The one director Daniel Day-Lewis called a “shining light”
Throughout an extraordinary career, Daniel Day-Lewis has proven again and again that he is simply one of the greatest actors of all time, perhaps because he’s been so selective of his roles and has never taken something on that he felt he couldn’t add something unique to with his wildly impressive talents.
Day-Lewis has enjoyed the opportunity to work with some of the most acclaimed directors in cinema too, most notably with Paul Thomas Anderson in There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, but also Martin Scorsese in Gangs of New York and The Age of Innocence and Steven Spielberg in Lincoln.
But even though Day-Lewis has collaborated with such fine directors, that hasn’t stopped him from offering out his praise to those that he might have liked to, even if the opportunity never quite came through. One such filmmaker is the British cinema icon Ken Loach, known for his films of socialist idealism.
Day-Lewis spoke at length about Loach’s legendary 1969 film Kes, based on the 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines. It stars a teenage David Bradley as Billy, a young no-hoper at school who comes from a troubled working-class Yorkshire family but experiences the wonders of life when he adopts a fledgling kestrel.
“I think that’s one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen, David Bradley’s – it’s so beautiful and heartbreaking,” Day-Lewis once said when speaking at the V&A Museum event in London. “Ken Loach is really a shining light in this country. Kes was like a light going on.”
The actor’s words had come just after a screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread had been screened, and he was asked whether there had been any performances he’d witnessed when he was younger that made him realise that he too wanted to dedicate his life to acting.
It was at that point that he spoke highly of Loach’s film, detailing a recent time he saw it with one of his friends. “Just a few days ago, I had a mate staying with me in Ireland,” Day-Lewis noted, “And we rummaged through some films I have, and he said, ‘When’s the last time you saw Kes?’ Well, I’ve probably seen that film a dozen times, but when I first saw it, I was 12.”
The actor continued to say of his wild admiration for Loach and Bradley, saying: “That film was probably one of the extraordinary films to have affected me more than anything in my life, and still does in the same way even though I’ve seen it many times.”
