The Dan himself

You’ve all heard the stories. They’re usually prefaced (good-humouredly, mind) with, ‘That Daniel Day-Lewis, sure he’s a mad fellah’. To play Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the crew were asked to wheel him in a chair and spoon-feed him. He learned how to canoe and skin animals for his role as Hawkeye in The Last Of The Mohicans. He was repeatedly doused with buckets of water and starved himself for two days on the set of In The Name Of The Father. He trained for three years with pugilist hero Barry McGuigan to essay the title role in The Boxer. He built a time-machine and led the charge at 1857 Five Points riots for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York.

That’s what we’ve heard at any rate.
Today, before I speak to him, I watch the actor sink when the opening gambit from the press corps incorporates the word ‘preparations’. He smiles generously and affects the bravest of faces. But when, by way of comic gesture, he puts his head in his hands you suspect it’s only partly in jest.
“I always try to avoid talking about the way I work,” he sighs. “It sounds so self-congratulatory when you hear anyone talk about their work. I do need to immerse myself, to experience something at the level of the unconscious so it’s almost, well, not entirely of control. I don’t want to just pretend. I want the conflict to be real. But I’ve never really understood why people are so fascinated by the details of the preparation. I’m not the recluse some people think I am. If that were true how could I live in a house full of children?”
He has scarcely got the words out before we’ve moved onto the question Mr. Day-Lewis hears almost as often as those inquiries about the madness in his method.
You’ve all heard the stories. In 1989 the actor was playing Hamlet at London’s National Theatre when he walked off the stage after – as legend and folk song have it – he imagined he was talking to his own father, the late poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. Somebody in the gallery asks about fathers and legacies and such like.
The actor smiles and points out that a lot is made of this subject. Perhaps rather too much. He was, after all, only 15 at the time of his father’s passing and thus barely knew him. And so it goes.
I didn’t need to see or hear this exchange to know that Daniel Day-Lewis does not relish the celebrity status that his profession has thrust upon him. Questions about his work and Oedipal particulars are always met politely, graciously even, but he always looks as a bin man might were you to ambush him with similar queries.
Good for Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s nice to know that for all the kerfuffle around him, he’s standing well back. Many, including Daniel himself, will testify that he’s an ordinary guy who drinks in his local in the Wicklow mountains, who raises his sons Ronan (9) and Cashel (5) with his equally down-to-earth wife, the director Rebecca Miller.
“I’ve been on the road doing press for days now,” he tells me. “I’ll have to feed the chickens and chop plenty of firewood to make it up to Herself.”
Still, he must understand why enquiring minds want to know all about Daniel Day-Lewis. For one thing, he’s Daniel Day-Lewis, for corn’s sake. He’s got that punkish Joe Strummer thing going on. He was twice kicked out of public school. He has a romantic, nomadic dual nationality. He, the son of British actress Jill Balcon and grandson of Sir Michael Balcon, the former head of Ealing Studios, is married to Rebecca, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. He rides a motorbike and dresses like he’s in Dexys Midnight Runners. Aged 50, he still looks like he could play a mean Heathcliff. And his crunching, coruscating performances have been making film critics swoon since he upstaged Anthony Hopkins in 1984’s The Bounty.
Of course we’d give anything for a peek at the ghosts in his machine. There’s something unearthly about his acting. More often than not he looks as though he’s channeling something that’s too big for his body.
“It is strange when it’s time to go home,” he admits. “You have to stop it. You have this whole world around you and suddenly it’s gone.”
Why, you wonder, does he put himself through this? Then you see his work in There Will Be Blood and you wonder no more. This latest offering from Magnolia director Paul Thomas Anderson refashions Oil, the historical saga by Upton Sinclair, into a blistering stand off between the twin corruptions of God and mammon. Since John Wayne sauntered into the sunlight at the close of 1956’s The Searchers, few films have dared to play out on such mythical terrain. In one corner, we find Daniel Plainview (Mr. Day-Lewis), a ruthless crook whose roguish twinkle and John Huston tones can’t quite disguise his murderously Darwinian instincts when it comes to oil prospecting in the early 1900s.
“I liked the idea of working with Paul (Thomas Anderson),” says Day-Lewis. “I’d loved his films, particularly Punch Drunk Love. But when the script arrived I was taken aback. Coming from my background I’ve always had an ambiguous relationship with language. So to read this script that tells you so much in the first twenty minutes without saying a word, wondering how long can he keep this up – that was remarkable, audacious. We shot an even longer version of that opening sequence than the one you see in the finished film with just Jonny Greenwood’s incredible music to guide you along.”
Watching There Will Be Blood there is a sense, to paraphrase George Peppard, of a plan coming together. In addition to Day-Lewis’ towering performance claimed by many to be a career best, the most singular, angular score since Ennio Morricone hung up his spaghetti western guns, the disconcerting tactility of Anderson’s world, you can enjoy a supporting cast that was willing to match Mr. Day-Lewis blow-for-blow. Little Miss Sunshine star Paul Dano portraying Plainview’s arch-nemesis, a faithless preacher whose spiritual fabrications seem far worse than his rival’s penchant for swindling, was even prepared to do so literally as well as figuratively.
“He gave me a hiding,” laughs his co-star. “You could only ever take that from someone you really like so it was no bother taking a beating from him.”