Anna found the following interview with Daniel in the British magazine, Time-Out, February 2-9, 1994. Thanks Anna!  Click on the small icons to see a larger picture.  Thanks to Kieran in Ireland for clearing up the mystery of some of the slang.


The Rage of Innocence

Daniel Day-Lewis has done it again: two startling film roles within weeks. But what strain does his work put on him? And why is the press ready to attack his Guildford Four film? Steve Grant asked him to debunk some myths.

The desk clerk in Dublin's Sherbourne Hotel has directed me to the second-floor suite in which I'm to meet Daniel Day-Lewis to discuss his latest cinematic transformation as Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four released in 1989 after 15 years' wrongful imprisonment. While I'm trying to decide on room 207, 217, or 270, a young man dressed from head to toe in black leather except for a striking necklace and some celtic rings, approaches me and asks: 'Are you looking for room 272?'

At first sight Daniel Day-Lewis looks like a rather cute motorcycle messenger boy, something of a Lord Byron on wheels. He's just completed the 45-minute journey from his home in County Wicklow, and there's the touch of danger that so many associate with an actor whose excursions have all but rewritten the method textbook; his beloved Triumph 350 has just been fixed following a crash which temporarily put it out of commission. The route he travels includes a stretch where water comes down from the hills to create a 'slalom effect' in inclement weather and he has no desire to 'drop my bike again. I was okay, I've still got two knees.' He says that insurance rules make him unable to ride during filming, even though Michael Mann, who directed him famously in 'The Last of the Mohicans', was more solicitous -- 'Michael loves bikes, he was always giving me bikes to ride, he gave me a Harley-Davidson which is the first machine I ever rode. I wasn't supposed to do any motorcycling during "In the Name of the Father", and I just about managed to fulfill that obligation.'

'In the Name of the Father' is directed by Jim Sheridan, with whom Day-Lewis had his Oscar-winning hyper-success in 'My Left Foot'. His portrayal of painter Christy Brown, who suffered from cerebral palsy, involved eight weeks spent in a clinic, learning to paint and type with his left foot and being carried about by crew members during takes. It was a masterpiece of transformation and never sullied by sentimentality; now four years later Sheridan and Daniel have rejoined forces, alongside such as fellow Oscar-winner Emma Thompson, to tell another story of struggle against adversity, during which the same no-holds-barred methods have been used. These have been well publicised, including a diet of cold porridge and prison slops, sleep deprivation, a purpose-built cell the door of which was kicked by volunteer 'thugs' who also threw in (literally) buckets of cold water, and long interrogation sessions by two real detectives.

Daniel has managed yet another brilliant acting feat, one that transcends mimicry to become a form a spiritual empathy -- he has reproduced a West Belfast accent that not even the locals can fault and has shed a couple of stones to replicate the skinny, long-haired scruff who hung around London in the early '70s, working building sites, burgling houses, smoking dope, betting on the gee-gees¹ and generally going after the (pre-drugs)'crack'². The British opening will be as much of a landmark as 1985, the year in which the actor first burst upon the cinematic scene with two film roles that could hardly have been more different: the surprisingly sensitive fascist punk, Johnny, in 'My Beautiful Landrette', and the effortlessly priggish Cecil Vyse in 'A Room With a View'. When the films opened in New York in the same week to ecstatic and mind-boggling audiences Day-Lewis earned himself a reputation as the ultimate chameleon, able to transform himself almost at the dop of a washing-powder scoop from racist yob to Edwardian snob. Now, audiences can get a similar buzz from the prospect of seeing the actor as the epitome of tempted New York propriety, Newland Archer in Scorsese's 'The Age of Innocence', and as a hosed-down, beaten-up, much-abused Irishman in 'In the Name of the Father', picked up days after the discredited Prevention of Terrorism Act for one of the most repulsive and violent series of bombings ever to hit mainland Britain.

In the intervening years, Daniel Day-Lewis has been feted as an actor and prodded and pummelled as an individual. Sometimes the tendencies cross, as with his celebrated walk-out seven performances from the end of his 1989 National Theatre 'Hamlet' after reportedly 'seeing' the ghost of his own father, the former poet-laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. Other talking points that Daniel will be answering back to this afternoon have included his so-called 'suicide attempt' following his father's death when he was only 15; his wild-child bouts of pilfering and drug-abuse; his tendency to disappear from public gaze as when he won his Oscar; his house in west London where he sleeps on the floor and eschews furniture and wall decorations save for a torn-out picture of cool-dude incarnate Keith Richard, and his emotional abandonment of his English middle-class roots in a controversial decision to become an Irish citizen and live in a country where he says the 'soul can run free, where it's harder to be cynical'.

The theme of 'In the Name of the Father' has been provided ample fuel for the media pack to stoke up some of these flames. Certain sections of the press are already sharpening their knives at the film's supposed 'anti-British stance, and pointing up some of the factual inaccuracies that certainly exist in the narrative. Of greater interest however, is the suggestion that the actor has been drawn to the film out of a desire to resolve his own emotional problems; for the film is just as much about the intense, bitter and finally moving relationship between Conlon and his father Guiseppe, another superb performance by Pete Postlethwaite who had known Daniel since they worked together in the early '80s at Bristol Old Vic.

It is certainly that double pull that interested director Sheridan, whose own father had by a terrible coincidence died suddenly just a few days before my meeting with Day-Lewis. (The funeral was a 'real Irish event', says the actor, 'with the rain falling and New Orleans jazz band playing'.) Sheridan had been saying for some time that he wanted to make a film about the Good Father n Irish history because there were no role models in Irish literature, a view borne out by the works of O'Casey, Beckett (who created the ultimate absent father figure in Godot) and even Joyce, whose own immortal father-figure Leopold Bloom was a Jew, and as much an exile as Joyce's alter-ego Stephen Daedelus, Joyce's spiritual journey of rejection, reflected in his masterpiece 'Ulysses', was away from the twin orthodoxies of the British state and the Catholic church. Sheridan has extended the analogy to the political situation, saying that 'England became a kind of father figure whom the Irish have been trying to confront for a long time,' explaining that it was the prospect of adding to the cycle of weakness and compromise that forced many Irish children to escape what they grew to despise.

Brenda Fricker's heartbreaking performance in 'My Left Foot' won her an Oscar and allowed Sheridan to articulate all our gratitude to the mothers of our lives; now he's given us the good father in Guiseppe Conlon, a quiet, life-long pacifist who came to London to help his son and died in prison in 1980, after spending years cooped up with a loved one who grew to resent and despise him for what he saw as weakness in the face of injustice. Such comparisons may seem fanciful when one reads Conlon's engaging, humours and largely frank account of himself, but then he too was a classic Irish exile, running away from the Belfast authorities and from the Provisional IRA who were threatening him with a kneecapping, or worse, for his 'anti-social activities' as a petty villain.

In Conlon's autobiography, 'Proved Innocent', on which the film is based, he describes his father's last words: '"When I die I don't want you attacking no screws, I want you to start clearing your name. My death's going to clear your name and when you get your name cleared, you clear me." I was crying. I leaned forward to touch him with both my hands, but one wrist was still handcuffed. And then he looked past me at all these people and said loudly enough for them all to hear: "If any of youse people think I'm guilty, look me straight in the face." They all dropped their heads forward on their shoulders and he said: "How does it feel to be murdering an innocent man?"'

I ask the actor how much of the film reflects his own unresolved longings to be at rest with his father's memory. 'If that was a reason for my involvement it was never a reason I allowed myself to be aware of; what draws me towards something is the desire to understand a life, and all points of comparison are left to reveal themselves if they have to; I wouldn't compare the experience that Gerry had with his father with what I had with mine. My father died in very different circumstances; yes, I was young, in the middle of a rebellious phase and in trouble at school and all that, but I think it was Jim who was really fascinated by the lack of communication between fathers and sons. It's very sad now, but when the film opened in Dublin, and this was shortly before his death, Jim's father came down and there was a point when he suddenly leaned on his son, and I think we all realised that this hadn't happened before in their life. 'Jim once said to me that a son can't talk to his father unless he's dying and I know what he means. The hideous thing for the Conlons was here was a young man, an active youth in a volatile situation, who knew all the rules of the street, the game, and what could be worse than being stifled by the presence of his own father, a constant reminder of his own immaturity, to escape to the mainland to his great sexual and recreational freedom and then find yourself cooped up in a six-foot cell. 'So what happens is that the infant remains traumatised or he finally recognises the strengths of father. Guiseppe made a strong moral decision not to be involved in the Troubles; he was a peaceful man and Gerry crassly equated sickness with his love of peace. But that to me is part of the mystery of the part, it's not of my experience. I didn't feel the need to "murder" my father because he died when I was still young; I didn't have to shake myself free of my father, I like to think he freed me in his own way. I do think you continue a dialogue with someone that's gone, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, even though people have linked it with so-called mental instability.'

Day-Lewis has an answer for most of the good copy, such as the celebrated overdose of migraine tablets which left him in a mental hospital hallucinating for a fortnight.
    'It's constantly implied that I have some lingering unfulfillment, and okay, I wish that my father had been alive to see my successes as an actor. I think of him with affection and curiosity because there are so many things I don't know about him, but all this psycho overdose stuff is absolute crap. First of all it happened years later, not right after he died, it was completely unrelated and secondly it wasn't a suicide attempt, it was a complete accident. It happened because I was messing about with drugs. It would be very far-fetched to relate the two things. Similarly with "Hamlet". It's true that during that time because of the work I was doing I did preoccupy myself with the relationship of father and son and dwell on aspects of that relationship that I had no protection against when I was very tired; yes something very disturbing and frightening happened that night, but I still look back on it as an interesting experience. I read some piece of drivel recently in a Sunday paper saying that "Hamlet" was the fiery hoop through which all actors had to jump, coming out either irrevocably scarred or prepared for the great quests of theatrical life. And that no matter how many Oscars I win, I will never recover from my failure. This is someone who knows nothing of me; it's such an archaic, snooty view. Actors aren't bound by those sorts of entrance rules anymore and I thought, God, if I met the man who wrote this I'd probably break his fucking legs.'

It should be said at this somewhat heavy juncture that Day-Lewis really is an extremely amusing and charming man whose conversation has much of the stamp of his celebrated father and indeed his mother, Jill Balcon, whose family is one of the biggest dynasties of the British Film Industry. He's fascinated by revelation that his father taught me poety for a year in 1968, the same year he succeeded John Masefield as Poet Laureate. I recount how Day-Lewis Snr had a mischievous streak, once reducing a student to stammering embarrassment by revealing gently that his analysis of WH Auden's 'Lullaby' was somewhat marred by the fact that the subject was not a mother and child but 'probably Auden and one of his blasted boys'.

Later, over an impromptu lunch, he's highly amusing about his old school Bedales, which gave him his only happy times amid the horrors of the public-school system. His father had been a staunch believer in state-education, hence Dan's street-cred accent at the time of 'My Beautiful Laundrette'. After he died, and Daniel was dumped in and ran away from several private schools which made him miserable, his family settled on the ultra-liberalism of Bedales: 'Absolute bliss, like a holiday camp. I just got introduced to the carpentry shop and proceeded to make furniture and have lots of fun. Now it's all going of course. parents are objecting at long last to paying thousands of pounds so their children can turn their back on formal education.'

He reminisces about his pre-fame time in a celebrity football team, 'falling out of coaches stones and drunk and then having the shit kicked out of us by teams who thought we were all a load of pansies and getting groans from fans who didn't know who any of us were, until we got a couple of "EastEnders". Phil Daniels is a great footballer, really classy, and one match someone just crunched into him and you hear his ankle virtually split in half and Phil was lying on the ground screaming in agony and they brought the oxygen cylinder along and he shut up. Then when they went to take it away he shouts, "Hey give that back, that's serious gear, that is!!"' He also talks about reminiscing with Anthony HOpkins, also famous for having once walked out in the middle of a Shakespeare production, the RSC's 'Macbeth'. Hopkins confessed himself to have been near breaking-point at the National while performing King Lear. 'We decided we'd become part of this elite of actors who'd fled the stage and that we felt very proud in the end for doing something for ourselves.'

It's that kind of remark that sometimes betrays an inner security, not to say ruthlessness, alongside all the mercurial charm and the famous good looks; it's no great boast to have left one's colleagues floundering on a stage. Similarly, during an admittedly reluctant attempt to explain his acting method, he casts great scorn on Sir Laurence Olivier's famous answer to Dustin Hoffman's obsessive preparations: 'Why don't you try acting, dear boy.' 'I really hate that remark, it says more about Olivier than anyone else. I mean who cares what Dustin had to do to get into that part?' Well, Olivier for a start, considering that while filming 'Marathon Man' he was suffering from cancer, very frail and was being dragged around the set by a hyperactive New York method actor.

But to be fair, what distinguishes Day-Lewis's brand of method-work is not any general concept of empathy or self-punishment, but the fact that he so often pulls off the most difficult of tasks to achieve his purpose. It's one thing to gain weight as De Niro did for 'Raging Bull', or learn to chop onions as Pacino did for 'Frankie and Johnny'. Day-Lewis's feats have so far included the painting of quite competent watercolours with his aforementioned left foot; learning to trap and skin animals in the wile, build canoes and reload an eighteenth-century musket while up to his waist in icy water. How does he do it, and how does he know it's working?

'The only answer to that is that I don't know it's working. One of the problems of this mysterious process is that it tries to apply a logical process to what always remains essentially mysterious and illogical. It's muddy. It's just mud, and you make certain choices and it's true that sometimes, without knowing what I'm looking for, I make certain discoveries. Everything you do is just part of this continuing process. And sometimes you feel something solid between your fingers, or a sense of something happening between your eyes, a semi-precious stone in that mud. I don't concentrate esily on things; when commitment comes, my concentration is relatively impressive. I don't know if that is a gift but it's one I've been endowed with...maybe it comes from being a lazy bastard, a ferocious attempt to combat that inactivity.

'I don't do anything for the sake of it. Gerry is the first character I've played who has stood beside me and whose company I've shared; he's a very funny and articulate man, but to play him there came a time when I had to shrug him off and take on a life that was exotic and alien, come to terms with events that were happening when all I cared about was Hendrix and Dylan. And I can only do that if the discovery remains interesting. Maybe it's unnecessary to do everything I've done but I do it because I remain immensely curious. Like so many people with dissolute youths behind them, I suppose I've just become fascinated by the concept of learning. But it's hard. Gerry confessed to a crime he didn't commit after hours of threats, torture and brainwashing; I have to understand how someone can do that, I have to try to repeat the feeling of disorientation as much as I can, but all that was only a part of a much bigger process, as with any film.

'Finally you have no control; maybe the need is to remain unconscious because acting is such a self-conscious activity, maybe the only way you can reveal a life to someone else is to have it revealed to you.' One interesting fact he does reveal is how much his heart sank when he was informed that one of Edith Wharton's character clues for the part of Newland Archer was that he had read George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'. Daniel, who's unaware that the book is currently the subject of a multi-million-pound television overhaul, says: 'Jesus, if I had to choose between reading "The Last of the Mohicans", "Middlemarch" and shooting myself in the head, then I'd definitely choose the latter. Those books are like wading through treacle in one of those dreams you get when you're crying for help.'

No one can mistake Daniel's commitment to this film, for which he turned down a $7million role in Neil Jordan's 'Interview with a Vampire' (second choice was Tom Cruise) and also the much-vaunted British vehicle 'Shakespeare in Love'. The actor laughingly mutters that this has led him to be accused of giving the British film industry its 'big chill'. 'Everywhere I go I keep getting asked by journalists about other films. Don't they realise how fucking hard it is to put together the film you're working on?' Cannily both Sheridan and Day-Lewis took the advice of the experienced Mann at the outset, who told them that their ability to make the film would rest on the first week's totals for 'Mohicans'. they were astonishingly good. Was he surprised? 'Your're kidding. No disrespect to Michael but of course I was. It didn't even have a story.' Yes, but it did have his chest.

'In the Name of the Father' has already had its detractors in the press both here and in Ireland, and from such as the Maguire Seven who have rightly pointed out compressions and factual inaccuracies in what after all is one man's version of the story. Day-Lewis defies most of criticisms, quoting the much-appreciated support provided by the Evening Standard's respected film critic Alexander Walker, no IRA supporter he, who admires the film enourmously and emphasises that the only exchange involving a republican prisoner ends with Conlon Snr saying: 'Don't be sorry for us. Be sorry for your victims.'

Day-Lewis's defence against charges that the film is an IRA propaganda vehicle are probably unprintable, but he isn't the first person to opine that 'cinema verite is a contradition in terms. The bottom line is that people served 15 years for crimes of which they were innocent. I've heard about mutterings that the Guildford Four were lucky; well, no film we could ever made would convince people who believe that garbage otherwise. People should make up their own minds.' They will. In Dublin, it's the second biggest movie since 'Jurassic Park'. And as my cabbie said, "Well so, look what a bit of controversy did for dat Salman Rushdie.'

This actor who was called the 'first British hunk' by the Sunday Times (which must come as a shock to Finney, Caine, Connery, Reed, Harris, etc) admits that he does think about being a father, although it's not a desperate need. 'I would like to be a father,' he says finally after taking the idea for his usual mental motor-bike run. Given that most women on earth seem to be madly in love with him (Julia Roberts and Isabelle Adjani included) he won't have much trouble finding a mate. Was he, as so many colleagues and friends have said, a man with an almost palpable intensity, a real sense of something that transcends everyday social traffic? 'Oh come on Steve,' he guffaws, ' if I said anything to you that I wa a spiritual man or a mystical force, would you take up your bed and follow me? I think not. I certanly bloody hope not.'

¹gee-gees = horses, particularly racehorses
²crack (generally spelled "craic") means action. "What's the craic?"="What's happening?"