Republic of Lewis

The giggling behind the door is getting louder. I’m confused. Trusty Hot Press paparazzo Graham is confused. There’s clearly been a terrible mistake. We’re here to meet Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller, not Syd James and Babs Windsor.

“We’re sorry,” says Mr. Day-Lewis, when he beckons us in some minutes later.
“People seem to think we’re really bookish and serious,” continues Ms. Miller. “They always look so disappointed when they actually meet us.”
It’s true. In person, the couple are not remotely as grave as their reputation suggests. But that would be very sombre indeed.
He is, after all, an actor renowned for treating his work with heart-attack seriousness. Like Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando, he becomes his characters. In the 21 years since he made his name as a gay tough in My Beautiful Launderette, tales of his method have proliferated. He remained wheelchair bound for his Oscar winning portrayal of Christy Brown in My Left Foot. In recent years, speculative reports from Gangs Of New York intimated that he had lived in Italy as a cobbler for months, that he had trained in an abattoir, that he had almost died from infection due to his insistence that Bill The Butcher wear shoddy fabric, authentic to the period setting.
More famously, he walked off stage during a 1989 production of Hamlet, convinced that he was speaking with the ghost of his own father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis.
“Too much is made about the method as a working system”, sighs Daniel (not, one suspects, for anything like the first time). “And a lot of the method is just common sense. Acting requires that you create the illusion that you’re someone else. Sometimes you have to travel a great distance to exchange this life for your own. To completely understand another human being you essentially have to melt and disappear into them.”
He smiles and shakes his head.
“God, it sounds so pretentious when I talk about it.”
Well, you can’t argue with results. To date, Mr. Day-Lewis’ courageous self-investment has provided the ignition spark to films such as The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, The Last Of The Mohicans and In The Name Of The Father. Necessarily, the 48 year-old remains fiercely selective about projects. He has appeared in only fifteen films during the past 20 years, turning down Tom Hanks’ role in Philadelphia and Hugo Weaving’s in Lord Of The Rings. He even turned down Rebecca Miller.
The couple met in 1996, just after the filming of The Crucible, a play written by Rebecca’s father Arthur. They would marry within the year. By then, she had already mentioned Daniel’s suitability for the lead role in The Ballad Of Jack And Rose, a screenplay she had developed, but it would take him several months to agree.
“That’s what it takes to cast him,” laughs Rebecca.
“In my defence I should say I read the screenplay before we met and was intrigued by it immediately”, adds Daniel. “It was a startling piece of work and unusually the characters already had life on the page. It also had a very eccentric sense of humour which I eventually discovered was Rebecca. But ten years ago I did not feel that I could give her what she needed for that story. I thought I would end up shattered into smithereens by what was needed. I wasn’t ready.”
Even after he relented, the usual finance related dramas would delay the project for years. Rebecca Miller’s dreamy, cerebral work as a writer-director on Angela and Personal Velocity may have won her awards and critical raves, but she admits, neither those films nor The Ballad Of Jack And Rose correspond to anyone’s idea of an easy sell.
“I’ve given up trying to boil down my movies”, she says. “I write into the dark and find my way, blindly and gradually. I eventually become conscious of structure as the characters develop. I refuse to be pragmatic about filmmaking. It’s not easy to pitch the results at producers but I’m just stubborn that way.”
Happily, the delayed production allowed Rebecca to further embellish her screenplay around her husband muse. “The character Jack was originally an American”, explains Rebecca. “Daniel kept saying I hear a European humour, definitely English or Scottish or Irish. Slowly, I started hearing a different voice. It was an interesting back and forth process.”
Given the couple’s famous progenitors, it’s not too surprising that The Ballad Of Jack And Rose is primarily about fatherhood. In the film, Daniel essays Jack Slavin, an ageing, terminally ill hippie raising teenage daughter Rose (Camilla Belle) in complete isolation on an island, the two remaining members of an idealistic commune. She has virtually no contact with the outside world, until dad’s girlfriend (Catherine Keener) and her teenage sons arrive to live with them, fuelling oedipal jealousies.
“When I started writing The Ballad Of Jack And Rose, I was a daughter”, says Rebecca. “But by the end I was a parent. That further shifted the focus onto Jack. I started to think more about those feelings of protectiveness.”
The Ballad Of Jack And Rose plays out its familial tensions on a semi-mythical plane, encompassing the figurative death of the sixties, Oedipal and Eden myths and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
“Yes”, she nods. “The Tempest is a great analogy. I had already started writing before I realised the connection. Then I went back and read it so we could steal in the great Shakespearean tradition.”
In preparation for the role, Daniel lived apart from his wife and children (boys Cashel Blake and Ronan Cal) for almost a month, staying in a small cottage on Prince Edward Island (off the coast of Nova Scotia) where the film was shot. Didn’t that make life difficult when, say, she needed to send someone out for milk?
“Most of the complications were practical like that but it worked out okay”, Daniel explains. “It was more a symbolic separation than anything else. I had to become this reclusive individual, but for the person I live with. It was important that we cut our routine and learned to refer to each other in a different way, rather than using the usual shorthand that goes on between married people.”
“He does what he needs to do”, smiles Rebecca. “I just stay out of his way.”
It may sound like spoof psychology, but it is tempting to see parental influences in the couple’s respective approaches. Though Rebecca’s work is every bit as girlish and tender as a Rosie Thomas ballad, her sense of character and grand narrative clearly recalls the work of Arthur Miller. Similarly, Daniel’s insistence on working in a vacuum, on becoming the material, surely represents a writerly approach, an echo of his literary origins.
“I hadn’t thought about it that way”, he says. “I don’t ever think of myself as having the discipline of a writer. I need to move, physically. I love that solitary period of time before the collision. But I love the collision too.”
Though not quite as reclusive as Jack and Rose, Daniel and Rebecca live relatively below the radar, between their home in Wicklow and, when the boys are off school, New York.
“The kids think of themselves as being Irish-American-English”, says Rebecca. “They have this sense of the family being a little tribe always going off on adventures. They love adventures. So do we.”