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Haven't listened to the 2 radio links or read the 2 articles, but just posting them for people who've already seen the flick. So, I don't know if there're major or minor spoilers. Lastly, I can't speak on whether or not these links are worth your time.
PTA on Fresh Air 12/19/07
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17401674&ft=1&f=13
Paul Dano on Fresh Air 1/8/08
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17926946&ft=1&f=13
LA Weekly piece on DDL (Swipes to follow the next and last link):
http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/daniel-day-lewis-the-way-he-lives-now/17906/
The A.V. Club PTA interview:
http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/paul_thomas_anderson
Swipes:
Daniel Day-Lewis: The Way He Lives NowAs his fourth film in a decade arrives in theaters, the movies’ most enigmatic leading man reveals the method behind his onscreen madness
By JUDITH LEWIS
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 - 10:00 am
“You don’t meet the book when you meet the writer,” the novelist William Gibson has said. “You meet the place where it lives.” A relatively uncontroversial remark about the people who vent their imaginations on the page — no one should expect Philip Roth to sound exactly like Nathan Zuckerman — Gibson’s adage applies only rarely to actors. Robert De Niro studied hard and put on weight to play Jake LaMotta, but there was never any mistaking the sighs and hand wringings and tongue clicks as anyone’s but De Niro’s; Meryl Streep plays bossy editors and Polish war survivors with persuasive delicacy, but in Letterman’s plush Late Night chair, she still tilts her head and laughs just like Sophie.
Daniel Day-Lewis is another matter. In his current role, as turn-of-the-century oil baron Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Day-Lewis portrays a man so contorted with greed that he can barely heave a laugh from his toxic throat. You might expect the man behind the mask to have at least some of Plainview’s fire. Or a flicker of that fixed, maniacal stare. Or at least a little bit of that thrust-out lower jaw set hard against the rest of humanity.
But it’s not so. When Day-Lewis shows up on the patio of the Hotel Bel-Air one November day for an interview, it’s a shock: There are the sharp green eyes, the slightly bent nose, gold hoops hanging in the earlobes where Plainview had little holes. But in this man — the one wearing a plaid shirt and jeans, a mop of curly black hair flecked with gray tumbling over his forehead, great lines swooping up around his eyes when he smiles — there isn’t the faintest shadow of Plainview; or of Christy Brown, the writer with cerebral palsy Day-Lewis played to great acclaim in My Left Foot; or of Gerry Conlon, the young Irishman wrongly accused of terrorism in In the Name of the Father. If I’d been impressed with his performance in Anderson’s film before, after meeting him, I was awed. When you meet Daniel Day-Lewis, to paraphrase Gibson, you don’t meet the characters. You don’t even meet the actor. You meet the place where it lives.
How does he do it? This is what I wanted to know about Day-Lewis, more than anything else. More than whether he was serious about becoming a cobbler when he studied shoemaking in Italy, or what he finds in the rare script that makes him say yes to a project, or why he left England 15 years ago to live in Ireland. I wanted to know how it is that a person can disappear so thoroughly into a character that everything about him except for his concrete physical attributes is obliterated. I wanted to know how every nuance invented to express that character — Plainview’s compensating gait, for instance, meant to suggest a badly healed broken leg — can appear to the audience as the natural result of that fictional character’s own long history, and not as an actor’s contrivance.
And to my further amazement, Day-Lewis can actually explain how he does it. He can, in fact, make you think that, provided you had his good looks, intelligence and drive, you could do it too.
“It’s a game,” he tells me. “It really is. It takes a long time from beginning to end. It’s a long and complicated game. But it’s a game. And it’s fun.”
It was more than 20 years ago that Day-Lewis first came to the attention of film aficionados when he appeared as the gay, working-class street punk Johnny in Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette,the same year he played the upper-class twit Cecil to Helena Bonham Carter’s girl with the hair in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View. That the two films screened in many cities simultaneously gave the public and critics alike a little thrill: Can this really be the same man in both of these roles? “Seeing these two performances side by side is an affirmation of the miracle of acting,” wrote a smittenRoger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “That one man could play these two opposites is astonishing.”
That was 1985, and Day-Lewis instantly became the actor to watch; four years later, the trailer for My Left Foot consisted of little but Day-Lewis head shots and accolades. He disappointed no one: He won a Best Actor Oscar for his humane, heart-rending portrayal of Christy Brown, and there were few holdouts around to say he didn’t deserve it. The consummate Method actor, who feels his work from the inside out, Day-Lewis prepared meticulously for the role, slumping himself over in a wheelchair for so many months on end that he reportedly broke two ribs.
It was a big deal, then, that he agreed to appear as the eponymous Danish prince in Richard Eyre’s Hamlet at the National Theatre while My Left Foot was still in the theaters — a production that was billed as the “Daniel Day-Lewis Hamlet.” Though the performance earned him only lukewarm reviews (his Hamlet, evidently, was too sweet and not sufficiently Shakespearean), the production has gone down in history as the one in which, nearing the end of an eight-month run, Day-Lewis burst into tears during the ghost scene and rushed offstage, leaving his understudy, Jeremy Northam, to take over. Official rumor says that Day-Lewis saw the ghost of his own father, British poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, with him onstage. What is certain is that he never returned to theater again.
But he did come back to the movies, in 1992, with heartthrob turns as Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (for which he learned to skin animals, fished and lived off the land) and as the tortured, empathetic Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, the first of two films with Martin Scorsese. The next year, he did another film with My Left Foot director Jim Sheridan, In the Name of the Father. Once again, Day-Lewis delivered a performance to drop the most cynical jaw: His portrayal of the young, working-class Irishman caught up in the British antiterrorist legal system of the 1970s is piercingly genuine and specific, right down to the last little self-conscious toss of the head, a familiar gesture among young men of the era clearing long hair from their eyes without using their hands.
Almost never is it feasible, in advance of meeting an actor with a few decades of work behind him, to watch a whole career’s worth of films. With Day-Lewis, however, it’s possible, because in the 22 years he’s been famous, he has appeared in only 14 films; in the past decade, only four. Journalists, particularly in England, have often interpreted this as evidence of Day-Lewis’ elitism or extremism, but it really only proves that, at 50, the actor leads a relatively normal life beyond movies, with hobbies and a wife and kids. He’s married to Rebecca Miller, daughter of Arthur, whom he met on the set of The Crucible in 1996; together they have two sons, Cashel, 5, and Ronan, 9. He also has another son with Isabelle Adjani, Gabriel-Kane, 12, who lives with his mother. “There are more and more things to preoccupy me outside of the world of films,” he admits. At the same time, he doesn’t completely shut out movies between roles.
“Something that has been suggested on my behalf is that I live an almost bipolar existence, with the public life of filmmaking on one side and a sort of reclusive, almost misanthropic life on the other.” (This has been suggested most often in the British press, which has “grossly misrepresented my life,” he says.) “But it never appears to me that there’s any chasm, any rift, between those two worlds. My life to me contains both the professional and the personal very easily. But because you tend to be written about when you’re for whatever reason in the public eye, then they depict you as having left and returned.
“But it’s not a return to me. I never went away. I never left myself. I simply need the time I spend not working in films, the time away, to do the work that I love to do in the way that I love to do it.”
The work Day-Lewis does begins with meticulous advance preparation, during which he lives as much as he can like the character he’s playing. For Gerry Conlon, he tried for three days to sleep in a prison cell; in 1988, while starring as the restless doctor Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he learned to speak Czech; to play Jack Slavin in The Ballad of Jack and Rose two years ago, a movie written and directed by his wife, he and Miller lived apart so he could more deeply connect with the isolation of a dying man perplexed about his family.
Preparing for There Will Be Blood was trickier. Though the film was eventually shot in Marfa, Texas, most of its action is set in Southern California from the turn of the century until the 1920s. Day-Lewis was living in Ireland for the two years it took to get the movie financed — “an environment that was of no help to me whatsoever” — and despite the U.K. Guardian’s speculation that the actor, given his penchant for physical research, was “out drilling for oil in his Wicklow back garden,” this time Day-Lewis did most of his preparation in his head.
He read letters written home by the “men who were living in holes in the ground,” florid letters, “full of sentimentality, full of love and loss.” He pored over photographs of the period, “of these lads scooping up oil from the ground in buckets and saucepans and whatever they could take with them before drilling was developed,” and of the landscape of oil-rich Southern California pockmarked with oil fields.
“From Bakersfield to Signal Hill to Los Angeles, it was a forest of oil derricks,” he says. “Squeezed between these derricks intermittently were these tiny little houses in which people were living their lives, stepping out of their front doors into a quagmire of crude oil just running down the streets. That was the foundation of this city!” He also read up on oil tycoon Edward Doheny (a name he pronounces Do-HAY-ny), who, like Plainview, was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and made his way west to a millionaire future in Los Angeles, although the book on which There Will Be Blood is loosely based, Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, is itself only loosely based on Doheny.
“In the end,” Day-Lewis says, “no matter what stimulus you can find that belonged to that world, that world that you’re trying to imagine, finally imagination is the only thing that’s going to take you there. And more than anything else, I had time. I had time, and a quiet place, and neutral surroundings. I’ve got a room at home where I can really daydream without being disturbed, and I suppose it’s there where things ferment.” Things like Daniel Plainview’s voice, which the actor says came to him in pieces and parts, and recordings from the Dust Bowl and the ’20s-era Fond-du-Lac proved less helpful than his own ear.
“I like to have the illusion that I can hear that voice before I’m able to speak with that voice,” he says. “I do use a little tape recorder. I talk to myself a lot. I try without thinking about it to have a sense of whether that voice belongs to me in my new life.” For Plainview, “I discarded a lot of ideas that didn’t work, and a lot of possibilities. Finally, I just began to hear a voice which seemed to be right. I couldn’t make the sounds initially. I could hear them, but I couldn’t make them.” Gradually, it began to stick: The way Daniel Plainview sounds matters as much as the way he crouches down to marvel at the flames erupting out of a newly exploded well.
“We don’t choose our voices,” Day-Lewis says. “So within the voice, there’s an expression of the very self.”
“Do you really want to know about that?” Day-Lewis protests when I ask how he manages to live on set in character. He looks down at his hands and laughs. He has just been profiled in a many-thousand-word New York Times Magazine story by Lynn Hirschberg, which had Day-Lewis on the cover, smiling, nearly life-size; you could see pores. He’s reluctant to “gob off” even more about himself, not out of humility or standoffishness but out of a firm conviction that there should be other things to talk about, like what’s happening in Pakistan, or Gaza. But like it or not, Day-Lewis has come here to gob off, and Paramount Pictures is paying for the hotel suite, and so he complies.
But not without objections: “The odd thing about this particular period of time is that if you do what you have to do to try to encourage people to see a film you’ve worked very hard on, it appears, I suppose, as if you’re engaged in an orgy of self-promotion. Which really wouldn’t be my thing.” I get that, I assure him, but still, I want to know: Did he really eat, smoke and drink as Daniel Plainview even when the cameras weren’t rolling?
I should mention here that the way Daniel Day-Lewis sounds on the page, uttering these clean, neat, clearly composed sentences right off the cuff, isn’t really a fair representation of how he sounds in person. There are “um”s, “ah”sand pauses so long that it’s hard to resist finishing his sentences or interrupting him to get on to the next point. He comes off neither overly learned nor haughty, only obdurately sincere, always checking himself to make sure that he means what he says. He interjects the name of the person he’s talking to as he speaks, as if to remind himself to treat each new interrogator lumbering through an inevitably dreary day of publicity as an individual. He brightens up when the discussion veers off filmmaking to politics, world events or California State Highway 1. “It’s hard driving that coast,” says the motorbike enthusiast, who drove the route recently on his way from Los Angeles to a race in Monterey. “Every 200 yards, you have to stop and drink it in.”
All this affability makes it hard to believe that, as Hirschberg suggested, Day-Lewis so intimidated an actor on the There Will Be Blood set that Anderson had to replace him with Paul Dano halfway into the 60-day shoot. Day-Lewis seems confused by the story. “When Lynn mentioned that to me, I was genuinely surprised,” he says. “I didn’t believe it. I’d be very, very sorry if that were true. It appalled me to think that it might be true. It would never be my intention. Apart from everything else, it would be self-defeating to intimidate a colleague I was working with. No matter what the rivalry is, even if it’s murderous between those two characters, you’re in a partnership, you’re in a dance of some kind. And it’s absolutely vital that you work together.”
It is true that the actor originally cast in the role of the young evangelical preacher Eli Sunday was recast two months into shooting. But Day-Lewis rejects the idea that his process caused the trouble. “I suppose I always hope there’s some sort of tacit understanding between myself and my colleagues that I work the way I do,” he admits. “I don’t expect them to work in the same way. I don’t mind what way they work in to arrive at what they’re trying to arrive at, as long as it doesn’t interfere with me. And I really try not to interfere with them in any way, and only ever encourage them to do what they need to do to find that thing.”
When I initially let the topic go, he brings the conversation back. “Just to return to that question,” he says, “ also kind of suggested that Leo felt the same way about me,and I just don’t think that’s true. Leo is a very strong, independent, serious actor. He’s wonderful. And he knows how it works. He may not have liked me during that time, I don’t know. We get on very, very well. I’m very fond of him. I’ve never discussed it with him. He never suggested to me that I was making his life difficult in any way. And I don’t think I was.”
“Look,” he concludes, “everyone has insecurities. Every single person on the set at one time goes through a moment of black despair about what it is they’re trying to do. They’re all subject to those weighty questions that seem to press us into the ground sometimes. And it’s possible one might be insensitive to the needs of somebody who’s spinning off course, because you’re taken with a fever, just like all those oil prospectors were — all driving forwards.
“All that I ever hope for from any colleague is that when the collision takes place in front of the camera that there’s a recognizable human being there, telling the truth. Speaking, listening, responding. I don’t care how extreme that process is.”
Dano had already been indoctrinated in the Day-Lewis experience when he played the teenage Thaddius in The Ballad of Jack and Rose (“a boy with a face like a blade,” wrote Manohla Dargis in The New York Times). After There Will Be Blood, he suggests that working with Day-Lewis is far less frightening than inspiring. “I think there’s a general feeling about Daniel that what he does is abnormal,” Dano says by phone from New York, where he’s appearing off-Broadway in Things We Want. “But I have to say, when you’re there with him, it could not make more perfect sense. He’s doing what he has to do to give the best performance he can, and he has the nerve and passion and commitment to do it.”
It sounds like very serious work, this thing Day-Lewis does, but only when somebody writes about it. “I think I’ve been my own worst enemy in the past,” the actor admits, “judging by the stuff that’s been said about me. It sounds as if I’m being kind of dragged in a straitjacket to the set, kicking and screaming, struggling with a sort of reluctance.” What almost never comes through is the obvious delight Day-Lewis takes in pretending so thoroughly to be somebody else.
“For my sense of continuity, I suppose I work in a certain way,” he says. “But it goes beyond that. It’s really about the sense of joy you have in having worked hard to imagine and discover and — one hopes — to create a world, an illusion of a world that other people might believe in because you believe in it yourself, a form of self-delusion. After achieving that, it seems far crazier to jump in and out of that world that you’ve gone to such pains to create. And it wouldn’t be my wish to do that, because I enjoy being in there.
“It all sounds so grandiose, because of course you’re surrounded by reminders of the modern world, everywhere you go. Part of the work you have to do is narrowing your focus, continually shutting out, closing off the peripheral vision that would take in the cables and the catering and the anoraks and so on and so forth. But I don’t find that hard to do — the power of self-delusion, I suppose — and it’s the joy that I find in that work, in inhabiting a world that you’ve taken such pains to imagine.
“Just like in other kinds of creative work, you get to enjoy that extraordinary sensation of timelessness, that time ceases to have any relevance or importance while you’re working. And within that, you experience the loss of the self. It’s a temporary thing, but it’s a very invigorating thing, the loss of the self. Do you know what I mean?”
I would be lucky if I did, I think — and probably a much better actor.
“It’s like you’re constantly trying to head off the conscious mind, which will, whether you like it or not, attempt to stay one step ahead of you,” he elaborates. “The imagination is on the frontline of the unconscious. And you do whatever you can do to engage that animal part of yourself, that instinctive part of yourself.”
These are not tricks he learned in theater school, at the Bristol Old Vic. “The learning of skills and the disciplines and so on and so forth — those just provide a framework to stop you from spilling over into chaos,” he says. “But it’s very important to live close to the possibility of chaos. Very, very important.”
To the question “How did you know Daniel Day-Lewis was right for the role of Daniel Plainview?” Paul Thomas Anderson answers, “That’s like asking, ‘How did you fall in love with your wife?’ I could say, ‘Well, she’s got a great sense of humor,’ but that doesn’t describe her. I guess you just have to assume because of Daniel’s previous work that he’s capable of doing anything.”
It also helped that Day-Lewis is not, in the traditional sense, a movie star. “It is very helpful to a filmmaker to work with an actor who doesn’t have a personality that is easily accessible in the way that some film stars do. You are that much more at an advantage when creating another world entirely, when creating the illusion of somebody else. It’s quite hard to get past someone’s personality if it’s bigger than their performances.”
People will have various opinions about There Will Be Blood. They already do: Though there’s a strong Oscar buzz about the film (Day-Lewis will likely be nominated for Best Actor) and some reviewers are ecstatic, others have squirmed in their seats at the film’s length (two hours and 40 minutes) and its unapologetic brutality — not violence, though there’s some of that, but Anderson’s defiant independence, and the film’s absolute refusal to throw anyone any sort of feel-better bone. But — and this may be hard to believe — the film gets better the more you watch it. I know this because, after meeting Day-Lewis, I borrowed a friend’s “for your consideration” DVD and watched it again, and again, then replayed scenes over and over just to try to find the actor in the work. I couldn’t. Not only that — I would find the world falling away as I watched, forgetting that I was watching an actor. Forgetting why I was watching at all, if not to relive the story.
This isn’t only because of Day-Lewis’ performance; it’s also because of a script that serves him (and Dano) with a character who, for all his darkness, still claws at rising above his cruel beginnings in a way we all recognize. “It appeared to me to come from a very much unconscious self,” Day-Lewis says of Anderson’s script. “I didn’t know Paul at all. I didn’t know him as a man. But I knew when I read it that he had already inhabited this world. I think the very best writers do that, in very much the same way that we do it when we’re working, or try to. I felt like he understood each and every one of those people that he was describing, and understood the world that they came from. He had taken the seed of an idea and progressed it moment by moment to such an audacious conclusion.”
Plainview, were he real, would be among the men of history celebrated on dignified brass plaques and in statues all over the world. “But when you take off their tall hats and long-tailed coats,” Day-Lewis observes, “they’re just covered in the stuff.” Oil, that is.
As are we all. When Plainview strokes the head of his injured boy, or sobs over the found journal of a lost family member, he reminds us that he still belongs to us, not only as a fellow human but as an iconic American. In our cars and planes and heated homes, we all benefit from the oil prospector’s largess and pay for his sins every day.
Like many other films this season, There Will Be Blood announces in the credits that it’s a “carbon-neutral production,” which means that for every unit of carbon emitted during the making of the film, an offset was purchased, probably in the form of a tree. And Anderson, who got the idea for the film when he read Sinclair’s book while traveling in London, clearly had a point to make about human greed laid bare in the petroleum industry.
But both director and star insist that There Will Be Blood is neither a political film nor a metaphor for anything. “Parallels are a menace,” says Day-Lewis. “For the sake of doing the work itself, we had to set aside, put under lock and key, all our personal feelings about . Otherwise, we’d have been in the business of trying to teach, which is death to any kind of storytelling.”
Still, he laments the proliferation of SUVs in Ireland. In Ireland? With those tiny streets?
“I go to school in the morning with my lad, and I park the car in a lot that’s jammed full of SUVs they absolutely have no need of whatsoever,” he attests. “Everyone is buying cars. They can’t afford houses, so I guess they’re buying cars instead. They’re everywhere. Perched up in those bloody things, looking down on you, lording it over the rest of us.
“The roads in Ireland are only that wide. They’re buying these things you can just jam between the hedgerows. It’s madness.”
A few years ago, Day-Lewis said in an interview that after decades of self-doubt — decades of asking himself whether, even after an Oscar and all that, he could be useful in the profession — he had finally realized that “Is there any reason to be doing this?” is a healthy question to be asking oneself, enthusiastically and repeatedly.
“It came to me in the form of a revelation,” he explains. “When I was a young utopian and still had that conflict, I found it terribly unsettling, because it made me question my commitment to the thing I was apparently giving my life over to. And I worked a lot more in those days than I do now. So it really came as a great relief that it was vital to have that conflict, to continually reassess the reason for doing this work, which may well have changed over the years.
“My ambition for many years was to be involved in work that was utterly compelling to me, regardless of the consequences. But I worried a lot as a young man about where such and such a thing might take me; you’re encouraged to think that way. You’re supposed to build a career for yourself. But there’s no part of me that was able to do that. And thank God I was able to recognize it before I sort of went gray with anxiety.”
Far from building a career, he now sees himself starting all over each time he determines he can be sufficiently useful to a director and accepts a role. “It’s absolutely new each and every time,” he says. “For all that you carry with you as you get older — and if you’ve had the good fortune to work in films that people have seen and in some cases liked, you carry with you the burden of expectation — all that went before is meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. Because you’re a baby. From the moment you decide to go to work again, you’re a baby. You have to empty yourself if you’re going to be any kind of vessel at all.
“I suppose that’s the salvation of all of us. With all the kind of grandiosity that surrounds the way of life that actors lead, there’s an insistent humility to the work itself, because you cannot do it unless you begin with nothing each time.”
The beginner’s mind: Some people meditate for a lifetime to find it.
Day-Lewis laughs. “I don’t think I’ve achieved separation from the material world just yet,” he says. “The loss of myself happens in a place that’s very concrete.” Right: in the movies.
Paul Thomas Anderson
by Josh Modell
January 2nd, 2008
Paul Thomas Anderson famously dropped out of NYU film school after just a couple of days, intent on beginning a career making movies. It worked: At 26, the writer-director released a remarkable debut feature, 1996's Hard Eight, which featured several actors that would become part of his troupe, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, and Philip Baker Hall. Anderson's real breakthrough, though, came via 1997's Boogie Nights, a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking ensemble piece set in the porn industry. His even more sprawling Magnolia—another melancholy love letter to southern California—earned Oscar nominations and high praise; he followed that with the unsentimental, beautifully off-kilter romantic comedy Punch Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler. Then Anderson seemed to disappear.
It turned out he was working on his magnum opus. The film, loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, stars Daniel Day Lewis in a remarkable performance as a single-minded 19th-century oil prospector. A departure from Anderson's other films, Blood ditches modern-day L.A. and his regular group of actors and focuses largely on one character—Day Lewis is in nearly every scene of the 158-minute film—and the effect of his dark drive on those around him, particularly a young preacher played by Paul Dano. One of 2007's best films, it renders this seemingly small story huge and powerful. A jovial Anderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about Day Lewis, the melancholy of finishing work, and "message movies."
The A.V. Club: How did you first encounter Upton Sinclair's book?
Paul Thomas Anderson: I was in London, in Covent Garden, and it's impossible to miss. The title is in this enormous red lettering with an exclamation mark. Oil! That was the first I ever saw it, or heard of it. I had never read Upton Sinclair. I didn't read The Jungle in high school or anything like that. But it's pretty terrific writing.
AVC: What's your process of adapting like? Had you ever tried to adapt something before? All of your produced screenplays have been originals.
PTA: It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called Rule Of The Bone. I didn't do a very good job. I didn't really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book. I really was confused by that, because I loved the book. I remember being taught in school that you would underline things that you liked. I remember just underlining everything as a kid, thinking, "This has all gotta be important!" I would just underline the whole thing! I remember my dad saying, "I don't think you understand. Just underline key ideas." Anyway, I think that's what I did on that Russell Banks book. I felt like my job was to somehow transcribe it, which in that case, really wasn't the right thing to do.
So with There Will Be Blood, I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write. I can remember the way that my desk looked, with so many different scraps of paper and books about the oil industry in the early 20th century, mixed in with pieces of other scripts that I'd written. Everything was coming from so many different sources. But the book was a great stepping-stone. It was so cohesive, the way Upton Sinclair wrote about that period, and his experiences around the oil fields and these independent oilmen. That said, the book is so long that it's only the first couple hundred pages that we ended up using, because there is a certain point where he strays really far from what the original story is. We were really unfaithful to the book. That's not to say I didn't really like the book; I loved it. But there were so many other things floating around. And at a certain point, I became aware of the stuff he was basing it on. What he was writing about was the life of Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair. So it was like having a really good collaborator, the book.
AVC: When you finish a film, are you generally pretty confident in it? At what point in the process do you know that it's good, or great, or the opposite? Do you need to see it with an audience?
PTA: It's back and forth all the way along. You definitely have moments of confidence, where you feel like, "We got something great today!" And you go home at night, completely unable to sleep, mad with enthusiasm and confidence. A couple of days later, you're lost again and struggling to make sense out of something. But that's okay. I actually enjoyed the struggles that we had trying to shape Blood, to get the pacing right, the rhythm of it. I showed it to family and friends, and we kind of knew the parts that we didn't like, or that we wanted to work on. Speaking for me and Dylan , we knew the parts that we wanted to work out, that we weren't happy with. But there's a certain point where you're desperate to show it to somebody, and you put it in front of friends and family, and, lo and behold, the thing that you suspected wasn't working certainly was not working. And then you get that thing that opens your eyes to the bits and pieces you thought were flying that really weren't as great as you thought. Face to face with having to show it to your friends, you find yourself becoming a little less confident. It's that battle, a never-ending thing. Then when you do get to the end—I know when we got to the end of this film—we were really happy. I really felt like we did what we wanted to do, that we'd worked it hard enough that we could be proud of it. But that said, nothing prepares you for that melancholy when you've finished it. It's always a little bit depressing.
AVC: It's strikingly dissimilar to the rest of your movies; did you feel, when you were making it, that you were outside your comfort zone?
PTA: The struggles are the struggles no matter what. It definitely felt good to be outside of the comfort zone. I remember feeling like, "I should really try to enjoy this, because it will be over so fast." And it was. We had such a good time making the film, and I remember jumping ahead to the end, saying "In three months, it's going to be over." Quite honestly, I wish we were still making the movie. It's been really hard to let go of.
AVC: And yet it's easily the darkest thing you've ever done.
PTA: Definitely. But I like that. That's a good thing—it feels right.
AVC: You've described it as a horror movie. Do you still feel that way?
PTA: I do feel that way, in the way of, "What's the best way to look at this story?" You're always coming up with bullshit ways to describe it, that for whatever reason can help communicate to everyone, like, "We've got to think of this movie as a boxing match between these two guys, and attack it like a horror story." Those are just ways to describe whatever the marching orders might be. They come in handy, those kinds of descriptions.
AVC: It's a bit surprising at how many laughs Daniel Day Lewis gets in uncomfortable spots, especially at the end.
PTA: It's great, isn't it?
AVC: Is that how you felt when watching it with an audience? Were you expecting people to laugh?
PTA: I wasn't expecting it, but I was hoping for it! We used to laugh so much, but there is this completely nerve-wracking feeling, like, "Fuck, I hope they laugh."
AVC: How much, if any, of Lewis' character's misanthropy do you share? I just read this New Yorker review that described you as "pessimistic, even apocalyptic," which seems incredibly off the mark.
PTA: Yeah. Fuck, I'll take it. Sure. Yeah.
AVC: But do you have that in you?
PTA: Absolutely, absolutely. We all do, don't we? I know that I do. It would be insane to say that I don't, that we all haven't had murderous thoughts. But we're socialized. We don't really do those things that we think about doing.
AVC: Do you have any of the character's "competition" in you?
PTA: From time to time, certainly yes, of course. But mostly, no. As I get older, I have less and less of it in me.
AVC: You wrote the part for Daniel Day Lewis. Had you met him before?
PTA: I hadn't, no.
AVC: So was sending him a half-finished script a shot in the dark?
PTA: More or less, but we had a mutual friend who had let me know how Daniel felt about Punch Drunk Love, which was that he was incredibly complimentary. So I was armed with that to give me a boost of confidence. Without that, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, yes, I would have made that leap and risked failure. But it was really nice to have that kind of encouragement to think, "Well, he liked that."
AVC: You've said that you spent a lot of time preparing, the two of you. What was the process like, working out what his character would be like, and how you were going to tell the story?
PTA: Well, we spent a couple of months together in New York. I just remember a lot of eating breakfast and a lot of walking around, more or less getting to know each other and not talking that much about the movie—just this flirtation, like dogs sniffing each other out, to get to know somebody that you're gonna get married to. We decided that we would make the film together, or more to the point, he decided that he would make the film with me. Then we went in separate directions; I was back in California and he was in Ireland. That was a really good time, because we were separately doing our work. I was still working on the script, and he was doing whatever he was doing. We never really asked each other what we were up to that much. As far as I'm concerned, I didn't need to give him anything more than he wanted to know. I was just there to answer any questions he might have. It was certainly not my job to start babbling away.
Those were really good days, and they accidentally went on for two years, because we tried to get the film going, and we couldn't get it going, and life intervened. There were babies born, backs broken—he hurt his back. One thing led to another, and we just did that more or less for a year. We thought it was time really well spent, and then when we started filming, I can't even tell you: It was like we were cooped up in the starting gate, and the second the starting gate opened, we fell flat on our faces with all of this energy. We had the most horrendous beginning of a film, for two weeks, just completely off of the mark. We got it together finally, but it was hilarious. We had been cooped up for too long.
AVC: So did you have two weeks of wasted film?
PTA: A little bit. There was some stuff that was salvageable. There was some stuff that we got that was good, really good, actually. But mixed in was some stuff that I wouldn't show to anyone—the most embarrassing, off-the-mark kind of stuff.
AVC: Do you recall, either in conversation or rehearsal, the first time you heard Daniel speaking in the unmistakable voice he uses for the film?
PTA: The voice came in these little Dictaphone recordings that Daniel would send me from time to time. It was funny, because my first impression of them was "This is insane!" But those are usually the best things, the things that you have no preconceived idea about that rattle your world. When you're writing it, and you're alone in your room, it's great. It's just you. But the great thing is opening it up to someone else. You have to be selfless and allow this thing to happen. So I would get these Dictaphone recordings, which were alternately exciting and nerve-wracking. But after sitting with them, just for a day, I could see where he was heading. Somewhere along the way, he just kept finding it, and finding it, and finding it, until it settled into what it became. He must have a Dictaphone from the 1930s, because everything sounded antique coming out of this tiny little speaker. So it all sounded old to begin with. And he talked about this: A great benefit of what we were doing was that there were no voice recordings from 1911 that we could draw from. We could really do what we wanted.
AVC: Were you worried when you first got the recordings that the voice was too over the top?
PTA: I don't know what it was; it was as exciting as it was nerve-wracking. But I've had that so many times before. I remember Phil Hoffman showing me what he was going to do in Boogie Nights, and going, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I remember being the same way when Jonny Greenwood was sending me score pieces. I was like "What?" But ultimately you have a day, maybe two days, to get out of yourself and see what another person was thinking.
AVC: It's been pretty widely reported that Daniel stayed in character the whole shoot. What exactly does that mean, and how does that affect your relationship on set?
PTA: I still don't know what that means. It's a major misconception that somebody is off the planet or something. But it's a level of concentration that is unparalleled, that's really what it is. Somebody who's come to do one thing, and only one thing, to be Daniel Plainview, and indulge in that for three months. Why wouldn't you take the opportunity to inhabit something else on a free pass for three months? It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. It really is the best way to do it, in my mind.
AVC: He's gotten tons of deserved ink, but what about Paul Dano? What do you feel like he brought to the table, and what was the chemistry between Daniel and Paul like? Loathing with some admiration?
PTA: That's a good way to put it, loathing with admiration. They had the benefit of working together before, so Paul knew what to expect, and Daniel gave Paul respect, underneath all of it. That said, they kept their distance from each other. But you can only play that game if there's an understanding—"I get it, you get it, let's get on with it. This is my line, don't cross it." It was like S&M, but we didn't have any safewords.
AVC: You were there to provide the safeword.
PTA: But I was the last one who wanted a safeword! It's my job to not have a safeword.
AVC: How many people are around when you're doing some of these really intense scenes, like the one in the bowling alley? It seems like, for actors working in that intense a scene, almost anyone would be a distraction.
PTA: It can be, if people are misbehaving or talking loudly, or wearing bright clothes, or chatting away. Ideally, in a perfect world, everyone is doing what Daniel is doing—concentrating on doing their job. And that's what we were all doing. You could say that we were all in character the whole time. The bowling alley is a particular situation, because it was so narrow that there could only be a very limited amount of people at any given time, maybe five or six behind the camera and then the two boys.
AVC: That was actually shot at the Doheny mansion, right? Was it ghostly?
PTA: It was great. It was funny, because that mansion has been used so many times in films; it's kind of this notorious location. Your first instinct as a filmmaker is, "Can we really shoot someplace that's been shot in so many times?" I think we had a free pass because this was the guy we were basing the film on. It's definitely pretty ghostly around there, without question. Daniel called it a pyramid that Doheny built to himself. I think that fits. It's kind of a mad place.
AVC: Some people will surely see it as a message movie because Upton Sinclair's name is on it, but for other obvious reasons as well. Were you thinking about modern-day strong-arm capitalism and mega-church religion while you were writing and shooting it?
PTA: I was thinking that we'd better be very careful not to do too much of that. And what I mean by that is what I said earlier, that we should approach the film as a horror film and a boxing match first. You know you're walking into a film about an independent oilman and a guy that runs a church. The risks that you run are big, long speeches that would help in paralleling or allegoricalizing, if that's a word. We thought, "Let's be careful." That's a slippery slope, isn't it?
AVC: Sure, but you know it's there. Do you let a tiny bit of it in to avoid the floodgates opening?
PTA: I suppose that's probably what it is. It's so funny, because ideally, once you get underneath the skin of these men, that stuff falls away.
AVC: Is there a small part of you that hopes people take away an anti-capitalist message?
PTA: Do I hope the film brings peace to the Middle East? If we can help in some small way. We're just one film.
AVC: One long film.
PTA: That's true. Maybe we should count as two.
AVC: Long films are required to have messages.
PTA: It's true, it's true! That depends on how progressive you are, actually.
AVC: Do you think that people can watch it and not get that? Could a big oil tycoon watch it and just get a cracking good story out of it?
PTA: Chances are. I don't know. We've got to show it to the oil circuit, and see how they respond. Maybe we'll take it to the religious circuit and see what they think.
AVC: It seems pretty obvious what kind of reaction you're going to receive there.
PTA: Does it? What do you think they are going to say?
AVC: I mean this in the best way, so don't take it the wrong way…
PTA: Uh-oh, I always get nervous when I hear that.
AVC: Your movies always seem very tidy. They might be sprawling, but they're very unambiguous. The conceit of so many independent films is to be ambiguous, maybe for its own sake.
PTA: I take that as a high compliment, actually. Thank you. I really do. We could have titled the movie There Will Be A Morally Unambiguous Ending. That's really nice of you to say. Thanks.
AVC: Is ambiguity not in your filmmaking genes, then? Does it not appeal to you?
PTA: I don't know. It would require me to get objective and think too much. I'll just take the compliment.
AVC: The film is dedicated to Robert Altman. Was your experience working with him on Prairie Home Companion what you hoped it would be? You knew him a little bit, right?
PTA: I knew him pretty well, off and on for about 10 years, but I had gotten to know him particularly well in the last three or four years. I got to watch Bob navigate that film, and I watched how good he was at evading questions, in the best way. He was really good at not committing himself too early to something. He didn't impose his will early. He loved to work with people. He loved to see what they came up with. He would give things time to settle, to rise or to fall, and watching him do that was a great lesson in patience. Because at the end of the day, he invited everybody in to work on this film, but he ended up getting exactly what he wanted, and everyone else felt that they had been part of it, because they had. They really made the film with Bob. How he did that was a lesson to me.
AVC: Is that something that you feel you emulate? It seems like There Will Be Blood was very collaborative with Daniel.
PTA: I've had great collaborations in the past—some of the actors and the crew have been working together for years—and it felt like we were all working in great sync on this one. Maybe it was because we hadn't made a film together in a long time. We were all so happy to get back together and go to work, and work with some new people, like Daniel, and Jack Fisk, and Jonny Greenwood. We really enjoyed making the film. I daresay a lot of us still wish we were making the film, and have had a hard time letting it go.
AVC: Will that spur you to dive into another movie more quickly?
PTA: Ideally. It's something we're all talking about. We'll take a little time off, and talk about what we'd like to get done in the new year. It would require me getting some writing done and finding some time to do that. Hopefully it won't take too long.
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