Inside a modest room on the northern side of the Chelsea Hotel, as the midday sun pours in through a window, with the noises of the bustling street several floors below bleeding through the walls, Daniel Day-Lewis is in deep concentration. Or rather, the 67-year-old actor appears to be in deep concentration, if the look on his face is any indication. You’ve seen this particular expression before, in any number of movies that the Oscar winner has graced over the years, though it’s been a while. Eyes: narrowed. Jaw: set. Focus: laser-like.
A photographer is packing up his stuff, a publicist is multitasking on her phone, a journalist is trying to make himself invisible. (This is a star of stage and screen who once referred to the experience of interviews as “God’s great joke on me.”) But Day-Lewis tunes all of that out. He’s studying the furniture in the room. Sizing it up, inspecting it, admiring the craftsmanship. There was a point when he was a young man, before the lure of acting truly took hold of him, where Day-Lewis wanted to be a furniture maker. For all we know, he may have spent the past eight or so years in his workshop, making a table similar to the one he’s staring down with a characteristic intensity right now. He runs a hand over it, lost in thought.
Then the word “Dad” rings out, and boom, Day-Lewis is suddenly very much present, smiling and relaxed. “Hey, Ro,” he says affectionately, ambling over to his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. The 27-year-old writer-director, tall and whippet-thin in a vintage Adidas shirt, beckons Daniel from the other side of the room, emanating the sort of restless energy you associate with twentysomething artists. When the men stand next to each other, you can see a certain similarity between them — same long nose, same rugged jawline — enough to clock that oh, yeah, they’re definitely related. Daniel is virtually beaming at his kid as the two of them casually banter. They’re both here to conduct their first joint “God’s great joke” together for something they’d been working on in relative secrecy for close to a decade. And they clearly couldn’t be happier to be sitting next to each other.
That secret project, Anemone (from Focus Features, out Oct. 3 in limited release, Oct. 10 wide), is nothing if not a family affair. It is the directorial debut of the younger Day-Lewis, a longtime painter (his first solo exhibition at the Megan Mulrooney Gallery in Los Angeles kicks off Sept. 13) and the son of the Lincoln star and filmmaker Rebecca Miller. It’s the first screen appearance in eight years of the elder Day-Lewis, who announced at the beginning of the press tour for 2017’s Phantom Thread that he was stepping away from acting for good. It’s a project that started with the two batting ideas back and forth, and now ends with a truly extraordinary drama about brothers, mothers, and, yes, fathers and sons. And it’s as much an introduction to a new talent as it as reintroduction to a veteran one.
Taking its title from the name of a delicate flower whose petals close when a storm approaches, Anemone tells the story of a former British soldier named Ray (Day-Lewis), who lives in the remote woods the North of England. His sibling, Jem (Sean Bean), has traveled to the small shed that his stoic, hermit-like brother calls home. It seems that Ray’s teenage son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley), is on the verge of following the same self-destructive path as his dad. Both the boy’s uncle and his mother, Nessa (Samantha Morton), want to save him before it’s too late. To do that, Ray will have to confront his past. And that’s not going to be easy.
It’s an intense, joyous, sorrowful, and sometimes absurd family drama that occasionally veers into the sort of strange, hyperreal territory that involves giant fish, freak hail flurries, and an elongated, camel-like creature with a human face and a tiny penis.
Once Daniel and Ronan settled in and the former poured everybody a glass of mineral water, the two men spent the next hour talking about everything from the genesis of this project to Ronan’s upbringing on film sets to Daniel’s decision to retire — a word he still takes some issue with — and, for this film, unretire. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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Let’s start at the beginning…
Ronan Day-Lewis: I had been thinking for years about wanting to write something about brothers. And when we talked about doing something together, it turned out that my dad had, completely independently of me, been fascinated with this idea of doing something about two brothers as well — notably, the role that silence plays in brotherhood.
And so that was the spark. The idea of this man who’s living in in complete isolation surfaced for us pretty quickly, and then the details of his environment, his backstory and what his life was like started to foggily come into focus for us. I’ll let you give your version of it.
Daniel Day-Lewis: That pretty much covers it, yeah.
When did you guys first start having this conversation?
Daniel: It was just before Covid, I think, that we started talking about it — we weren’t sure what it was going to be yet…
Ronan: It was around 2018 that we talked about collaborating on something. But it wasn’t until 2020 that we actually sat down and started banging our heads against the wall, trying to write something together. We would go back and forth, and I had a Google doc where we’d jot down fragments of ideas, fragments of scenes that we were talking about, aspects of who this person was. I remember, there was a moment for me when you started actually speaking these fragments of scenes as Ray; it started to inform the world we were building. We wrote the first 10 pages pretty quickly.
Daniel: I had some residual sadness because I knew Ronan was going to go on to make films, and I was walking away from that. I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely if we could do something together and find a way of maybe containing it, so that it didn’t necessarily have to be something that required all the paraphernalia of a big production. So we started off [with] the idea of these two fellas in a shed, basically. [Laughs.] Then, as time went on, the two of us began to get really stifled…
Ronan: Yeah, after a year of writing just these two characters in the shed, it was like…
Daniel: “We need to get out of this fucking shed!” [Laughs.] “We need a woman involved in this!”
“I had some residual sadness because I knew Ronan was going to go on to make films, and I was walking away from that.”
Daniel Day-Lewis
If you just stay with those two men in the shed, you have a really wonderful, extremely profane Beckett play. But…
Daniel: Exactly. It’s more of a play than anything else! And we thought, well, there has to be something else here. And introducing those other characters [played by Morton and Bottomley] allowed us to be able to breathe a bit. But with every stroke of the pen, you make it less and less possible, because it’s so easy to write, you know, a street scene, but that immediately requires more stuff.
Ronan: We realized, as it was developing, that every scene that we wrote was expanding the scope of it.
Daniel: So we just went, “Yeah, let’s not fight it anymore. Let’s go along with it and see where it takes us.” It was basically all improvised. Ronan learned to type very early in his life, and his fingers just fly on the keys…
Ronan: I owe Mavis Beacon a lot. [Laughs.]
Daniel: … and then we were improvising, and refining, refining, refining. Ronan would make amendments along the way. We didn’t know really whether we would ever have a full-length script or not, to be honest — we thought it might well be a short thing. Because we get to a point every now and then, when we’d think, “Well, sure, what else do we have for these people? Who are they? What are they trying to tell us?” But we kept at it. It was astonishing one day when, when Ro sort of counted the pages and said…
Ronan: “We’ve got something close to 100 pages…”
Daniel: “Now what!?” [Laughs.]
I want to go back to something that you said a little earlier, Daniel, that you’d felt a sadness because you knew Ronan was going to start a career as a filmmaker. You’d been very public about saying, “Well, I’m interested in doing other things besides acting now.” So was there a possible scenario in which the two of you were just writing this and somebody else would play Ray? Or were you compelled to play him from the beginning?
Daniel: [Pauses.] Well, actually… I’m not sure what Ro’s thinking was, but as these characters were sort of declaring themselves to us, I could have just as easily taken interest in Sean’s character instead of my character. I didn’t have a partisan loyalty to one or the other. I was equally fascinated by them both. I suppose that I just fell naturally into Ray’s way of thinking.
Ronan: That’s interesting. I didn’t actually know that. Because, for some reason, I always saw you as Ray. I’d assumed you’d play him.
Daniel: That didn’t answer your question, though, did it?
It got very close to answering it.
Daniel: I think, in terms of, like… when we had a script and we weren’t sure what the next steps were, there was some part of me that began to feel, you know, certain reservations about being back in the public world again. I said to Ro, “Look, regardless of whether I do it or not, it’s yours to do whatever you want with them.” And Ro made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to do it if I didn’t do it. But we had a very happy time writing this story together, and I think it was really in the spirit of wanting to just keep that ball in the air that we thought, “We’ll keep moving forwards with this, whatever that means.”
Having seen the performance, I feel like you would have been heartbroken if you hadn’t played Ray.
Daniel: Yeah. I mean… You’re right. I think the reservations were entirely a reflection of fear more than anything else. It was just kind of a low-level fear, [an] anxiety about re-engaging with the business of filmmaking. The work was always something I loved. I never, ever stopped loving the work. But there were aspects of the way of life that went with it that I’d never come to terms with — from the day I started out to today. There’s something about that process that left me feeling hollowed out at the end of it. I mean, I was well acquainted with it. I understood that it was all part of the process, and that there would be a regeneration eventually. And it was only really in the last experience [making Phantom Thread] that I began to feel quite strongly that maybe there wouldn’t be that regeneration anymore. That I just probably should just keep away from it, because I didn’t have anything else to offer.
But looking back on it now — I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure. [Laughs.] It just seems like such grandiose gibberish to talk about. I never intended to retire, really. I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work. I never, you know… Apparently, I’ve been accused of retiring twice now. I never meant to retire from anything! I just wanted to work on something else for a while. And so I think I was at such a low ebb, I thought…
Look, I’m a very proud person, and not in a good way. [Laughs.] I have a lot of pride, and I thought, “If I draw a line under this, I’ll be too proud to go back on that. Because I know there’ll come a day when I’ll be tempted again. But if I’ve said I’m not doing this, I won’t do it.” This just shows I’m not as proud as I like to think I am! I don’t know if any of that makes sense, David, but I do feel it’s important to restate that the love of the work itself, that has never diminished for me.
When you and I spoke 20 years ago, you had just finished two projects, Gangs of New York and The Ballad of Jack and Rose, after a period of not working for a while. I’d asked if you felt that you needed a life away from your work. And your answer was something to the effect of, “Your question suggests that there is no connection between the two.” The idea being that you need to engage with the world in order to create the art — specifically the type of art you create, in the way you create it. Going back and looking at that quote, it suddenly made perfect sense why you might have said, “I’m done for a while.“
Daniel: Yes. That’s absolutely it. As I get older, it just takes me longer and longer to find my way back to the place where the furnace is burning again. But working with Ro, that furnace just lit up. And it was, from beginning to end, just pure joy to spend that time together with him. [Pauses.] I wish you’d been around to speak on my behalf during these times and just bring that quote up then.
Well, my hourly rates are cheap, so…
Daniel: [Laughs.] You’re hired!
Ronan, you come from a long line of writers, artists, and filmmakers. At what point did you become interested in pursuing film as well?
Ronan: Did you screen [the Ken Loach film] Kes, for me when I was six or something?
Daniel: That sounds about right.
Ronan: I remember having a very intense reaction to that movie when I was young. That’s the earliest memory I have of understanding the elemental power that film can have. After that, I became the annoying kid who was always kind of corralling my friends into making little short films on our parents’ flip cameras in the backyard. It wasn’t until I was much older that I could look at my mom’s career and be able to say, “Oh, this is actually something you can do. It’s actually possible to be a filmmaker.” I just started writing more. And I had been obsessively drawing stuff since I was basically an infant, so… it felt wrong if I wasn’t making something.
There’s a scene in Anemone where Ray comes across this odd, fluorescent creature with a human face — it’s actually based on a sculpture you did in 2023 called “The Creature” that’s shown up in a few variations in your work. How much crossover is there between what you’re doing in the studio and what you’re coming up with in terms of filmmaking?
Ronan: A lot. There’s a way I could have directed this film that’s very much a kitchen-sink drama. And it was important to me that I think of this not as something completely separate to my painting practice, but as two sides of the same coin. I didn’t want to self-consciously inject imagery from my paintings into the film, but as we were writing, it felt like we were becoming more free about maybe not just making it completely straightforward. I’m a big David Lynch fan, and he’s someone who had managed to find a way to blend the personal and the odd, hyperreal aspects of his work together in such a beautiful way.
One thing David Lynch never did: write a 12-minute monologue about scatological revenge. [Note: There is a showstopping story in the film involving Ray, a priest, and a confrontation involving uncontrollable defecation that must be heard to be believed.] Can you both talk about writing and performing that sequence?
Daniel: Ah, yes…
Ronan: You don’t know if you should be laughing or crying during that scene. It was amazing, because really early on in the process, my dad — I’ll let him speak about it, but I heard him saying something under his breath. [To Daniel:] And then you just said the whole thing off the top of your head. “Oh, he’s talking about some priest they knew as kids…” It kept on creeping up on me until it hit the turning point where I realized where it was going, and I was just like, “Oh shit!” It was one of those moments where the film revealed itself to us — that kind of slightly Baroque kind of tone, or whatever you’d want to call it, mixed with this dark, kind of uneasy humor as well.
Daniel: It definitely… surprised both of us. [Laughs.] I learned that from watching Ronan’s mom. When she’s working and writing something, she talks to herself quite a lot. I think characters just sort of announce themselves. That was definitely a big moment when I felt Ray kind of announce himself to me.
Part of the problem, of course, was that once we had that, it was very much like: “Well, this is great, but, um — what is this? What now?” [Laughs] “Where do we go from here?” As I was improvising, I kept waiting for Ronan to say, “No, stop… we can’t do this!”
Ronan: “Keep going. Keep it going!!!”
How is he as a director?
Daniel: Oh, God, so many things one could say, but…. [He looks at Ronan. Both of them crack up.]
Ronan: Go ahead.
Daniel: When somebody asks me about this or that director, I always think about the set. What kind of a set is it? I think people imagine that the director spends all their time telling people what to do. And it’s not that that doesn’t take up a fair, you know — 1,000 questions about, his or that detail or costume or light or whatever that have to be addressed. But to me, I suppose I’ve always found it most alluring when I’ve worked with somebody that creates a very particular kind of working set. And it’s not that I had any doubts that we would have a good set, but it’s a very precious thing and you can only create that as a director.
Do you mean the structure of a set?
Daniel: More like establishing the playing fields. Creating something that allows for a freedom of expression where anything might be possible. There’s nothing that you shouldn’t try. Most of our talking about the nuts and bolts of was finished — we’d discussed a lot about every aspect of this beforehand, from casting to heads of department to everything else. But by the time we got to the set, you know, Ronan’s notes were always very specific. They were never literal, which is, you know — there’s nothing worse than a fucking literal note. All notes have to come in at a sort of slightly acute angle somehow. But it was a place where people felt good, where everyone was treated kindly, and where people could do their best work. And of course, I was very proud about that.
I can imagine, as a performer who was reluctant to step back into the public eye, and knowing that doing this film was going to force you to do it nonetheless — it must have alleviated the anxiety a little bit to know, “OK, I have a chance to try things. I have a freedom to actually be creative here. There’s a sense of safety after being away from it for so long.”
Daniel: Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. It didn’t matter if it was a sprawling set outdoors, in the hills or on the beach, or the very contained set within the hut. There was always a sense of intimacy between the people that were engaged in the work. You would wish that it was a prerequisite for every working experience, and it’s not. I told Ronan, “Well, you know, it’s not always going to be like this. But if you’ve got the memory of it just once, of having had that experience in this way, where all heads of department and everyone working under them seem to want to do the same thing at the same time for the right reasons, then you’ll carry that with you. You will look for that. And if you look for it, you’ll find it again. You’ll create it.” I mean, and I’m not just saying this, you know, for the obvious reasons, but Ronan created that. We were a very close group, all of us working on this, and I know that everyone in all the departments felt that very keenly as well.
Ronan, did he take your notes?
Ronan: I mean, I think that it’s part of the work of the director is knowing when to when to give a note and when to shut the fuck up and just let someone try something. I tried to keep my notes really specific. We had talked so much about every aspect of the character and almost every scene we’d dissected through the writing process that by the time we got on set, we had such a shorthand about the character and this world that it was more about finding that right tone.
It’s a story about the legacy of fathers on their sons, made by a father and his son, so are you worried some people might think…
Ronan: That it’s autobiographical? No. There is nothing explicitly autobiographical, and the whole idea of the “sins of the father,” etcetera, is very archetypal. But there is this mystery of your parents’ past life, especially your father’s past life, and this simultaneous obsession with knowing someone and never really being able to know them. Or with becoming your parents in ways that you don’t even understand. Not that I feel that…
Daniel: It’s OK! [Laughs.] You know what you would like to teach your children, but you can’t necessarily assume that those things will be assimilated or learned. I mean, we are very close…
Ronan: We are, yeah.
Daniel: … and both my parents were very affectionate, good people. But my father was an absence. I mean, he died when I was young, but long before he died, even within the household, he was very much removed from the family experience, by virtue of the work that he did and because of the nature of the times. You know, different generations, and so on. My dialogue with my father is with somebody that I never will know, and it will never be resolved. So while I suppose Ro could also say that, in some respects, I’m unknown to him, we are present in each other’s lives in a completely different way.
I’ve never really thought about this before, but because of the relative absence of my father, I was very close with my grandfather [Ealing Studios founder Michael Balcon] during the final years of his life. He had long retired from making movies when I was child. But as I grew to discover them fairly early on, I became so curious about that world that he’d been involved in.
Was there a film in particular he’d made that struck you at an early age?
Daniel: Well, I suppose the Ealing comedies are the obvious things, and the war films, too: The Cruel Sea Went the Day Well. So those would have been the first works that I’d have discovered to my astonishment. But he was also somebody that remained very closely in touch with young filmmakers. He loved young people. And that was something that was very important to me. He paid attention to my generation and what we wanted to do. A lot of young filmmakers went to visit him. But when I came to a sort of crossroads, leaving school and all that, and he knew that I was interested in either pursuing furniture-making and possibly working in films, his curiosity and encouragement meant the world to me. It made a big difference in my life.
Ronan, can you watch any of your father’s films with any sense of objectivity?
Ronan: It’s so strange watching his films, because it’s like seeing two people superimposed over each other. Obviously, in each one of his films, he’s so deeply inside the character. But your brain can’t help but register it as this weird double thing, where you’re also watching someone you know so well. It’s a strange experience, but it’s interesting. I feel like every time I’ve watched one of his movies, the next time I’ve seen him in person, there’s this uncanniness where I’m just like, “Oh wait. You’re not Bill the Butcher.”
“Didn’t the guy with the mustache and the glass eye make me breakfast the other morning?”
Ronan: [Laughs.] Right!
Daniel: When Rebecca and I were making The Ballad of Jack and Rose, we were all together on the set. Ronan was just a kid; his younger brother Cashel took his first steps on Prince Edward Island. They were basically running around like savages on the beach while we were filming. But I was there fairly early on in that production, because I was working with the construction crew, learning how to build a house and make furniture. Apparently, somebody asked Ro, “So what does your father do for a living?” And he said, “I don’t know, I think he’s in construction?” [Laughs.]
Ronan: To be fair, I was five.
Ronan, you’ve talked about how the American landscape has played a big part in the way you paint, and how a lot of that stems from you being a kid on set in Marfa, Texas…
Ronan: For There Will Be Blood, yeah. I would have been about seven, going on eight. And really having a huge influence on me. I remember so clearly being on set for both that movie and Jack and Rose — they were two early experiences on sets where I was just like, “Oh my God. This is crazy, this construction of a whole world that’s real and yet not real.” Both of them were so immersive! Like, in Jack and Rose, they built this commune-like house that was embedded in a hill, with grass growing over the roof of it. And then There Will Be Blood, obviously, it was just this massive thing. I remember a day when you guys were shooting the train leaving a station, or maybe it was pulling into the station, and having my mind blown.
Daniel: I remember that day, and you being there. Yeah, it’s definitely something we got right, in terms of working and you guys. I was acutely aware of that because of my rather fragmented experience during childhood. [Rebecca and I] decided fairly early on that only one of us would work at any given time, unless we were working together. And if it fell within a school year, we would homeschool the kids and take them with us. So we did have, you know, a few wonderful years where we just stayed together. I hope that that was, you know, something that we were able to nourish our children’s lives a bit.
Ronan: I think what was great about it was that it was really organic, and combined with showing us films and stuff. It was almost more like absorbing these aspects of your lives and your work, rather than explicitly being taught it. But yeah, those experiences — they made such lasting impressions.
Daniel: It gets hard, you know, because as they got older, of course, they have their own lives, the school situation becomes much more complicated in terms of the demands, and there’s extracurricular stuff going on. There were occasions where mostly I was working away on location, and it was a bitter experience. It just did not suit me well at all. When you’re a young actor, of course, you just shut the door and go away for six months, and who cares? But after I became a father, that didn’t work well for me, being away from them for long periods of time.
Ronan: I feel like the only time I can think of, specifically, was when you were making Nine that it felt long…
Daniel: Right, and Lincoln.
Ronan: Oh, right.
Daniel: It didn’t happen that often, but… are you saying it wasn’t that bad? I mean, it was probably more like they couldn’t wait to get rid of me! [Laughs.] “My God, will he never leave?”
Ronan: No, no! I just remember it felt like such a long time that you were gone for Nine. That one was tough.
Having made this film together, do you each think differently about what the other does?
Ronan: It’s interesting, like — yes and no. Growing up, his work has always had this air of mystery to me, and there was something fascinating about that, all of this stuff he’s doing being behind this curtain. I sort of assumed that working together, that curtain would be pulled back — and I think in many ways it has been, in terms of the process of developing this character together, developing this world together, and obviously, working together on set.
But then there are also aspects of his process that remain unknowable to me in a way that I love, where there’s an alchemy to it that I think, once we got on set, it was really exciting to be able to just lean into that. We couldn’t rest on the fact that we had had so many of these illuminating conversations leading up to it.
Daniel: But then when it came time to do it…
Ronan: …we could just really allow ourselves to be intuitive and just do it. Thanks, Dad.
From Rolling Stone US
