EXCLUSIVE: One week after opening a major art exhibit of his paintings at the Megan Mulrooney Gallery in West Hollywood, Ronan Day-Lewis on Sunday unveils his feature directing debut, Anemone, in a New York Film Festival World Premiere before Focus Features and Plan B launch it in theaters. I’ve seen both of the artwork and the film, and the 27-year old Yale-educated artist with the famous last name has all the talent and creativity needed for him to emerge as a new artist with something to say.
Also give him points for bringing back to the screen his three-time Oscar-winning actor father, Daniel Day-Lewis, for the first time in eight years. Retirement seemed crazy at the time he announced it, but not to me. I did a magazine cover story with DDL once, and reflecting back on it, I doubt anyone but Ronan could have persuaded arguably the greatest actor of a generation to unretire. Daniel came to our sit down thumbing a well worn paperback of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! the 1927 novel that gave the spine for the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed There Will Be Blood. We were there for The Ballad of Jack and Rose, the drama directed by his wife. That would be Ronan’s mom Rebecca Miller, the daughter of Arthur Miller, the late playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for Death of a Salesman.
At the time, Daniel hated questions about his rigorous preparation process, because it tended to expose him to ridicule despite the undeniable results. He parried my inquiry. But his character was dying in that movie, and Daniel grew so alarmingly emaciated that I asked if his director ever said he was pushing it too far, and maybe suggested he eat a sandwich or something. I also noted that my wife and I were right in the middle of technique-painting all the rooms of our house. I said I couldn’t imagine making an entire movie with her; we were only putting paint on interior walls, and we ready to kill each other. That led to a discussion of our mutual passion for home construction projects, which led to the more fascinating discussion that left me unsurprised when Daniel announced that the PTA-directed The Phantom Thread would be his last film.
After admitting that if someone complimented the job I’d done cutting and installing crown moldings, my eye would go to the imperfect angle I couldn’t quite lick either because I wasn’t good enough or the walls weren’t perfectly square, Daniel used the analogy to put his work in a light I had never considered. Imagine, he said, getting scripts and trying to talk yourself out of them. But if they’re too good, you cannot. He’d have to say yes, knowing it would send him down a rabbit hole of an arduous, instinctive preparation process that led to him inhabiting his characters throughout production, even after the cameras were turned off and everybody went home. And then he would have to rely on compliments and accolades because he found the process of watching his onscreen work too excruciating to see it himself.
If he built a cabinet or made a pair of shoes, even if they weren’t perfect, these were tangible things he could at least hold in his hands. What a terrible burden, that he could not enjoy his unique skills as an actor, I thought. So much for the glamour of being the best actor on the planet.
After spending an hour on the phone with Ronan, and with a son of my own whose skills and smarts constantly dazzle me, I could tell that Ronan was reason enough for Daniel to return, at least temporarily. Daniel wrote the Anemone script with Ronan, an organic process that built from the original idea of putting two lion brothers in the confined space of a hut in the forest, and letting them tear off the roof.
Tired of watching his stepson circle the drain, Jem Stoker (Sean Bean) heads off to a remote wooded area to confront his brother Ray, the boy’s PTSD-suffering biological recluse father who holes up in a stone cabin. Jem won’t leave until his brother agrees to come home, and that won’t happen until they’ve worked out everything from the recriminations of rough childhoods that included a brutal father, pedophile priests and active duty as British soldiers quelling rebellion violence in Northern Ireland.
Ronan and Daniel broadened that premise on the page, and opened up the visual potential that shows the son is a director with a promising eye. Ominous landscapes reflect incoming weather that mirrors the turbulence between characters. Surreal and dreamlike vignettes, and some laugh out loud moments of levity break up mano a mano scenes in that hut that test the intensity of Bean and Day-Lewis. Ronan uses silence to build anticipation for that moment when the sky will crack open — literally with a hail storm — and the brothers lay bare their pain. After all, Ray might have left behind his pregnant wife, but did brother Jem have to take his place in her bed? Still, Jem is determined to bring his brother home to meet the son who is an AWOL soldier with a gaping hole created by his absentee dad.
“At first we wanted to write something confined, that basically take place in one location,” Ronan told me. “For a long time, it was just the hut and the surrounding area. “Then we started to get so sick of the hut after living in it for a certain amount of time. The script just started to strain against the constraints that we had put around it. And I think at a certain point Ness (Samantha Morton plays the wife of Bean’s character after Ray walked away) really just started to just demand to be a real person and not just kind of an idea or a footnote. And then through her, Brian [Samuel Bottomley plays Ray’s son] came to life. That became a way into his bedroom and Brian’s world and the stakes of his internal crisis. Gradually, I think once those characters became real people, it opened the floodgates for the scope of the film to expand a lot more. By the time we got to certain sequences towards the end, it really had strayed a long way from the original idea but it didn’t lose that sense of confinement and claustrophobia within the hut, which remained a really important aspect of it.”
The long writing process also made it so that Daniel didn’t have to get lost in the woods and become a frontiersman like he did after Michael Mann gave him the script for The Last of the Mohicans. For the first time, Daniel got to be on the ground floor, developing that character on the page, and organically becoming him.
Did working so closely with his son remove the things that made starring in films excruciating enough to prompt his father to walk away for nearly a decade?
“It’s a good question,” Ronan told me. “I definitely think from hearing the way he’s talked about it, and also just my experience working together on this over all these years, that I think it has been a different experience for him than other films he’s done. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how, but obviously it helped with us being father and son and having informal beginnings on it and the way that it grew gradually. When we first started working on it, we didn’t have an outline or anything. It began with this notion of brotherhood and this idea of silence between brothers and almost how these silent modes of communication is a bond these two people share.”
Dialogue is spare at the beginning, and a young director might have been insecure and filled it up with chatter. It’s better the way he shot it.
“It was very, very intuitive and joyful, the writing process,” Ronan said. “I think maybe the gradual nature of the way he started to slowly inhabit the character and slip into that world made it a different experience for him. I don’t know how excruciating it was, for him [compared to past roles]. I think it was at first pretty hard, but he did end up coming to the cutting room. He watched it a good few times over the course of post and yeah, I think it seemed like, from what I could tell, that it wasn’t quite as excruciating as maybe in past experiences for him to watch. I’d have to ask him that actually. I’m curious.”
In a statement from Day-Lewis, it sounded like the answer pointed towards a more pleasant or at least bearable experience: “Working on this film with Ronan has been a unique and wonderful time,” Daniel said. “In my career, I’ve met many people who work really hard but I have never met anyone that works harder than Ronan. He’s an inspiring leader. Some great directors are generals; some are micromanagers. He’s neither one of those. He provided both cast and crew with a sense of creative freedom that allowed them to do their best work in their own way. It takes a lot of confidence to do that. For a painter, for whom every micro-dot of the work is his alone, it might seem counterintuitive. But I think he created a wonderfully collaborative working environment for everybody.”
Ronan’s road to painter/director began with the former discipline.
“I was always drawing, for as long as I can remember,” he said. “According to my parents, when I was two, I would just draw certain things over and over, obsessively, like motorbikes, because my dad rode bikes. I started painting when I was around 11, but then I was also starting to make films, little movies in the backyard. I was a young kid, always annoyingly trying to corral people into taking part. I didn’t really take it that seriously until eighth grade, when a film teacher just lit the fire in me. I started to realize that this was an actual thing you could do. I looked at my mom’s work as a filmmaker and realized, people do this as a career. And then I watched Zombie Girl.”
I had to admit he was the first filmmaker in my nearly 40 years of doing this who cited that film as a North Star influence.
“It’s about this 12-year-old girl who made a feature length zombie film in her small town in Texas,” he said. I watched that around that time I started making short films more regularly and started writing scripts. That set me off on that path. But painting and film felt very separate to me. In recent years, I’ve started to sort think of them more as two expressions of the same impulse or sort of two sides of the same coin.”
The works in the art gallery show were done while Ronan was making Anemone, and one influenced the other. They are all done in pastel paint over bare rough canvas, inspired by photos he found on the artwork repository website Flickr. They were taken in the early 2000s, capturing young people in states of restlessness. Ronan filled some of the space with repetitive phrases, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. The images feel innocent, but there is an ominous, even dangerous feel there, like the angel-faced girl who, if you look closely, is holding a handgun by her side.
“It was crazy to see these paintings in that beautiful gallery space,” Ronan said. “I’d been working on them in Dublin in this little room they gave me to paint in, above the cutting room. It was really a great situation. But I was trying to make pretty big paintings, and it was quite a limited space, so I was filling the walls to the brim.”
He believes that working on the still art helped his filmmaking, beyond the storyboards he drew for the film, and the drawings on butcher paper that open the film’s credit roll and set the tone for a volatile ride.
“I’ve been working exclusively with oil pastels on raw canvas for the last few years,” Ronan said. “The actual tone of the show and the imagery, it was definitely influenced lot by the film,” he said. “We were editing the film as I was making this body of work. And I think there are certain images that I was already drawn to in previous bodies of work that kind of filtered into the film, and then this sort of sense of storminess of certain things like fairgrounds and images that I tend to gravitate towards. Watching the same scenes over and over again, you’re kind of soaking in these images. So I think that that definitely found its way into these paintings in an especially intense way.”
Back to the movie. Ronan said he wanted an actor watchable and intense enough to hold his own opposite Daniel, and felt lucky to get Sean Bean. I wondered if simply promising the actor he would be alive for the closing credits would be enough. From Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, Patriot Games and James Bond, he has been a most killable star.
“That was the big draw, alright,” Ronan joked. “When we started to think about Jem, I realized that there were so few people I could imagine as him, and eventually got to the point where Sean was just the only person that we could see as this guy. He comes from the same neck of the woods as Jem. He’s northern English, and he has the right kind of physicality. I just loved his work growing up, with Game of Thrones a big influence on me. He was really excited to do it right off the bat, and he was just a joy to work with. I was nervous going in because he had been a longtime legend for me, but he was so kind and disarming, and created a character that was so much deeper and had such a kind of more palpable inner life than what was already on the page.”
Whether Daniel Day-Lewis got recharged enough to continue making films is an unanswered question, because Ronan’s next project really doesn’t have a part that would be right for his father.
“I have a script that I’d really like to make next that I wrote before this one, actually, called The Dancing Place,” Ronan said. “It is so different from Anemone, a coming of age story about teenage girls that warps into a nightmare.”
Even if the tandem was a one-off, Anemone gave Ronan a chance to glimpse his father in a different way, like when Daniel started to exhibit qualities of his character Ray, as they were writing the film’s most intense scenes.
“There’s this kind of mythic quality to the way he’s perceived by you and others,” Ronan told me. “Growing up I started to get the sense of that from other people, even though that obviously wasn’t how it was at home, where he’s just dad. His work was always behind this veil for me. I was always really fascinated with the mysteries of that. It was amazing to suddenly see that work from such a different vantage point, as a collaborator. And yet there are still aspects of his process that are mysteries to me and I’d love that they stay that way. This was really thrilling and just kind of surreal. And there were moments on set where I think we both had to just laugh at just how crazy it was that we were doing this and that we were having this cosmically lucky experience of working together in this way.”
The post Mike Fleming Jr: Meet Ronan Day-Lewis, The Young Filmmaker & Painter Who Coaxed A GOAT Out Of Retirement appeared first on Deadline.
