By Cole Smithey
Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor whose reputation almost has to be whispered about in polite conversation. Everything about him on the screen is so much larger than life that it is humbling to discuss his performances. Since his first credited role in a feature film in Richard Attenborough’s "Gandhi" (1982) the 50-year-old actor has only made 17 films, but each one of them is memorable for the unfathomable degree of character development Day-Lewis achieves.
For Paul Thomas Anderson’s "There Will Be Blood," based on the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s novel "Oil!," Day-Lewis spent two years preparing the role of a 1920’s silver miner named Daniel Plainview. When a young man (Paul Dano) approaches Plainview about purchasing his family’s oil-rich land, Plainview’s focus shifts to oil and he assembles a crew to draw the black goo from the ground. In the process one of his workers is killed, leaving behind a young son who Plainview adopts more as a partner than as a son.
It isn’t long before Minister Eli Sunday, the twin brother of the boy who introduced Plainview to the oil-rich land, comes to the fore as a rival for the attention and wealth that Plainview accumulates. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance is nothing short of astonishing. He embodies the hard-nosed character with such restraint and conviction that he is at once better and worse than any historical figure you can think of. It’s in this context of flesh and blood emotion that we come to understand greed, disassociation, love, hate, and revenge for their effect on society and our ecology. Looking back on his work in films like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "In The Name of the Father," and "Gangs of New York," I speak in a quiet voice when I say it’s the best performance of Daniel Day-Lewis’s career.
I was honored to participate in a press conference with Mr. Day-Lewis at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria hotel where the amiable actor spoke about the details of "The Will Be Blood."
CS: The character arc seems to go from that of a miserable prick with just a thin strand of human decency to a man with no decency at all. What was the challenge for creating this complex person?
DDL: I never really saw him as a miserable prick. The challenge, I dare say is the same as it always is, which is just to try and discover a life that isn’t your own. And Plainview, as he came to me in Paul’s beautiful script, was a man whose life I didn’t understand at all. It was a life that was completely mysterious to me, and that unleashed a fatal curiosity, which I had no choice but to pursue. He’s just a fellow trying to make a living. I believe you see the seeds of the man you meet at the end, in the man you meet at the beginning. So it never occurred to me that his journey was a short one.
CS: Did you have to do any physical preparation for the kind of hard labor we see Daniel Plainview doing?
DDL: When you discover Plainview at the beginning he’s almost learning himself how to do it. Anyone that can swing an axe or a sledge—which anyone can do—can dig a hole in the ground with a pickaxe. In terms of physical preparation, there wasn’t really anything to do except stay fit and start digging holes. They kind of just made it up as they went along, and that was true even as you see in the story before cable rotary drilling became common use. They began by scooping this muck as it erupted out of the earth—scooping it up in sauce pans and buckets and stuff—that was the first way of gathering oil. Then someone had the bright idea of trying to set up an A-frame and plunge the equivalent of a telegraph pole down into the ground and see if that would help it along. It was incredibly primitive. As the story progresses the drilling procedure is a fairly complicated thing, but at the beginning it’s sheer blood and sweat really just to scoop this stuff up.
CS: You have a violent scene with Paul Dano where you beat him up pretty good. How was that scene to film?
DDL: It was a very difficult day. Things weren’t going right and there were people doing all kinds of things to try and fix the pipe which needed to be working in the background, filling the reservoir that we were digging. So we lost a day in this place, which we just couldn’t afford to do because time was very tight. Essentially, out of necessity often something interesting is born. Paul set up a tracking shot that covered the whole scene. We didn’t know if we could make it work. In a moving shot that covers the whole scene, the chances of getting everything right in that shot are pretty slim. There’s nothing you could do to get ready for that, except try it and try again.
CS: The film’s climax happens in a real old fashioned bowling alley inside a mansion. What’s the story behind that?
DDL: We shot that scene in the Doheny mansion. Sinclair loosely based the character in his book on the life of Doheny. So by second removed there was also a connection there. And this huge great gloomy pile was the pyramid he had built to himself with the wealth that he had accumulated. It’s overseen by the Doheny trust, and the Doheny Trust employees are an army of people in extremely neat uniforms to watch everything Goddamn move that you make in the place. I don’t know what they thought we were doing in there, but they seemed quite disturbed by the whole thing. We’d already entered into a realm where we didn’t know one thing from another. Again, we had very little time to play with and it was a fog.
CS: Radiohead’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood proved to be an adept composer to score the music under your performance.
DDL: Paul recorded at Abbey Road in London, and the funniest thing about Jonny is that he didn’t study composition. He was a violinist—he studied violin and then he went into the band and the band became his life, but somehow along the way he taught himself composition. And he is the resident composer for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who played a lot of the music, and he scored the whole thing himself. I don’t know how he did that.
CS: A significant element of the story is your character’s relationship with the young Dillon Freasier, who plays H.W. How did you work with the boy?
DDL: I felt very close to Dillon—very fond of him. He’s a cowboy by the way. His father is a rancher. Dillon has got his rodeo buckles; he’s won numerous events. He does the round-ups. He’s the real thing and so he has this strange maturity that’s very unusual. It’s something that a lot of kids of his age might have in common in that part of the world. He’s really used to hard work, and he’s got hands like—he could knock out a horse with those hands. They’re big. He’s the most delightful person. He had a curiosity for everything that was going on—both technically with the shots and every department. He was constantly drinking in all this new information with such excitement and vision.
As we started to approach the moment when we were going to start shooting, I started to worry a little bit because we were very close. We had a nice friendship and I thought, "Man, how’s he going to feel when I start kind of treating him harshly"? So I thought I better have a conversation with him about that. So I kind of sat him down and I created this sort of portentous atmosphere, and I said, "Look Dillon, you know how I feel about you, and there are going to be moments in the next months to come when I’m going to speak harshly to you. I’m not going to treat you nice. I hope you understand that I love you, and so on.” And he looked at me like I was insane, and said, "Of course I know that." He was just one step ahead of us once in a while.
His mom just raised him so beautifully and very respectfully and so on. His mom is a state trooper and she wanted to do things right and thought she better check out this bunch that were going to be taking care of her son, so she went and got "Gangs of New York." She was absolutely appalled. She thought she was releasing her child into the hands of this monster, and so there was a flurry of phone calls, and somebody sent a copy of "The Age of Innocence" to her. Apparently, that did the trick.
There’s a real connection between those two [Plainview and H.W.]. It’s not pure exploitation, although Daniel kind of taunts him later on—the idea of a cute face to buy land. Even earlier on there’s a sort of joke made of it when he bumps into a fellow prospector in the train station, but it goes deeper than that. But the problem is that Plainview has no understanding of what the responsibilities of a parent are. So he’s preternaturally responsible in a way that a genuine partner would be for the day to day running of his business. So from Plainview’s point of view, anything that interferes with the running of the business is something that he has to take care of even for his son’s sake as well. He just doesn’t know how to deal with this damaged creature who’s a child. He doesn’t know how to be a father to him. He has no means of knowing that.
