Daniel Day Lewis is legendary for punishing lengths to deliver authentic performances. He took him to the crew while playing “My Left Foot” Christie Brown, wheelchair-bound, and spent a month in the wilderness, transforming into an outdoor man from “The Last of the Mohicans” and dedicated two years to studying dressmaking to become a fashion designer for “The Phantom Thread.” On set, the acting goat will always remain in character, and expect the director, including the director, to introduce him by the name of his character.
“It was intuitive that everyone called him Ray on set, and I did,” Ronan Day Lewis talks about his father’s immersive approach to playing a living hermit with awful secrets in the new film, “Anemonet.” “But obviously I was always looking at the offset at him, and that would have been a bit strange if I had called him Ray.
Growing up, Ronan Day Lewis admits that he never fully understands what his father did when he took on all the ways his father acted.
“His work was very mystical to me,” he says. “It was always behind the curtain. Others mythsed him and I absorbed it. He’s my dad, but he had this other life that disappeared into what he does in these films he does.
Ronan Day-Lewis, 27, knows what his first feature as a director would look like to star his Oscar-winning father, but that wasn’t a plan. He was planning to make another film in Germany, but he only saw the funds collapse at the last minute.
“I also knew the luggage that could be attached to working with my dad and the pressure that came with it,” he says. “I definitely had some ambivalence. I wanted to carve my way. I foresaw how it would be perceived. There was a lot of talk about nepotism.”
Eventually, he leaps aside his concerns that he would be called “Nepo Baby.” It helped him succeed on his own as a painter and exhibit in major galleries in New York and Los Angeles. He then reasoned that he could not refuse the opportunity. “It’s cosmic luck to be able to work with my parents this way. Ten years from now, if I handed it over, I would kick myself.”
It was Daniel Day Lewis who first proposed to find a project they could create together. Both men were independently teasing the idea of doing something about their siblings. “The archetypes of brotherhood and the beauty and tragedy of that archetype felt like something we wanted to explore,” says Ronan Day Lewis.
Opening in a limited release on October 3rd, “Anemone” tells the story of two estranged brothers (Daniel Dalewis and Shawn Bean) who reunited to deal with the family crisis. It took Daniel and Ronan Day Lewis four years to hone the script.
“We first outlined it,” says Ronan. “Then we fit and burst. We only write when we were in the same place. We were often in different places for a long time, so we kept our distance from them. So by the time we got back, our appetite had accumulated again and we could push the characters a little more into the dark.”
When they were working, Daniel Day Lewis improvises as Ray and Ronan Day Lewis fine-tune the dialogue he came up with on the spot. Eventually they realized they were ready to make a leap.
“The bones were there and that was horrifying because all of a sudden it all became so real,” says Ronan Day Lewis.
All they came up with was a gross spare chamber piece. Ray lives outside in the woods as Bean’s character pursues him and tries desperately to persuade him to return to civilization. Much of the film is silent as the two brothers are circled around each other. However, when Ray drops the guard, he does so with a torrent of words, delivering a burning monologue.
“It’s a story about withholding information,” says Ronan Day Lewis. “It starts off dripping, then an explosion occurs because when it rains, it pours.”
