‘Theatre is an elitist art form for privileged people’: Daniel Day-Lewis talks class, cinema and his crush on Mary Poppins | Daniel Day-Lewis

Actor Daniel Day-Lewis criticized the decision to keep audiences out of cinemas, and what he saw as a continuing disdain for UK cinema at an event at the London Film Festival.

Speaking to critic Mark Kermode for a lengthy talk in front of an audience at the BFI Southbank, Day-Lewis said he felt “there is still an elitism in this country that theater is the superior form”. His dramatic training at the Bristol Old Vic School encouraged him to feel that theatrical work was his calling. “Then there are the movies: a bit dodgy. TV: Like, really? Well, you have to pay the gas bill. That was the thinking.”

“There was no concession [in the training] For movies at all. But secretly, most of us do [students] We longed to make films, because we grew up on films, and films seemed so wonderful and magical to us.

“It’s not that theater isn’t, but theater itself is an elitist cultural form. There are of course exceptions, and many wonderful theater companies that manage to make shows affordable to everyone. But the great thing about cinema is that everyone can – maybe not so much these days – but everyone can buy a ticket.”

“Theater relies essentially on people who have had the privilege of an education that allows them to believe that they are entitled to go to the theatre. This education has enabled them to perhaps understand the classics in a way that makes sense to them. It is a relatively small group of people available to them, which is quite wrong. It has always bothered me, much as I loved my time in the theatre, that we were performing mainly for a group of more or less privileged people.”

On Tuesday night, Day-Lewis attended the UK premiere of his new film, Anemone, which he co-wrote with his son Ronan Day-Lewis, who directed. The film is the three-time Oscar winner’s first film in seven years, after his retirement from the profession in 2017.

Following the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis’ representatives issued a statement saying that he “will no longer work as an actor… This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this matter.”

However, speaking to Rolling Stone last month, Day-Lewis declared that he “never intended to retire” and “had better move on.” [his] Shut the mouth.”

During the conversation in London on Wednesday, the actor again dismissed what he saw as misconceptions about method acting, saying that the “recent comments” about the technique for which he has become famous “always come from people who have little or no understanding of what it actually entails. It’s as if it’s some kind of pseudoscience that we participate in or a cult.”

“It’s very easy to describe what I’m doing as if I’ve lost my mind, and a lot of people were happy to do it,” he said, adding that people often thought he was “as crazy as a hare.”

Instead, he said method acting is “just a way to free yourself” to be spontaneous and “able to accept whatever comes through you” as another person. As an example, he cited one of Anemone’s key monologues, in which he tells his brother (played by Sean Bean) how he got revenge on a clergyman who abused him when he was a boy, with the help of Guinness, curry, and a packet of laxatives.

“I don’t know why I found it so funny,” he said. “The idea of ​​defecating on a priest. It’s not normal. But I thought it was funny and I couldn’t stop laughing.”

He also discussed the role for which he won his first Oscar: Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy, in Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot. Day-Lewis said the dramatic change in attitudes towards the portrayal of people with disabilities in the 36 years since this film was made means he will no longer play the role.

“Obviously I wouldn’t be able to do it now, and for good reason – at the time it was already in doubt,” he said, adding that “a couple of kids helped me a lot at the Sandymount Clinic.” [for people with cerebral palsy] They explained to me that they didn’t think I should do it.

The actor prepared by spending two months in a house with a wheelchair and a set of paints. “If you have the responsibility of portraying the life of someone like Christie Brown – a huge, noble figure in Irish society – you have to try to understand as humanly possible what she feels inside that experience. And I thought: ‘I will never stop working like that again.’”

Day-Lewis noted that before filming My Left Foot, he was “clueless” about filmmaking. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he said, recalling director Stephen Frears’ anger during the filming of My Beautiful Laundrette when he was filming a scene in which his character cleans a store.

“There’s something like a compulsive need to find something that feels real to me,” he said. “So I was mopping the floor, and he said, ‘Keep doing that.’ I said, ‘This part is clean.’ Stephen is a very smart guy but his tolerance is very low. So he sent me into the cutting room with the editor and I looked at him.” [the footage] And I say: Oh, I see. right. “Because you have to be in the frame…” I was that stupid.”

Day-Lewis, who also won Oscars for best actor for “There Will Be Blood” in 2007 and “Lincoln” in 2012, discussed working with his wife, writer-director Rebecca Miller, on “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” in 2005. He said she sent him the script 15 years ago, before they met.

“I really admired her mother [photographer Inge Morath] And my father [the playwright Arthur Miller] And I got to know them and I’m going to go and stay with them in the house where Rebecca grew up. So I heard a lot about it. And she seemed fine.

He said working with their son Ronan, 27, on Anemone was also a happy experience, supported by a generous director who had time for everyone. “You can’t guarantee that you’ll get a great movie out of it, but what you will get is an experience that people will always remember with joy. That was true for Jack and Rose, and it was true for Anemone.”

The film, set in the late 1980s, follows two brothers, Ray (Day-Lewis) and Jim (Bean), who served as British paramilitaries in Northern Ireland years before. Day-Lewis said that while some of his previous films, including In the Name of the Father and The Boxer, looked at the controversy from the point of view of West Belfast Catholics, there was a feeling that “it wasn’t really great to show the British military experience because they were the bad guys when they were in that situation.”

“But that wasn’t the case. It was like anywhere in any struggle. There were working-class guys competing against each other usually for no good reason. It was a dirty, dirty struggle. And I only really examined it from one point of view.”

Anemone was met with mixed notice, with critics praising Day-Lewis’ performance and the film’s stylistic ambition, but less certain about whether it adds up to a cohesive piece of cinema.

Day-Lewis said the film’s reception bothered him. “You kind of try to put on the challenge hat but it doesn’t fit very well. ‘We made this movie and we were happy making it, it is what it is, we did what we could, we did our best and so on.’ And of course that matters to us hugely.

“Critics have to some degree the power to encourage people to see it or to discourage people from seeing it. They are the go-betweens and women between us and the audience. But of course what we long for is that when we get our work done, it will be meaningful to people. And if it proves not to be, that’s a very bad feeling. It will bring you down immediately.”

But he and his son are wary of trying to satisfy public taste. “If you’re trying to guess what people are going to think and how they’re going to react,” Day-Lewis said, shaking his head. “There is an epidemic disease in cinema: trying to figure out how to make the audience laugh, make them cry, make them scream and cheer.”

Day-Lewis also recalls his interactions with his acting heroes, including Marlon Brando, who once suggested they work together, and Alec Guinness, who wrote him a eulogy after the release of My Beautiful Laundrette. “This means the world to me.”

He added that the most powerful on-screen performance he had ever seen was child actor David Bradley’s debut in Ken Loach’s Kes, saying: “I didn’t know it was possible to do something like that. A young boy who had never acted before. And it’s true and a bit disappointing that some of the most amazing performances over the years have come from people who have never trained.”

“You’d see cartoons and then The Lone Ranger and then something in a spaceship, and they’d give you a badge and it was cool,” Day-Lewis recalls of his years attending Saturday morning Picture Club shows in south London.

He also ranked Mary Poppins as one of the greatest films ever made, and singled out its star for particular praise, saying: “What a doll. I admired Julie Andrews.”

Commenting on his career, Day-Lewis said, “Although I’m proud of some things, I’m starting from scratch.” But in retrospect, he concluded that he was relieved that he had a “certain fortitude” that enabled him to turn down many of the projects he took on.

“I’ve done quite a few over the years, but I knew from an early age that I would never try to dance to someone else’s beat.”