There are two types of movies : movies that you watch only once and movies that you watch again and again. What’s amazing is that even when you have watched your favourite movie a zillion times, there are still new facts, new perspectives waiting to be discovered. Take the movie Gandhi for instance, which I must have watched more than 50 times. (Not a believer in non-violence philosophy, by the way). There is a scene in this movie where the young Gandhi is met by a British clergy in South Africa. This particular scene is very close to my heart because I grew up and spent my childhood roaming around the location in Pune where it was shot. And yet, there was a fact about this scene that I did not know till last week. The South African hoodlum in the scene was played by none other than Daniel Day-Lewis. Imagine that : Ben Kingsley and Daniel Day-Lewis in the same frame with Richard Attenborough behind the camera!
The reason for this article is the announcement of retirement by perhaps the greatest method actor of our times, Daniel Day-Lewis. As expected, this news has been met by a range of reactions, from ridicule to sadness. Some say it’s a publicity stunt for his upcoming movie with Paul Thomas Anderson. I find this hard to believe. The man has won three Oscars in the leading role category, more than any living being on this side of the galaxy. I don’t think he can be any more famous even if he tried to.
There are many anecdotes about how Daniel takes method acting to extremes. First there is the research. In In The Name of My Father he plays an innocent man who is falsely accused of a crime. Daniel spent three nights in jail without sleep which was followed by interrogation by three teams of special branch police officers for nine hours. He did this to understand how an innocent man could sign a confession under duress for something which he did not do.
For his role of Abraham Lincoln, Daniel read over 100 books. Daniel stays in character in between shots and for most of the duration of the movie. It’s difficult for him to come out of the character after every shot which makes sense. So he used to send texts as Abraham Lincoln to Sally Fields who was playing Mary Todd Lincoln. For many of his characters, as he is doing his research, Daniel begins to hear a voice in his head which he then tries to reproduce. For Lincoln, he made a tape of this voice and sent it to Spielberg who then okayed it.
There is a story that is often told as a sort of counter point to method acting. It involves Lawrence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman who worked together in the movie Marathon Man. One day Dustin looked awful and Olivier asked him if he was okay. Dustin said that he had not slept for a while because he wanted to get into the character. And Olivier said, “My dear boy, have you tried acting?”
I have lost count of the number of times I have read this story being given as a proof to criticise method acting. I am glad someone told this story to Daniel Day-Lewis and Daniel’s comment is priceless.
“It says more about Olivier than it says about Hoffman’s process..He is just missing the point,” Daniel says about Olivier.
Steven Spielberg once said, “It’s not science, what we do here.” Precisely. If acting were a science, then all you had to do was to follow Olivier’s recipe – whatever that may be – and you get an Oscar for every performance. That’s not what happens. No one knows what will work and what won’t.
Daniel likes to stay in character most of the time, Anthony Hopkins does not find it necessary. Hopkins learned a poem every week when he was preparing for the character of Hannibal Lecter. For L.A. Confidential, Russell Crowe lived in a very small house because he wanted to feel big and authoritative. For All The Presidents Men, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman memorized not only their lines but each others lines as well so that they could interrupt unannounced. Each actor has his own way of getting there and no one, including the actor himself knows if it will work or not.
It’s not difficult to see where Olivier is coming from. He is one of the most famous products of the Shakespearean tradition of actors from the British stage and one of the main principles of this style of acting is to avoid physical expressions. The theory is that Shakespeare’s words themselves are so powerful that if you just recite them as they are meant to be recited, you don’t need to do anything else. This is completely opposite of method acting where you try to experience the character as deeply as you can.
So what happens when a method actor tries a Shakespeare play? As it happens, Daniel Day-Lewis worked in the Royal Shakespeare Company at the beginning of his career. That did not go too well and he left it. Later on he did Hamlet for the National Theatre. During the performance where Hamlet sees the ghost of his dead father, Daniel had a breakdown on the stage. He left the production half-way and never returned to stage. He said that he saw his dead father on the screen, though much later he clarified that there was nothing paranormal about it. It was part of experiencing the character.
It is this capacity to go so deep into the character that makes Daniel the genius actor that he is. For instance, here’s one of the many remarkable things about his acting. Almost every actor has a bit of his own self in every role that he plays. That is why it is possible to do impersonations of almost every great actor. You recognize him by his accent, his diction, his voice. Till date, I have never seen anyone do an impersonation of Daniel Day-Lewis, with the exception of this Saturday Night Live skit. But even here the impersonation is of the character Daniel played in There Will Be Blood, it has nothing to do with the actor himself.
In fact, when I saw his interview for the first time, it was a revelation as to how different he sounded. He has a British accent, he speaks in a rather nondescript way, often pausing to think before speaking. It would be impossible to identify him if anyone were to imitate that voice. He never speaks in the high pitch that some of his characters use regularly. Ditto with the eyes or facial expressions. Some of it is of course make-up, but it’s also the personality behind that character.
Daniel Day-Lewis is an eccentric genius. He rarely does any interviews. This is not his first retirement. In 1998, he took a leave of absence and moved to Florence where he reportedly worked as a carpenter and learned shoemaking, working as an apprentice with the famous shoemaker Stefano Bemer. He never talks about this period in his life. “My lips are sealed” is his usual reply. Daniel returned to acting in 2002 with Martin Scorsese in Gangs of New York which earned him his second Oscar.
Daniel is more known for rejecting roles than accepting them. Till date, he has worked in only 20 movies. He reminds me of the famous chemist Frederick Sanger. In a career of over 40 years, Sanger published about 70 papers. In today’s publish or perish world, that’s nothing. But he won the Nobel prize in Chemistry twice, once for his work on structure of proteins and other for his work on DNA sequencing. Less is more has never been more true than in such exceptional cases.
I am not a film critic. I mostly write about movies that I like and even when I find something lacking, I am more prone to be on the actors side. And in cases such as this one, I find it very difficult to describe the quality of Daniel’s acting performances because I fear it would just be a string of superlatives and adjectives. Suffice it to say that whenever I read the name Abraham Lincoln, the image, the voice, the walk that comes to mind is that character in the movie Lincoln. Same with Gandhi, even though in this case, some old footage of Gandhi actually exists.
For Daniel, getting into the skin of another person is the most interesting thing. Movies or stage are just means of getting there. So who knows, maybe he will continue his passion hidden from public viewing. I want to say that I hope Daniel comes back from his retirement and keeps on working. At the same time, I realize that it is too much to ask of an actor who immerses his mind, body and soul in every character that he plays. Maybe he has reached his capacity.
Marlon Brando once asked Johnny Depp how many films he does in a year. Two or three, said Depp.
“Too much,” said Brando. “We only have so many faces in our pockets.”
