Just got this in from Ster Kinekor and thought you might enjoy checking it out. It's a bit wordy and Daniel Day Lewis "too deep" but got some interesting bits and pieces.
An interview with Daniel Day Lewis about the film There Will Be Blood and his Oscar wining role as Daniel Plainview:
Source: Ster Kinekor
Q: You have said (to the “New York Times”) that you were unsettled by this script. In what sense?
DDL: When I used that word for me that means something good. It’s a good thing.
I suppose unsettled in as far as I began to feel myself drawn into the orbit of a new world, and that’s an experience I would commonly have if I were going to work on something, rather than feel like I could somehow admire it from the outside, as a spectator.
I could see the possibility of moving towards and discovering that new world. So I was unsettled in that sense.
Q: What was fascinating to you about Daniel Plainview’s character?
DDL: It’s hard to dismember him into the entirety of him. I felt that Paul (the director and writer of Let There Be Blood) had taken the seed of an idea and pursued it step by step all the way through very honestly, and without blinking to the outrageous conclusion of that life.
Q: You have done The Last of the Mohicans, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York and now this. It would seem that you are attracted by a certain “spirit” which is intrinsic to the American experience.
DDL: It’s not something I’d be conscious of, necessarily. There must be some part of me that is intrigued, perhaps as an outsider, by the discovery of the New World, but I’ve never made the connections between one story and another.
There is something at work, but I don’t know what it is. In a certain kind of way I kind of prefer to leave some things unexamined. I enjoy the mystery of it.
I don’t know what it is I’m responding to, I just know that I am.
Q: Daniel Plainview’s experience has a very strong physical dimension to it. He literally dug himself into the ground, looking for silver and for oil. Is it something that interests you as an actor?
DDL: He did dig himself into the ground and only just dug himself out again! I suppose that attracted me, but again, I never separated that part of his life from any other part.
That was one important aspect of the entirety of his experience, and certainly I feel it’s something that remains with him, as I’m sure it did with many men that would have had a similar experience beginning with a pick ax and a shovel, living like an animal underground and for the lucky ones achieving that unimaginable wealth that they were in pursuit of.
I think many of them, even after they were in a position to stand and watch others doing that work that they’d begun themselves, nonetheless felt the need to stay close to the soil, to be part of it. It’s almost an animalistic connection.
And I think very often they’ve been brutalized by the experience as well, to the extent that work becomes an end in itself. They can’t truly enjoy the fruits of their labors because the labor itself is where they get their satisfaction from.
Q: You got the script two years before shooting started. What kind of work you and Paul Thomas Anderson did within that time?
DDL: Paul and I had many conversations, which would have been more about the story rather than the specific work. I recognize that his work involves a very different kind of responsibility to mine.
To some extent we both work very closely and in isolation as well, so our conversations would have been about the telling of that story rather than particular discussions about character, which he would have more or less expected me to do, to just get on with it. And that’s what I prefer to do anyhow. But we were very closely in touch during that time.
Q: Can you describe the scope of your research?
DDL: I suppose I did the most obvious things. In the case of something like this, you need to discover a period of history that hasn’t been part of your experience, a particular society that existed at that time, and the day to day way of life of those people within the society, and the smaller society that those men, the prospectors, created for themselves.
There is a lot to be found and discovered. There is a lot available. That’s the conscious work that’s done. But the most important work is really an act of imagination. And that is something that I prefer to do over a long period of time anyhow.
I like it to work its own way through, almost to the extent that you feel decisions are made in spite of you rather than because you’ve chosen one way as opposed to another.
It may sound as if you are kind of over-mystifying the experience, but I prefer to let it take its own course.
Obviously, you are at work in some way - making decisions, accepting certain things, choosing certain things and denying certain other things, but I try not to think about it very much.
It’s a strange balance you have to create, I suppose, between the conscious mind and the imagination, which works in a very different way. I think the intellect, for whatever part it plays in the whole process, has to always be of service of something more important than that, which is finally an act of imagination.
Q: I understand John Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre was a point of reference…
DDL: That's a great film! Walter Huston is the man to watch in that. He’s endlessly fascinating in that.
Q: I thought (your) Plainview reminded me of a certain whimsical quality he had on that movie…
DDL: Yes, but there is also gamesmanship as well. And I think (for Plainview) that’s a very important part of it: the game of it, the game to be played for its own sake.
You’ve just made me think more about Walter Huston. What’s wonderful about him in Treasure is that he has the same fever (Bogart and) those other guys have, and yet some part of him understands the absurdity of it as well.
When all that gold dust gets scattered to the wind it’s actually a great delight to him. And that’s one of the things I love most about it.
He’s both part of that world, but at the same time he’s risen in consciousness above it, which isn’t something that Plainview ever achieves. But I love that in Walter Huston’s character.
Q: David Denby, on The “New Yorker”, has found parallels between Plainview’s character and experience and Moby Dick’s Capitain Ahab. It seems to me he is quite accurate. What do you think?
DDL: Ahab? Well it was very interesting that Denby would remark upon that. Certainly I wouldn’t have any conscious connection. I certainly see what he’s getting at, and Moby Dick as a novel has been a great influence on me. As a work of literature, I think it’s one of the most richly rewarding books that I’ve ever read.
Q: In terms of the influence it had on you as an actor?
DDL: I can’t say. Who knows? Because everything that influences your life, influences your work. Certainly the creation of Ahab is quite a remarkable creation. But the book in its entirety made a great impact on me.
I’m not sure that I actually re-read the book before we started work. I guess I did, though. Who knows that it didn’t find its way through.
Q: Paul Thomas Anderson described the film to me as “a nasty fight between two brothers”. Do you agree?
DDL: That seems like a good way to put it. I’d never put it that way myself, but yeah, I see that. It’s a mortal combat between two people that recognize the kinship that they belong to the same family. Yes, there is certain truth to that.
Q: What does Plainview dislikes so much about religion?
DDL: Well I don’t think he’s got anything against religion so much as he’s got something against anything that he can recognize and isolate as falsehood in another man.
In this case, it is Eli's spiritual fraudulence that Plainview sets to work on. And I dare say his fight with Eli could have been over just about anything else that he’d recognized.
If Eli’s front had been that of a man with a different set of beliefs, he could have just as easily destroyed him for that reason as well. It’s the need, I suppose, to reveal the hypocrisy, what he perceives is the hypocrisy in men.
Q: There is a certain purity to itDDL: There is a certain kind of purity, a perverse kind of nobility, I suppose. And most people that are able to do that so astutely, I think, suffer from a certain degree of self-hatred as well. You have to recognize it in yourself to recognize it in others.
Q. In that sense, this film has also a certain elegiac quality. Don’t you think?
DDL: I certainly see the elegiac quality. There is a sadness in that, a great sadness in it: man at his most basic. (It’s a ) difficult thing to do, to reduce a man to his most savage properties. Plainview is a master of it because he’s lived like a savage himself. But there is great sadness in it.
The pursuit is not in itself the pursuit of that, of that dream so many men had. It’s not in itself a morally questionable thing, but the process of that way of life imposed on most of them would have, I think, stripped them very, very bare.
And you can see why Eli has power over many of those men who were living…when we are reduced to a very basic level of existence, of course faith is a great temptation.
I think that’s some part of Plainview’s defiance, is to say, stand alone, don’t reach out for something, because it’s easy, the work is the thing. But that’s the fever of that particular kind of work. I suppose it’s not dissimilar from the particular kind of fever that leads gamblers to ruination.
Q: But Plainview’s fever has a primal, archaic dimension than other obsessions such as gambling don’t seem to have.DDL: Yes, I know what you mean. Maybe it is because of the connection to the earth itself, plunging into the surface of the earth for riches, maybe it’s the most primal of all things.
Q: You had worked with Paul Dano before, on The Ballad of Jack and Rose. Did you suggest his name to Paul Thomas Anderson when the need to substitute an actor arose?
DDL: I didn’t need to because Paul had seen the film and was already very keen that we should meet him, and of course I was too.
I had a wonderful working experience with him before and I suppose in certain cases it could be difficult to try to discover a completely different world and a relationship within that story with somebody that you are familiar with in a different kind of a way. But Paul, it’s just so clear that he knows how to discover the life that he’s looking for. He’s perfect.
Q: Do you perceive this film as a Western?
DDL: A lot of the questions I’m answering with hindsight because I would never choose to objectify my feelings about the story in that way. My response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s story was a very interior one. And so I would never be able to step outside of it during that period of time to be able to access it as being one thing or another. I just felt that it was something to do.
Q: Was there a detail, a piece of information that was most important for you in finding Plainview’s character?
DDL: Just as when he came to me in the form of Paul’s writing, it was his life in its entirety that appealed to me. Whenever I go to work, I always prefer to try to discover that life. Of course there are moments when you are working on one thing as opposed to another. There may be skills to be learned.
There may be certain aspects in life that are particularly elusive that you have to make a much greater effort to try to understand, but nonetheless I would always try to let that life reveal itself during a period of time in its entirety, in other words, not to dismember it into its various parts and then put it back together again. I couldn’t work like that.
I choose to remain very unconscious during the period of time that I’m working of the development of characters. I can’t sort of access from one moment to the other whether I’m finding what I’m looking for.
It’s really more to do with the feeling. Just as in the street sometimes you can look at another human being and for a certain moment, you may be wrong, but you feel strongly that you understand the world through that person’s experience. And I suppose it’s that that you are looking for, just that sense that you rediscover the world through a different pair of eyes.
Q: Maybe because you have chosen to do only so many films, there is a perception that it’s very hard for you to commit to a project, almost a hardship. Yet, each time, watching you in your new role one can only think that you must enjoy working very deeply.
DDL: Deciding to do a film it’s actually very easy. It’s always very clear to me. When the need is there it’s irresistible. When it’s not there….. Well, there is certainly no reason to do any creative work unless you have a compelling need to do it. It’s a very joyful process for me.
But bear in mind in the case of this it’s been three years, from beginning to end. That’s quite a big piece of my life that was given over to this. And so if I have a reluctance it’s more to do with the question: are you prepared to give yourself over to this for however long it takes?
It’s right to ask that question. I think it’s important, but it’s always with great joy that I go to work. Always, always, yeah.
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