The Odd Couple Gets Even

A small, historical milestone was reached last weekend, all but unnoticed. It was the opening of an English-language film that was made, for the first time since the movies began to talk, by a woman directing her husband in a leading role. While it hardly warrants a commemorative edition of Ms. magazine, the news will be greeted in many households across the land with a certain amount of wry satisfaction.

The couple in question, Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller, have pretty good ancestry for revolutionaries. He’s the son of British Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon. She’s the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. They met in 1996 at an early screening of The Crucible, a film of her father’s play. By that time Day-Lewis, already an Oscar-winning actor (for My Left Foot), had been offered, and had turned down, a role in one of Rebecca Miller’s movies. Their new film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose–an unusual love story between a hippie father and daughter who seem to teeter on the brink of incest as they try to create a Utopian life on an island in the Atlantic–is the very one he rejected.

To see them together now is to wonder a little that they were ever apart. Day-Lewis, 47, and Miller, 42, are

striking and strikingly similar with their long, lanky limbs, dark hair and sparkling blue-green eyes. She’s wearing the hip-girl wardrobe: designer jeans, a floaty blue top, and turquoise earrings that peek through her long hair. His shaggy hair and flowing beard are tinged with gray. He has tucked the curls partly under a knit cap, giving him the appearance of a trendy mad fisherman. His corduroy pants, tapering to his ankles, look either vintage ’80s or just unfashionable–it’s hard to tell. His sweatshirt sleeves are pulled up to his elbows to show off the intricate tattoo that covers his right forearm, a mix of Pueblo tribal bands embellished with dots and a central star motif that he designed.

Day-Lewis also carries the tattoo of his own legend: the actor who goes beyond method to near madness, so encased in his films’ characters that he stays in them on the set and off; the star who takes off years at a time to work as a cobbler. (Before the new film was shot, he helped build the house Jack and Rose live in. During shooting, he lived by himself in a shack on the beach.) Yet, for a reputed recluse, Day-Lewis is very chatty. He and Miller are easy with each other, looking at each other as they speak, seeming at times as if they were on a date rather than being interviewed. The only time silence descends is when talk turns to parenting. Miller’s father Arthur is recently deceased. But in an interview, as in a play or film, the silences can be as eloquent as the words.

WHERE DID JACK AND ROSE COME FROM?

REBECCA MILLER: Ten years ago I had written a film called Angela, and there was a young girl, 6 years old, and her father who are sort of left in the end. I wanted to write something else, and I thought to myself, Ten years later, where would they be? What kind of relationship would they have? From there they kind of diverged and became these other characters. This screenplay was kind of special in the sense that it really kept evolving and changing over a decade. Even when we were shooting I was making significant changes to the script.

HOW WAS THAT, TO BE WORKING ON SOMETHING THAT’S CHANGING?

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS: When you’re really inside of something, certain changes kind of demand themselves. Rebecca says she made substantial changes, and to her they probably seem to be, but I read the first draft nine years ago, and in essence I think it is exactly that same story.

RM: [Laughing] I think there were 33 drafts of the screenplay, and each time I changed something I would think it was a monumental change. [To Day-Lewis] I would show you, and you were trying to identify where it was and I would think it was earthshaking.

WHERE DID THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND THE PARENTAL ISSUES COME FROM?

RM: I grew up in the country. And maybe it was in the air at the time, but I was very concerned about the environment at a very early age.

DDL: It was in the air? [He starts laughing, which starts her laughing] She used to go around telling people to switch their engines off in parking lots.

RM: When we were all waiting for the bus in the freezing cold in Connecticut, I would go around and knock on people’s windows and tell them to turn their engines off because they were polluting. I was like 7 or 9, and they were just hating me, I’m sure, going “Oh, no, here she comes.” But I was really concerned. And I was also concerned about the land. So the seeds were sown in my childhood. With the parental issues [Pause] I guess I don’t know. [Shrugs] That’s a big question. [Silence]

TELL ME ABOUT PLAYING JACK.

DDL: Well, I recognized him in a certain way. Not because I would have rubbed shoulders with him ’cause I’d have been too small. It was a great time in the early ’60s in England before everything kind of went crazy. It was an astonishing thing to see these exotic creatures flying around the place. Even though they seemed incredibly benevolent, there was a certain kind of danger as well, because they seemed to be taking something on, taking the whole society on. So I loved that about Jack. Even in his frailty, there was something I found compelling about him. Even though he has totally f______ up his greatest responsibility of his life, which is to raise his daughter. He tried to raise her in his own image and protect her from all these things that she ought to have been examining herself.

WHY DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE NOSTALGIA FOR THE ’60S, BOTH OF YOU?

DDL: It’s interesting, isn’t it? And we’re not alone. We should have a 1-800 number. [Laughing] It was a beautiful, hopeless cause, and the fact that it seemed … I don’t know.

RM: Innocent and free.

DDL: Emerging out of that grayness of the ’50s, with unimaginable restrictions.

RM: For me, it was my older brother, him being in the commune scene, being friends with Ken Kesey, and there were these sweet girls who used to breast-feed their babies upstairs in my grandmother’s room. And the guys with their fringe jackets. For me, the Garden of Eden is a story about nostalgia.

DDL: I think nostalgia is a primal emotion.

WHAT MADE YOU STAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF JACK ON YOUR HUBBY HERE?

[Both laughing] RM: Well, I always thought he’d be perfect for the part, even before I met him. I just had the sense he would make him both conflicted and dangerous and yet completely lovable. He becomes the person so completely that whatever is heroic or good

DDL: Stoppppp! [Groans]

RM: Whatever is heroic or good in the character usually rises to the top. In Jack’s case he could have been very irritating. [Softly, looking at him] But he wasn’t. O.K., I’ll shut up.

DDL: I’m only irritating in real life.

RM: Yeah, in real life … aargh.

HOW WAS COLLABORATING? WERE THERE SURPRISES?

DDL: I don’t remember any surprises. It was just exactly how I imagined it would be. Better perhaps.

RM: It was more fun than I thought. I knew it was going to be exciting. Almost dangerous. It was really fun to talk about it at night, to have that together to do. We did of course talk between takes and that stuff, but Daniel had his reality to keep intact and I had to watch out for everything.

DDL: Filmmaking is utter madness. The fact that any film ever works on any level is kind of a miracle.

DID YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE WAY YOU SPEAK TO EACH OTHER? WERE YOU ABLE TO USE YOUR SHORTHAND FROM LIFE TOGETHER?

DDL: The shorthand was so short that when we got to the set we were almost monosyllabic. In an ideal way, not in a noncommunicative way. We didn’t have to say very much, and that’s how it should be. You have to resist the temptation to talk stuff out a lot. And I try to encourage other actors to do it too, without any cruelty.

RM: What I’ve learned about directing is how to say the least amount you can say and find a way to communicate that to the actors. I only cast people that I trust. And then there is a mutual trust. Because it’s not that I’m not composing shots, but without the actor I really don’t have anything. All my work is about character. It’s all about what goes on behind the eyes of an actor. If the actor feels hemmed in or emotionally stopped up because of what I’m doing, then I’m actually killing myself as a filmmaker.

WHY DO YOU DO THIS WORK? WHAT DOES IT DO FOR YOU?

DDL: You can’t really decide to do that work. You need to at least believe that you are chosen in some way. Not as in the chosen ones but that the work has chosen you, that you can’t avoid doing it.

RM: It’s a deep and primitive pleasure I get. Almost the way I felt when I was a little girl and I was deep into playing.

DDL: That’s good.

RM: I remember that feeling of being totally inside it. And it’s that kind of pleasure.

DDL: It’s true it’s a game. And it can be a very sophisticated one. But often it’s not.

I WAS IMPRESSED WITH THE TATTOO AND WONDERED IF IT WAS YOURS OR JACK’S.

DDL: Well, it was Jack’s, but I inherited it.

RM: He got it for Jack.

WHY?

DDL: I like real things.

YOU DO KNOW THEY CAN DO QUITE REALISTIC FAKE TATTOOS.

DDL: I know. But it bugs me. It’s like you’re already reminded of the artifice of the whole thing you’re entering into.

RM: I love it.

WILL YOU WORK TOGETHER AGAIN?

DDL: We can’t say for sure. I would do it in a shot. But I think we’d almost be even more shy about it the next time because when you’ve had a wonderful experience you so do not want to put a blemish on it. But you can’t think like that. We’ve just got to share the same madness for a few moments, and it will happen. That’s all it comes down to.

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