somehow reclusive. But they are not two lives, they are part of one thing, and I wouldn’t be able to do the work unless I have that time away. And the work that I do allows me to spend that time in much greater tranquillity. I lead a perfectly ordinary life outside of the work, because it isn’t always visible. People tend to fantasise a little bit.”
Day-Lewis may ultimately be a victim of his own genius. To create those performances, as heartbreaking as Christy Brown, as staggering as Daniel Plainview, he must utilise his mythical process. And so the stories will gather like crows. He smiles sadly in farewell. “I’d rather things were got straight,” he says politely. “But it’s not a crusade.”
There Will Be Blood is out on February 8. This feature and a review of the film will be in EMPIRE magazine’s February issue on sale 28th December
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