Daniel Day-Lewis Talks Pushing Aside His Pride to Work with Son, Ronan, On ‘Anemone’

“Apparently, I’ve been accused of retiring twice now,” Daniel Day-Lewis tells the audience, cueing laughter from the crowd. 

Following a screening of Anemone on the opening day of the New York Film Festival, director Ronan-Day Lewis joined his father, Daniel-Day-Lewis,  as well as actor Sean Bean. Anemone explores the intricate relationships between fathers, sons, and brothers, and the dynamics of familial bonds, and marks the return of Daniel Day-Lewis, who stepped out of retirement to co-write and star in the film with his son.

“I made a fucking fool of myself by announcing,” he admits, “Probably a bigger fool of myself coming back. But to deny myself the possibility of working with Roland just to stand on my pride, I think that would have been a worse decision that just, ‘well, I said that so I’m sticking to it.'”

The junior Day-Lewis, who holds a B.A. in Art from Yale University, approached the film with an expressionist lens, letting the sounds and sights of nature paint a picture of the tension of the story, while ghostly figures represented the eldest Day-Lewis’s character’s anxieties.

“Even in the first ten pages,” Ronan Day-Lewis said, “I think the way that more expressionistic or kind of metaphysical elements crept in was through the weather. Like, there was, even in the first ten pages, there was all this rain and just the sense of the elements kind of in concert with the human mystery and the human drama.”

“So I think starting to sort of follow that thread gradually over the course of writing, we started to kind of accept more and more of these kind of images or strange occurrences kind of into the fabric of the story,” he added.

Between those moments of letting nature speak to the story, both of the Day-Lewis men crafted moving monologues to break up the silence.

“Yeah, I think that the gradualness of the writing process definitely contributed to the sense of just following the characters,” the younger Day-Lewis explained, “It felt like we were sort of forced to take enough time after each burst of progress on it to reflect on that and iron over it.”

“Silence is important in the film, but there are also a couple of pretty remarkable monologues,” he noted.

It was just this pathos that drew Sean Bean to sign on to the project.

“I loved it,” Bean gushed.

“To tell you the truth, I was even more gobsmacked and surprised when he called me and told me about this wonderful script,” he said “And I was very flattered and honored that he should ask me, for starters, and then after reading the script and seeing its content, its potential, it’s beauty, the poignancy and these incredibly fractured and mysterious characters. I was just blown away by it, and it was something I wanted to… I was just so much looking forward to working with these guys.”

The eldest Day-Lewis, however, seemed to hint at a sort of “starvation” after leaving the industry behind, while also lacking an appetite for having a spotlight on his life.

“The work was always very precious to me. It was like food and drink. But I think I have it in common with a lot of actors that I’m ill-suited for the life around it, the public aspect of it,” Daniel Day-Lewis shared.

“But it just seems so self-important to me. But in that case, I was at a very low end, and I thought, ‘I’m doing this because I don’t really expect to find my way back to the appetite for this work again, and I did, and I’m really grateful for it, and I hope I do again.’”

Anemone debuts at the New York Film Festival on Sunday, September 28, and will be opening in select theaters on October 3.