“I’m still alive,” Daniel Day-Lewis quipped this morning as he sat down in the NFT 1 at the BFI Southbank for a career Q&A session with veteran British critic Mark Kermode.
The veteran actor and three-time Oscar winner is in town to present his acting comeback, Anemone, at the London Film Festival.
Opening the session, Kermode pulled out his phone and told Day-Lewis and the packed audience that he had reached out to One Battle After Another and frequent Day-Lewis collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson to provide a question he could ask the actor.
Anderson’s email reply to Kermode read: “This is no secret. Daniel is an incredible writer. His contributions to the dialogue, whether he writes it beforehand or improvises in the moment, are his secret strengths. He is so well-read. It’s no secret. I’m not betraying trust to tell you this; I’d be really curious to know what he was reading and what reading went into forming this.”
Anderson was referring to Anemone in his email, which is directed by Day-Lewis’s son, Ronan.
The veteran actor said he was particularly inspired by two books by the American writer Kent Haruf, titled Plainsong and Eventide, when he was prepping the film.
“You get to know this community in both books. The two characters that were most fascinating to me were a couple of elderly rancher brothers who lived together and in almost complete silence,” Day-Lewis said of the books. “They had a tacit understanding and a complete lack of need for words.”
Day-Lewis’s process was a frequent topic of discussion throughout the session, which was shaped around clips from across his filmography. A particularly interesting portion of the session surrounded Day-Lewis’s work on Jim Sheridan’s 1989 feature My Left Foot, in which Day-Lewis plays the Irish writer Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy and only had control of his left foot.
Day-Lewis said he certainly would “not be able to make that film” today, and at the time, his performance as a person with cerebral palsy was “already questionable.” The actor said he prepped for the role with the help of young disabled people from a clinic in Dublin.
“They made it clear to me that they didn’t think I should be doing it,” Day-Lewis said of the people he met at the clinic.
“I said, Well, I understand what you’re saying, but I do think it’s an important story, and at this time, it could possibly get made if I do it. It was a fairly flimsy justification for doing something that I just wanted to do.”
On his famed method process, Day-Lewis continued: “It’s very easy to describe what I do as if I’m out of my mind. But it just makes sense to me. If you’ve got the responsibility of portraying a life like Christy Brown, who was a huge and noble figure in Irish society, you have an obligation to try to understand, as far as you’re humanly possible, what it feels like to be inside of that experience.”
Later during the session, Day-Lewis discussed his inspirations. The vet said he revered Marlon Brando, who he said once called him about possibly working on something. Day-Lewis also spoke at length about his deep admiration for the work of legendary British filmmaker Ken Loach, particularly his 1969 masterwork Kes.
Day-Lewis ended the session with some advice for his son, Ronan, who makes his feature debut with Anemone.
“Take it easy,” Day-Lewis said, adding that at the start of his career, he was often pushed to produce abundant amounts of work until he embraced that his best performances come from his own unique process, which takes time.
Set in Northern England, Anemone follows a man who heads out on a journey into the woods to reconnect with the estranged hermit brother, with whom he shared a complicated past that was altered by life-changing events decades ago. Ronan Day-Lewis directed from a script he wrote with his father. Brad Pitt’s Plan B produced, and Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green, and Samantha Morton co-starred.
LFF runs until Oct 19.
The post Daniel Day-Lewis Talks Method Acting, Takes Surprise Question From Paul Thomas Anderson & Says He Wouldn’t Be Able To Make ‘My Left Foot’ In 2025 During LFF Q&A appeared first on Deadline.
