Rebecca Miller and her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, are working together for the first time. They tell Michael Dwyer about their film and about dividing their time between Ireland and the US. Portrait: Alan Betson
Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller are sitting in a Dublin hotel suite. They have been married since 1996, and their first film together, The Ballad of Jack & Rose, opens this month. She wrote and directed it, and he plays the male lead, an ailing middle-aged idealist living on an island with his 17-year-old daughter. Day-Lewis and Miller met when he was working on The Crucible, the film version of the play by her father, Arthur Miller, who died last year. They have two sons, Ronan and Cashel, and divide their time between Co Wicklow and New York.
As we settle down to talk, I mention that I travelled to meet them by Luas.
Daniel Day-Lewis: The Danny Day. Wasn't it a toss-up between that and the Jerry Lee? But it's tremendously flattering.
Rebecca Miller: Although it's becoming unglued, which is a little disturbing, isn't it?
Day-Lewis (laughing): Do you think there's some connection there?
Have you been on it?
Miller: I took it. It was great. There's a northern- European feel to it.
Day-Lewis: It's a relief to have a tram named after you rather than a public toilet.
So how was it to work together for the first time?
Miller: We worked on it for so long beforehand, which you would never do with an actor you weren't living with. It was so collaborative that we didn't have to say very much to each other when we started shooting. It felt like we were both having ideas together.
Daniel, how does Rebecca compare to Jim Sheridan or Martin Scorsese as a director?
Day-Lewis: I had a chance to watch Rebecca working when she made Personal Velocity. I came back from eight months of shooting Gangs of New York, and I saw her tell three stories in just a three-week shoot. I must say it was the most delicious antidote to that whole experience on Gangs, not that that wasn't very rewarding in so many ways. I got a strong sense from watching her working - and it's the same with the other people I've most enjoyed working with, Martin and Jim - that the word "director" is misleading in itself. What the best directors do is to create a field where everybody senses the freedom to do the best work they can and a sense of openness. A director often doesn't know what an actor needs to look for, but neither do they have to be in control of that. A lot of directors get into that line of work maybe for the wrong reasons - they are really in the business of manipulation - and that to me seems self-defeating. Rebecca is not one of those. In fact she relishes working with not just actors but everyone on the set. She has the strength of self-possession not to be threatened by that. She will guide them if they need that, and she will leave them alone if that's what they need.
Miller: Probably the most important thing I've learned is what not to say, although the temptation is always there to share all your thoughts with an actor.
Day-Lewis: Especially after a couple of Americanos!
Miller:Exactly. The main thing for me is trying to create an atmosphere of trust and freedom.
Day-Lewis: One of the great hazards of all creative working situations is that each one among us is going to have a private, personal anxiety about this unknown thing that is the work that lies ahead. With each individual scene you have some clues, but it's as yet to be revealed. The most obvious way of relieving that anxiety is to talk things out. You may feel better for it, but then you can give into that temptation to define things that should remain absolutely untouched. In describing it, you've lost it.
Miller: I experimented with myself in a way by acting in a few movies. I know that feeling of what it was like to have someone kill whatever, in my case, slender abilities were inside of me. If too much is said, or the wrong thing is said, it just shrinks up like a piece of paper too close to the flame.
Rebecca sent you the script before the two of you ever met?
Day-Lewis: Yes. I had finished working on something at the time, and I felt I wasn't what she needed in that moment. I found the script intriguing, and compelling as a beautiful piece of writing, which is unusual in a script, and the characters already had some life on the page. There was so much I liked about it, but I recognised immediately what its demands would be. Looking back, I think it would have been a mistake for me to do it then, because I had no real understanding of parenthood then.
Miller: When I first wrote it, it was called Rose and the Snake, because I identified more with Rose, the daughter. Then, as I became a parent and started to look at it from the point of view of the protector, the script started to shift, and it became Jack and Rose's story.
But you've kept the snake in the film, which adds to the movie's sense of a Garden of Eden where Jack and Rose are, in a way, the Adam and Eve surrogates.
Day-Lewis: It was like that on Prince Edward Island, off Nova Scotia, where we made the film.
Miller: It felt like the end of the earth.
It's a very rare opportunity to be able to make a film in such privacy.
Day-Lewis: That was true in a practical sense and in a symbolic sense. To be able to be on an island to do that work was an ideal situation. Everything gets distilled somehow.
You haven't made a movie on that scale since My Left Foot.
Day-Lewis: And I loved having that experience again, to be able to work quickly and very intensely with a small group of people, and where there was nowhere to hide and everyone was contributing something every moment of every day. Everyone was interested in the story we were telling and very happy to be working on it. You lose that, and it's through no one's fault, when you're on a big production. Why the hell should everybody care in the same way as you do? The more money that's floating around, the more people are looking at each other and wondering if they're getting more or less. And a lot of one's energy when working on a big scale goes into closing off that peripheral vision, the awareness of all the irrelevancies that are blocking off one's area of focus. That's wasted energy, really, that could be used more productively. There's so much wastage on a big set that it's obscene.
Miller: There was something very special for all of us to be working together on that island. We were all living together in communal houses. Daniel was on his own in his little cabin.
And Daniel got actively involved in constructing that set.
Day-Lewis: It's the second time I've done that, and in both cases it was for a very particular reason. It was the same for The Crucible. It gave me a real sense of belonging in that place.
It's quite scary in the new film when Daniel takes off his shirt and we realise just how ill the character is.
Miller: You can really see his organs, and even the outline of his kidneys. Terrifying!
Since Robert De Niro piled on the pounds for Raging Bull, and up to recently, when George Clooney did it for Syriana, there has been a media preoccupation with actors gaining or losing weight for movies.
Day-Lewis: To me, all those questions were asked and answered after Raging Bull. It's all part of the work. You do it if you have to, if it helps to tell the story, and if you can't, you don't. They are really obsessed with it in America, and how many pounds you gained or lost. I wouldn't want to be an actress. That's for sure.
There are so many myths about you getting into character for movies and taking very long breaks between making movies.
Day-Lewis: There was a break of about five years after I did The Boxer, but most of what was said was very misleading. It implied that I was moving away from films, retreating from them. From my point of view, it's just all part of the same life. I've had the feeling that I was moving towards other things rather than away from films, and the two lives are absolutely interconnected. I couldn't manage one without the other. They rely upon each other. And I love watching other people's movies.
Miller: Before we had kids we often watched three movies a day together. We can't watch movies during theday now, unless it's Harry Potter.
Going back to your own childhood, Daniel, and coming back to Ireland so often since then, you must have observed a great deal of change.
Day-Lewis: I remember Dublin very well as a child, when it felt almost like a Dickensian city. I could never have foreseen - as, I'm sure, most people couldn't - the change that's taken place and is still taking place in this country. Of course, there are a lot of wonderful things that go with it. The hard part is that, in the frenzy that takes over during any economic boom, everyone is rushing helter-skelter towards something that is unforeseeable, and it's not until the dust settles that you will know what the country will become. You can't put the brakes on. There's no vision driving it. But if you become an impediment to that, you're interfering with the hopes of people that in generations past would have had little hope except to look for their fortunes elsewhere. It's complicated. The European Union is an added complication, because not only does one have progress, but one feels the need to be seen to be progressive and to be part of a modern society. One of the great dangers of the European community is that we're applying all kinds of rules and regulations that just don't necessarily fit in the individual countries.
Rebecca, how does living in Wicklow compare to spending most of your life in New York?
Miller: It's completely different, of course, but I love the wildness of the sky and the feeling of living up in the hills. There's something beautiful about that. I grew up in the country, in a farming town in Connecticut, so it's not all that different from that. But it took me a while to adjust to it again after living in New York and being used to so many things going on around me. I miss being able to go out the door and just walking down the street to get whatever I need. Then again, in terms of writing, there's a lot to be said for the quiet. And the kids really love it. It's great for them at this age. As long as I know I'm going back to New York and I'm going to make films there, then it's fine. . . One of the things I didn't like about growing up in the country was that I think I was out of touch with reality in a way. I had no street smarts at all. I was so much younger than my years, and I would like our kids to be a little bit more robust.
Day-Lewis: I'll tell you one thing, having been through it in southeast London - most of what you learn by necessity on the streets is through experiences that are more or less rather shocking. You protect your kids from that for as long as you can, until a time when they are more able to deal with it.
You were just 12 when you acted in your first film, Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Day-Lewis: It's a fantastic film. At the time I was a choirboy in the same church I come out of in the film, and then I start scratching all those cars with broken bottles. It was funny, but I didn't meet the director, John Schlesinger, again for about 15 years. It was at the Edinburgh festival, when we were showing My Beautiful Laundrette. I thought that was funny, because he must have thought I had gone from being a small hooligan to being a big hooligan with no other trajectory in between.
Rebecca, you're working on a novel. Will it become a film, as Personal Velocity did?
Miller: I hope so, but it's too early to say. There will be a few nice parts for women in it.
And for Daniel?
Day-Lewis (laughing): As a woman!
And you are going to star in There Will Be Blood, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
Day-Lewis: He's very special. His script, as a piece of work in its own right, is beautiful.
You'll play an oil prospector in the e0 arly 20th century.
Day-Lewis: Yes, and there will be blood.
The Ballad of Jack & Rose opens on March 31st