Daniel Day-Lewis was retired. His son is just getting started

0:00Eight years ago, Daniel Day-Lewis quietly dropped a bomb on the film world in the form of a short statement, Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor. It said, this is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject. Well, the statement was shocking, in part because of how dedicated Day-Lewis was to his craft. Here he is talking to NPR in 2007. For me, the work is really pure pleasure. I do the work because I love to do it, not because I feel the need to punish myself. I do something else if I needed to punish myself. I love to do the work that I do.

0:41It was also surprising because he was so good at it. Day-Lewis won a record three Best Actor Oscars, and he really inhabited each role, whether it was President Lincoln, Blood's been spilled to afford us this moment now, now, now! or whether he was playing a ruthless oil prospector, There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. Or maybe it's that the characters were inhabiting him. You start from scratch. You begin with nothing. You reduce yourself as far as possible to the state of an empty vessel, which may or may not fill with something that's going to be useful. Day-Lewis described it as a silent partnership.

1:29What could be more liberating than to explore with impunity the darker recesses of one's imagination and psyche? and I suppose that has always appealed to me. And I always am most often intrigued by lives that seem very far removed from my own. Well, retirement notwithstanding, Daniel Day-Lewis has a new movie out. He plays a man who withdraws from the world he once knew and then finds himself pulled back. Consider this. Daniel Day-Lewis is back in a film directed by his son about unfinished business and about what we passed down.

2:12From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

2:23It's Consider This from NPR. For 20 years, a man has been living in the woods in the north of England. He's got everything he needs to survive. Roof over his head, cans of food, piles of firewood. He's isolated. He wants to keep it that way. No one knows where he is. Except for one guy, Jim. And one day, Jim shows up unannounced, determined to bring him home. How did I what? How did I manage without you? I won't pretend I don't think about it from time to time, but this is it, Jim. This is my life. Does it have to be? Daniel Day-Lewis stars as the reclusive Ray Stoker in the new movie Anemone, which was directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis.

3:13Father and son are both in our New York studios. Daniel and Ronan Day-Lewis, welcome to All Things Considered. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for having us. Let's jump straight into the story. Daniel Day-Lewis, your character, Ray, as I mentioned, has been off the grid for two decades, and then suddenly this guy, Jim, played by the absolutely terrific Sean Bean, walks through the door of your cabin. I know you don't want to give too many twists away, but what happens next? Well, Jim, as we discover him at the very beginning of the story, embarks on this mission in agreement with his wife, Nessa.

3:51Jem is my brother. And he has raised a boy with Nessa who is currently in a great deal of trouble. And there's a connection there. And so when he sets out on the journey to find me, it's with the idea of, as you said, of trying to find some way of convincing me to come back from this place. I didn't realize you two were brothers until there's a great scene where the two of you, you're at the sink and you're brushing your teeth and you're rinsing and spitting together. And I suddenly thought, okay, these two either were roommates or they're brothers. They've shared a sink. Right, right. So we've already gotten this as a movie about brothers.

4:38Ronan, it's also, of course, about fathers and sons and what we pass on. What were you trying to explore here? Yeah, it was interesting because the kind of father-son thread of it crept up on us. We kind of realized that Brian had to become a real person and not just this kind of footnote on the periphery of the brother's story. And I think when we first created a scene of him alone in his room, it really opened up his perspective and this sense of the kind of fascination with the mystery of the past life of your parent. And, you know, after I don't know how long it was before we realized that two fellas in a shed, like we just couldn't live with that anymore.

5:21I was thinking I hope a woman will come in at some point. What is the challenge, Ronan, of, okay, this is your feature directorial debut, and I imagine it would always be a challenge to direct one's own parent. And, oh, by the way, your father is freaking Daniel Day-Lewis. What was that like? Yeah, I mean, I'd sort of been thinking of it in such a kind of low stakes, playful way for so long because of the way the script came together, which was just like us at the kitchen table working on it. Yeah, y 'all wrote the screenplay together. Yes, yeah, we wrote the script together. So there was a moment, I think, when we first got on set where it did hit me, just the gravity of it.

6:01But it felt pretty easy to transition into that. Daniel Day-Lewis, this is your first movie in, what, seven or eight years? Yes, it is, yes. And did your son have to twist your arm to un-retire? No, I mean, it may seem like that from the outside, but no, if anything, I think it was really my wish to work with Ronan, And knowing that I'd decided to work at something else for an unknown period of time, there was a kind of anticipatory sadness in me knowing that Ronan would make films. And I thought, I wonder if we can cook something up just for the pure pleasure of working together. So let's go to the mystery.

6:50The trauma, I guess is a better word. The trauma at the center of this film, which has to do with Northern Ireland. And Ray, your character, Daniel, is a former English soldier. He fought there. He carries the legacy of things that happened there that he did. I wondered why Northern Ireland? There have been so many films, so many dramas that have explored the Troubles. What intrigued the two of you about wanting to revisit that history? Yeah, no, that's certainly true. But largely, the perspective of stories told about the Troubles have been from the other side of the fence. You know, I grew up with sort of deep attachment to both Britain and to Ireland.

7:32I have dual citizenship. I have close friends who were on both sides of that terrible argument. Yeah, like, as my dad was saying, his connection to Ireland, and then also having grown up there from seven to 13, we learned about the troubles in school. And I think since then, it's really loomed large in my imagination. And I think it was also important to me that the film is looking at war and human bloodshed from almost like an omniscient perspective. Well, and I was just looking, Ronan, you were born in 1998. So you must have no direct memory of before the Good Friday Accord, when the Troubles were very much alive.

8:12And conversely, over the years, I spent quite a lot of time in the north of Ireland, specifically in Belfast, during the Troubles, when they were at the very worst. And it felt like a very, very different and a very threatening place. Yeah. So you're talking about, you know, it matters to have spent time on the ground there to remotely begin to understand the story. Let's go back to where we started and the cabin in the woods where your character has spent a long time away from the public before finally reemerging. It is not lost on me, Daniel Day-Lewis, that you're doing something of the same thing, having stayed out of the public eye for years.

8:54Are you drawing on something personal there? You're known as a method actor. No, I'm so glad you asked me that question. I'm delighted to have a chance to respond to it because I think my name is rarely mentioned, that the word reclusive or recluse isn't attached to it. And I am not a recluse. I just don't live in the eye of the camera. You know, I mean, if you're not visible publicly, you're deemed to be somehow retired from ordinary everyday life. You very often see that phrase, break silence. But all it means is that, you know, I talk to people all the time. I'm just not talking into a microphone.

9:38Talking to friends and family and working in different ways in different places. So life goes on and it is absolutely not the life of a recluse. Well, let me say thank you to both of you. This has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. Oh, for us too. Thanks for having us. Yeah, this has been so great. Well, it's the very much not reclusive actor, Daniel Day-Lewis. Thank you. And his son, the director, Ronan Day-Lewis, speaking with us from our New York bureau about their new movie, Anemone. It's out through Focus Features, which, we should note, is a financial sponsor of NPR. This episode was produced by Catherine Fink and Connor Donovan, with audio engineering by Jimmy Keeley.

10:25It was edited by Patrick Jaron Wadananen. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. Thank you to our Consider This Plus listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and who help keep public radio strong. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors. You can learn more at plus.npr.org.

10:49It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.