Premiere - September 2002
Daniel Day-Lewis: The Man Who Knew too much
In a rare interview, Daniel Day-Lewis talks about the joys and conflicts of moviemaking, and why he's finally returning to the screen, as Bill the Butcher in "Gangs of New York"
Five years is a long time to wait for any man, feelings can change. Rumors can take root. It's
been that long since Daniel Day-Lewis last appeared onscreen, in Jim Sheridan's IRA pugilist drama
The Boxer. During his absence, word got out that Day-Lewis had quit acting - for good, this time.
The story went that he had moved to Italy with his wife, Rebecca Miller (daughter of play-wright
Arthur Miller) and their young son, to become a cobble; he was toiling away in Florence, it was
said, as a master shoemaker's apprentice.
"I was very happily out of the world of filmmaking," Day-Lewis says, his wry smile signaling that
this line of questioning will not be fruitful. "I was just happily working away at other things."
But then Marty came along. Or was it Harvey? Or Leo? The speculation shifted to what finally drew
the famously private 45-year old Oscar winner back to acting, in a plum role in December's Gangs
of New York, Martin Scorsese's epic tale of mid-19th century immigrant turf war fare. One rumor
had it that Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Miramax cochairman Harvey Weinstein met with the
actor at the Italian restaurant Rao's in Harlem, in the winter of 2000, in order to lure him in.
"That's nonsense from the horse's mouth," Day-Lewis says. "That's Harvey. We went to have a dinner
there, but the idea that Harvey was introducing me to this gangster world that was to galvanize
my decision is absolute fucking nonsense." His face lightens. "I have great affection for the
man," he adds with a gentle purring exhalation, " but Harvey hasn't gotten the message that I am
playing this part in spite of him - not because of him."
Rather, it was the chance to work with Scorsese again, after 1003's The Age of Innocence, that
clinched the decision. "For me, he is it," says Day-Lewis, sitting at a wooden, Tudor-style table
in Scorsese's Capa Productions offices in midtown Manhattan. At six feet one, with a nearly
shaved head, dressed in a nylon track suit, he looks the part of a European soccer player, albeit
a posh and highly articulate one. He is alert and responsive, even attentive. He says he felt
"both extreme excitement and dread" at the prospect of joining the Gangs cast. "Martin is a mighty
presence. You have to make a huge circumnavigation if you want to get around him. I was already
into the subject, and when he started to tell me the story... Oh man, he's a good storyteller."
Scorsese had quite a tale to tell: He had been developing a script - on and off for 25 years -
based on Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York, a 1927 account of the rival ethnic factions who
in the 19th century lived and fought in a hardscrabble section of lower Manhattan known as the
Five Points. The director had finally scored financing from Weinstein, among other partners, and
landed DiCaprio to star as Amsterdam Vallon, a young Irishman looking to avenge the death of his
father (Liam Neeson) at the hands of a ruthless American-born gang leader, Bill the Butcher.
Scorsese had discussed the latter role with his frequent collaborator Robert De Niro, before
turning to Day-Lewis.
"Daniel wasn't sure he wanted to do it. He knew there would be a lot of changes, time commitment,
script rewrites," Scorsese says. "He asked 'Why'd you think of me for this film?' And I said,
'I thought you'd understand the nature of anger.' "
Although DiCaprio's character is the hero of Gangs, Bill the Butcher hacks away at its turbulent
soul. ("I am drawn to characters who are, on the surface, what you would call a villain,"
Scorsese says. "Bill may have the aspect of a monster, but he is still a human being.") To develop
the character, the filmmakers researched the real Bill the Butcher, Bill Poole, a meat cutter and
gang chieftain with vehemently anti-immigrant politics who was also, as it says in Asbury's book,
"a champion fighter and eye-gouger."
"My Bill, though he is descendant from the same seed, is probably a little more extreme,"
Day-Lewis says, with typical understatement. In the film, between working the flesh of his trade,
Bill uses his knives to make mincemeat of men. In a time of wanton barbarism, he rises to the top,
working out of a building dubbed Satan's Circus, which has a devil's head adorning the door.
"Bill Poole had a remarkable sense of humor," Day-Lewis says. "It would come out in scenes of
mayhem. As he was cutting an adversary's ears off, he would be exchanging quips like, 'I am going
to trim the ears off and make a nice soup out of that head.' " But Day-Lewis's Bill is also a man
of some refinement, a snappy dresser with a penchant for quoting the Bible. His left eye is made
of glass, an American eagle etched on the pupil - a creepy ode to his warped sense of patriotism.
Squinting, sweating, leering, ready to pounce, Bill the Butcher is the essence of America's
melting pot reaching full boil.
Even before a 20-minute teaser of Gangs was unveiled at Cannes, word was spreading - stoked,
no doubt, by Miramax's mighty PR machine - that Day-Lewis had created another indelible character,
in a performance that rivals such acclaimed portrayals as Gerry Conlon in In the Name of the
Father, Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, Christy Brown in My Left Foot, and Tomas in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being. Don't expect Day-Lewis to join the chorus, however. "There is
invariably so much stuff that you wish you could have done differently," he says with an assured
honesty. "I think audiences may find my performance incomprehensible." He is equally measured on
the subject of his past achievements. "On each occasions, I have thought, is that all it was?"
His doubts date back to the 1970s, when he was a theater student in England. "Even at an early
stage, when I was a spearcarrier doing bit jobs, I was gobbing off about ambivalence. That
question mark was a weighty one for me: Is there any inherent value in this?" he says, recalling
that he asked that very question of the leading actor in the company. "To my great surprise,
he said, 'Acting is a noble art.' And it really stopped me in my tracks because it never occurred
to me that it was. I had felt that it was a response to a compulsion. I found his response
incredibly touching, I didn't believe it necessarily, but I felt that it was something worth
believing in."
In Day-Lewis's childhood home, the art of acting did perhaps have a more noble peer: poetry.
His father, Cecil Day-Lewis, was England's poet laureate, and although his mother, Jill Balcon,
is an actress, she was known in her heyday for her poetry reading at festivals and on the BBC
(the couple met at one such radio event). Cecil, who passed away when Daniel was 15, saw his
adolescent son develop a penchant for the meticulous work of furniture-making. Soon, Daniel was
channeled his intensity into acting in school plays.
"He has the poet and the actor in him," says Jim Sheridan, who directed Day-Lewis to an Oscar in
My Left Foot, and to a nomination for In the Name of the Father. But, he surmises, "if your dad's
the poet laureate, it's always going to seem like mere acting is below that."
After several years of stage work in the Bristol Old Vic theater, Day-Lewis received widespread
recognition for his role as a gay punk in the 1986 film My Beautiful Laundrette. He soon began to
build a reputation for the tenacious way he inhabits his characters. To Play My Left Foot's
Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy, he remained in a wheelchair even off the set; he spent
weeks hunting, tracking, and skinning animals while preparing for The Last of the Mohicans; he
locked himself into a cell for the IRA prison drama In the Name of the Father; and he arrived on
the set of The Crucible two months early so that he could build the house in which his character,
John Proctor, lives.
Despite the effort, and the accolades, Day-Lewis has found it easier to focus his faith in the
craft on other actors’ work. “At its best, acting can be an astonishing thing. I have personally
been very profoundly moved be the mystery of it,” he says, listing the performances of Brando, De
Niro, and such old-school great as Michel Simon, Charles Laughton, Spencer Tracy, and his Crucible
costar Paul Scofield. “But it’s much easier to believe in it in relation to other people.” Asked
if he considers acting a lesser craft, he says, “I think it is most of the time, but I don’t think
it has to be.”
“When people demand everything of what they do, it can’t fulfill [them],” Sheridan says. “Samuel
Beckett says writing is a failure, so Daniel is saying acting is a failure. He’s trying to elevate
it to a place where it really does mean something. I wish he could see that the acting is more
important to other than it is to him. I think an awful lot of people want to see Daniel. He has
a gift. I’d like to seem use it a little more, but I know it’s hard for him.
Whether he’s plating a priggish Edwardian gentleman (A Room With a View) or an emotionally complex
Czech love (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) – or even his first so called villain, for Gangs -
Day-Lewis strives for total empathy. “I wouldn’t know how to describe how my sympathies lie with
Bill, but obviously I felt some great sympathy,” he says, sitting in his chair with the stillness
of a monk. “He wasn’t an unethical man. It is just that his code of behavior belonged to that
time period and to those streets. I enjoyed his company an awful lot: to borrow the freedom of a
different code of ethics is very interesting.” Did he research the art of cutting up meat? “I try
and grab everything off the shelf,” Day-Lewis says vaguely. “When there are obvious skills to
learn, you try to learn them the best you can, and what you are not able to learn, you have to
forget you don’t know.” Yes, he says, for Bill, that included training with butchers, as well as
a lot of knife-throwing practice.
The physical strain of the seven-month shoot, at the famed Cinecitta studios in Rome, caused him
to feel “like the kind of scraps you’d feed to a dog. Not fit for human consumption.” And there
was an emotional toll as well. “Everyone over the course of a film has those very deep private
anxieties when we think, ‘What the hell am I doing? How can I do this?’ “ Day-Lewis says. “You
can see people suffering in the corners, in the shadows here and there.”
Those demons also afflicted Scorsese, which is partly why the actor and the director both speak
of a “complicity” between them. “There is no doubt: You look in the corner and you’ll see me
suffering. That is my nature,” says the director, who struggled with a ballooning budget and has
some widely reported blowups with Weinstein. “I could lean on [Day-Lewis]. He was pretty much a
solid rock. Because he was Bill. He was not Daniel. He was Bill.”
One way the actor stayed in the Bill frame of mind was to crank Eminem’s rap music at top volume
while working out off the set. “Daniel had to be in touch with an anger and a rage that are not
nice to live with,” Scorsese says. “You have to be in that place not just when the camera is
running, but all day. That is why I wanted him – because I know he was going to go all the way.”
His costars took note. “Daniel was completely enveloped with that character in a way that stunned
us all,” says Cameron Diaz, who plays a pickpocket who finds her way into Both Amsterdam’s
and Bill’s beds. Diaz recalls how Day-Lewis could throw knives – an activity that caused him
severe back problems – and his a small square from 30 feet away. “Over and over again,” she
marvels. “He worked at it every day. He is that intense a person. Everybody was completely blown
away.”
But with his wife and son in tow in Italy, Day-Lewis aimed to scale back his usual 24-hour
immersion. “I tried to moderate things,” he says, although he admits that there were some moments
off set when he couldn’t quite shake Bill. “Shopping expeditions during the weekends would be
interesting. I had a few encounters in parking lots.”
“I think the greater actors – like Sean Penn, Brando, De Niro, and Daniel – get close to a kid
of insanity in their commitment,” Sheridan says. “Imagine how difficult it is to have to sort of
consciousness that Daniel has, and then [to attain] the spontaneity [required for acting]. That
kind of contradiction would drive anybody insane.”
Fully aware that he is “a person who gets to do what he craves to do, with the people with
whom he wants to do it, in the circumstances in which he wants to do it, so it seems mealy-mouthed
to dwell upon [this] stuff,” Day-Lewis prefers to – despite himself – tone down the
self-questioning. “I have thought about this a lot over the years, an obviously it affects my
attitude toward the work, but the idea that I am wallowing in a great quagmire is no a balanced
point of view.” Still, he allows, “it’s probably one of the reasons who it’s quite hard to keep
doing this job.” (He wouldn’t be sitting for this interview, by the way, except that “Harvey has
me over a barrel because he knows I would do anything for Martin,” he says conceding the
importance of promoting Gangs. “I would never speak about filmmaking in this way if it were not
for the necessary business of repaying the debt.”)
All of which certainly helps explain the span of time between his movies. “Film sets always felt
like absurd places to me,” says Day-Lewis, who over the years has reportedly turned down
Interview With the Vampire, Philadelphia, Shakespeare in Love, and Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming
Solaris, among other projects. “I thought, ‘Well, what am I going to learn that is going to give
me something the next time I go to work? You learn to be an actor – but what the hell is that?
It’s nothing.” He prefers instead to “go back into the world and actually learn something. It’s
like the field lying fallow, I suppose.”
Recently, a young actor whom Day-Lewis will not name (no, he says, it wasn’t DiCaprio) suggested
to him that actors have an obligation to work. “He was a very idealistic man who believe in the
rightness of what he was doing,” Day-Lewis says with some admiration. “I kind of let it go, but I
feel he’s wrong. My feeling is that you obliged to offer it in proportion to what you are able to
give – not to keep giving when you have nothing to offer. A lot of creative people keep creating
by necessity, sometimes because they have to pay bills or because it is too fearful to contemplate
an alternative.” Day-Lewis has neither problem. For one, his price tag in the ‘90s hovered around
$7 million per film. But more important is his feeling that “life is such an endlessly mysterious
thing. How are you going to discover some part of that by hanging out on film sets?”
Does he find the mysteries of life, then, in carving up wood or hammering nails into shoes?
“I don’t know, but everything is worth trying, isn’t it?” he responds.
What about fatherhood?
“I am reluctant to boil that experience to a sentence to two,” says the actor, who witnessed the
birth of his second son with Miller this May (he also has a seven-year-old son from a previous
relationship, with the actress Isabelle Adjani). His mother-in-law passed away one month before,
and so he and Miller have moved the family from New York City to Connecticut, to live with his
father-in-law. “That’s been our lives, really,” he says with finality. “It has been a year of very
mixed fortunes.”
Clearly, another film does not appear to be looming on the horizon. “Nothing happened over the
course of making Gangs of New York that made me think, ‘Why don’t I do this more often?’ “ he says.
In an essay written last year titled “American Playhouse: On Politics and the Art of Acting,”
Arthur Miller seems to speak directly to the talent and paradox embodied in his son-in-law. It
ends with the words, “Tolstoy once remarked that what we look for in a work of art is the
revelation of the artist’s soul, a glimpse of God. You can’t act that.”
“Yeah, that’s beautiful,” Day-Lewis says after hearing the line. “Well, that will keep you
enthralled for a lifetime feeling miserably – unable to reach the thing itself.”
He won’t entertain the suggestion that perhaps he himself has come close to that “thing” in his
performances.
“By all means, all of us should live with that ideal in mind, but by living with that, you would
be ever conscious how far short of it you fell,” he demurs, laughing at the weight of it all. “But
the ideal is quite wonderful.”
Thanks a lot to Pitssymoon !
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