“I don’t think that I’ve ever gone to work without feeling that I’m starting from scratch every time. [That] I really just don’t know. I’m not sure I know how to do this … but at the same time, the work that goes on beforehand is, for me, if it works as it should, do, that by the time you arrive on a set and there’s a lens, there’s not a confrontation with … all the paraphernalia of filmmaking, which can be, if you don’t find a way to ignore it, a huge distraction in what you’re doing,” said Daniel-Day Lewis on stage at Alice Tully Hall after the world premiere of Anemone, his return to acting after a an eight-yearn hiatus.
His son Ronan Day-Lewis directed and they co-wrote the film together. “So it always works in such a way that I felt as if day one of the shoot should be like a continuation of something that’s already started a long time ago. For me personally, usually that’s just a rather solitary part of the process. But in this case, that happened quite naturally, because [with] Ronan and I, it felt just like a continuation of what we’d already done.”
Father and son worked on and off for years on the screenplay. “It’s so rare to be … able to prepare together,” said Ronan Day-Lewis at a Q&A after the packed screening. “And I think having written it together, we knew the scenes and the kind of emotional trajectory of the film, the characters were kind of, and Ray [Daniel Day-Lewis’ characters] was kind of growing alongside us for such a long time that by the time we got to set, we’d had so many of these extremely detailed conversations about each scene that it was, yeah, it was really helpful to kind of not have the pressure. Because, you know, with the time pressure on set, it you never are able to have as many or as deep a conversation as you’d like.
Lewis stars with Sean Bean in the Northern England-set film from Focus Features. It begins as a middle-aged man (S Bean) sets out from his suburban home on a journey into the woods, where he reconnects with his estranged hermit brother (Day-Lewis). Bonded by a mysterious, complicated past, the men share a fraught, if occasionally tender relationship that had been forever altered by shattering events decades earlier.
Samantha Morton and Samuel Bottomley also star. See Deadline breakdown.
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