Daniel Day-Lewis

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Daniel Day-Lewis is undoubtedly one of the most skilled actors in the world, after making his mark in a string of films. These are The Last Of The Mohicans, The Age Of Innocence, In The Name Of The Father, which he got an Oscar nomination for, and My Left Foot, which not only gave him his breakthrough film role, but his sole Oscar for Best Actor.

If Day-Lewis seemed to have a lower profile since the mid-1990's, it's not out of anything other than his own control and desire. While his output has become fewer and more far-between in the years since, he's an actor who continues to make an enormous impact on every film he's made, including The Crucible, The Boxer, The Ballad Of Jack And Rose, and Gangs Of New York, the last giving him his third Best Actor Oscar nod.

Now Daniel has made his return in his latest film, the drama There Will Be Blood, inspired by the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!. He plays the role of Daniel Plainview, a Texas oil prospector. When we spoke with the now 50 year-old classically-trained actor, Day-Lewis first shared how he was moved to participate in There Will Be Blood by the extraordinary complexities of Plainview.

'I didn't really see him as a miserable prick, but I guess the challenge is the same as it always is, which is to try and discover a life that isn't your own,' Daniel states, 'And in Plainview, as it came to me, Paul's beautiful script, was a man whose life I didn't understand at all. It was a life that was completely mysterious to me and that unleashed a fable of curiosity, which I had no choice, but forseeably.'

'Just a man trying to make a living, you know,' he adds, 'I'm not really the best person to say this, but I believe see the seeds of a man you meet at the end and the man you meet at the beginning, but Daniel, to me, goes through a fatherly transformation. It never occurred to me to think that his journey is a short one.'

With Plainview being an oil prospector that existed during the early days of the oil rigging business in the turn of the century, we asked Daniel how physically demanding it was to play a character living in such an era.

'The thing about those lads, I mean, you don't really need to discover Plainview from the beginning,' Day-Lewis says, 'This film has him learning himself how to do it, anyone who can swing an axe or a sledge, which what anyone can do, can dig a hole in the ground, or a pick axe. So in terms of the physical preparation, there wasn't really anything to do except stay fit and be outside digging holes. You know, they kind of made it up as they went along and that was true even as you see it in the story.'

Day-Lewis also shared with us just how difficult it actually was to dig for oil during that time.

'You know, before even cable-driven motoring became common use, they began by scooping this muck as it erupted, literally out of the Earth, scooping sort of these plants in buckets and stuff,' he explains, 'That was the first way of gathering and then someone had to go back there and set up the a-frame and they had to plunge the equipment with a telegraph pole down into the ground, to see if that would help it along.'

'It was incredibly primitive,' Daniel adds, 'You know, as the story progresses, then there's something to learn about because the drilling procedure is a fairly complicated thing. It's sheer blood and sweat really just to scoop the stuff up.'

The core of There Will Be Blood comes from the relationship between Daniel and his son H.W., played by young actor Dillon Freasier, who makes his screen debut. When asked about how he got along with him, Daniel had nothing but enthusiasm in talking about his young co-star.

'I felt very close to Dillon and very fond of him,' Day-Lewis says, 'He's a cowboy. His father owns a ranch and in a bit of digging, he's got this rodeo backhorse, it's a lancer, and he does the round-ups and is world famous. But he has this strange maturity that he's very young for, something most kids of his age might have become numb to the world.'

'He's really used to hard work,' he continues, 'He's got hands like you could knock out a horse with them. They're big, you know, and he was just the most delightful person. He had that curiosity for everything that was going on, both with the camera and the shots and every department. He was constantly drinking in all this information in such excitement. He was just one step ahead of us most of the time, absolutely. His mother just raised him so beautifully and very respectful.'

Day-Lewis also shared his take on the rather complex and unorthodox nature of the father-son relationship between Daniel and H.W. in the film.

'There's a real connection between those two,' he says, 'It's not pure exploitation. It goes deeper than that, but Plainview has no understanding of being in a parent drama. So his son is pretty naturally responsible in a way that a genuine partner would be for the day-to-day running his business.'

'So in Plainview's point-of-view, everything that interferes with the running of the business is something that he has to take care of, even for his son's sake as well,' he says, 'So he doesn't know how to deal with this damaged creature that he doesn't know how to be a father to. He's like a friend and a partner to him, but he doesn't know how to take care of him as a father and he has no real means of knowing that.'

Helming the film is none other than Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love. The actor also shared with us a particular day he recalls during shooting where the 37 year-old director managed to use his considerable skill to overcome a scene that proved to be more challenging to put together than anticipated.

'It was a very difficult day,' he recalls, 'Things weren't going right and people were doing all kinds of things to it to try and fix the pipe, which was needed to be working in the background, filling in the reservoir and we weren't digging anyhow, so we lost a lot of a day in this place, which we just couldn't afford to do as time was very tight. And essentially, out of necessity often, something interesting is born.'

'Paul set up a tracking shot which covered the whole scene,' Day-Lewis adds, 'We didn't know if we could make it work because obviously, with the hits, you got to get each right, at the right angle, and in a moving shot covers the whole scene and the chance of everything getting right in that shot were pretty slim. But Paul seemed to tap it like that and there was nothing we could do to get ready for that, except just try it and try again.'

Another unique aspect of There Will Be Blood is that the score was written by Radiohead guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood. The actor spoke with us with how much he admired the musician's incredible skills as a composer.

'Paul recorded the music of Abbey Road in London and the astonishing about Jonny is that he didn't study composition.,' Daniel says,' I think he was a violinist and then, when he went into the band, the band became his life. But somehow, along the way, he taught himself composition and he's arranged and composed for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, whose played a lot of music and he scored the whole thing himself. I don't know how he did it.'

All in all, Daniel Day-Lewis is obviously an actor who more than lives up to his esteemed reputation as one of the greatest actors continuing to work today. However, when the actor was asked to comment on a bizarre rumor that an actor backed out of There Will Be Blood due to allegedly being intimidated by Day-Lewis, Daniel's response was nothing short of being genuinely perplexed.

'I was quite surprised when I read that comment,' he says, 'Anyhow, the problem was, during that particular passing, I absolutely don't believe that it was because he was intimidated by me. I happen to believe that. I hope I'm right.'