The movie Daniel Day-Lewis called magnificently irrelevant: “You’re surrounded by distractions”
Famed for delving deep into a character’s psyche and reason for being, Daniel Day-Lewis treats his craft seriously. However, he isn’t above recognising acting as being an inherently ridiculous job that requires him to dress up and pretend to be somebody he’s not.
His method approach may not be for everyone, including the co-stars who were forbidden from speaking to him in an English accent during the production of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, but the results speak for themselves. Day-Lewis might never be seen playing for the cheap seats in a broad comedy, but at least he knows acting is a silly old game.
For his second collaboration with Martin Scorsese, almost a decade after The Age of Innocence, Day-Lewis was tasked with inhabiting a completely different kind of character. As he tends to do, he embraced the method to get into the mindset of William ‘Bill the Butcher’ Cutting in Gangs of New York, and he was ably aided by the filmmaker’s staunch commitment to realism and authenticity.
A brooding, complex, and violent love letter to the dynamism and terror of old New York, it was a Scorsese passion project that lingered in development hell for decades before being freed. Never one to do things by halves, the director had always envisioned building as much of the set as possible and keeping it historically accurate, from the architecture to the costumes.
It was a New York story, but the majority of principal photography took place in Rome. Gangs of New York may have spared no expense with its incredible sets to construct a faithful recreation of the city’s late 19th century battles between warring gangs. Yet, Day-Lewis initially struggled to find the requisite inspiration due to the location.
“There was a kind of magnificent irrelevancy to what we were doing,” he explained to Index. “We were trying to inhabit a different world and a different place. In Rome, you’re surrounded by distractions. So much of your energy goes into ignoring the stuff that you don’t need to see.”
It’s easy to see why a city like Rome would impede on the illusion so masterfully created by the sets, especially for an actor as immersive as Day-Lewis. “When I’m working, I try to stay in places where, if I can’t be reminded of what it is that we’re doing, at least I’m not taken too far away from it,” he explained. “We found a place outside of the city where you don’t have to be overwhelmed by all that beauty. That helped. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to make that daily transition.”
For an actor who prides themselves on the realism of performance, it can’t have been easy essentially pretending not to be in Rome, despite all of the visual, aural, and olfactory cues saying the direct opposite. And it makes the resulting gruff, gritty, and totally believable performance all the more impressive, knowing Day-Lewis wasn’t thrilled by the surroundings he found himself in.
That’s just one of the many things that make him a once-in-a-generation actor: hungry for knowledge, believable, demanding, and exacting when it comes to the job, but also self-aware enough to understand and even relish the absurdities of making movies.
