Located above Ronan Day-Lewis, the author/director for ”Anemone“And son of Rebecca Miller and filmS -star Daniel Day-LewisIn his apartment there is a painting of a luminous creature you will face in the film during a particularly dreamy sequence. Day-Lewis, 27, is a painter himself, after showing work in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and then. He spoke to me over Zoom from his place in New York, where he just premiered ”Anemone“At the New York Film Festival.
Drama stars Daniel Day-Lewis, who came out of retirement for his first film role since Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” (2017) to specifically help his son get his debut from the ground, as a former English soldier who served under Northern Ireland’s problems. Twenty years before the film’s day, Ray Stoker (Day-Lewis) abandoned his family to live off the net in a hut in the forest following a scar event during the conflict, which put Catholics against Protestants in Northern Ireland and the Union’s loyalists against Republicans. He has also evolved into an alcoholic individual who can barely take care of himself because of traumas that he shared with his brother Jem (Sean Bean) on the literal hands of a Catholic priest.
Now married to Ray’s former girlfriend (Samantha Morton) and raised Ray’s haunted son (Samuel Bottomley), JEM shows up at Ray’s door (of kind, since his residential neighborhoods are really a shack) in the hope of bringing him out of the forest, back to the city and talking some reason in his children who is on the way to the military. Day-Lewises shot the film mainly on site in Wales and in Manchester, England last year, and it is now on its way into the award season and Touting Day-Lewis’ triumphant Return to screen. (It is a searing performance built on a series of extended monologues where Ray slowly begins to reveal the nature of his wounds.) Will we see him in another movie? It is unclear, since Day-Lewis would not have arisen without helping from his son, with whom he wrote the script together for a period of years.
Below, IndieWire talks to Ronan Day-Lewis about his father’s notorious method game style (which involves Daniel who never breaks character on or outside the set), how the merciful English weather ended up dictating parts of the story and avoiding pitfalls of flashbacks to tell a dense story that was stairs in the latest story.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
IndieWire: Daniel Day-Lewis is known for staying in character even offsets during a production. What does it look like when you are also his son and you already spend a lot of time together outside of shooting hours?
Ronan Day-Lewis: Some of my experiences of seeing him work were like a child, and at that time he would have a little more of a gap when he would come home because it would be confusing for a five year old. (Laughs) This was perhaps the most I had seen him really stay in character and offset at all the times I have seen him work, and it was quite fantastic to see it from the different vantage point.
What does it look like?
It was mainly to do with his voice and ways of speaking and phrasing things. It is a strange double thing because it is still him, but it is almost like two people overlay over each other sometimes when we were not on a set and called into that world.
But it’s not like you are out for dinner, and he orders the menu in the voice for Ray Stoker. Or is it?
It was actually so in this case. (Laughs)
The writing process took a while because you are also a busy painter with work exhibited during that time. You could write the script in showers that went back to the pandemic. Did the idea of the idea start with you? And at one point did it become clear that your father would also act in this movie?
It is difficult to determine because for several years I had an independent inclination to do something for the brothers. I wrote other scripts and never found a way into it because I thought it might have been a story of the coming age that would have been more in my world. When he came to me with the idea that we could try to find something to do together, at that time we didn’t talk about a specific idea. A couple of years later, it turned out that he had this fascination for the Brotherhood and Silence and the negative space between siblings. When we locked it, the ball just started rolling very slowly. We did not go in with any kind of contour. It was very intuitive.
How did Plan B, with producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, became the selected partners for this movie?
My father’s dear friend and agent, Tor Belfrage, put us in contact with them early. She talked so much about them as collaborators and how they promote filmmakers and the spirit they seem. Obviously, the films they have produced some of my favorite films, “The Tree of Life” and “Moonlight” and so many others. We were quite nervous about sending them the script because not many people had read it at that point, and they just understood the film’s mix of the intimate and mythical, and how they can disappoint together in a way that was so encouraging to us. We were not safe at that time if it would feel harmonious or if these elements would collide for other people.
When JEM locates his brother, Ray has lived from the net for 20 years, after moving from the Boet family. How much of the production reflected the history’s off-the-gridness? You shot these sequences in place in Wales.
We really counted on real, natural environments and weather, and it became a huge part of the film’s visual identity. There are moments of wind written into the script, but some things happened when we shot that stopped making the wind a much greater character and storyteller in the film. The combination of being forced to embrace the chaos in these environment-we shot in the forest, when the rained clay was just crazy, so we tangled through clay and then we shot this abandoned copper mine where we watered through knit water filled with tagged stones. But also having the artific from the soundstag was really important. Chris Oddy, the production designer, carefully created the hut on stage down to matching floorboards with similar stains in similar places to have this seamless match. There were some pictures that required to move a wall or use a tap inside the hut that ended so that it could go beyond claustrophobia in the literal environment and give it a little more of the cosmic background.
This movie asks you to listen carefully to the dialogue, as there are a number of extended monologues that provide historical background. But there is no visual confirmation in the form of flashbacks. Were you tempted to include them?
It was definitely what we wrestled with throughout the writing process. So much of the film happens almost before the movie starts, so much of the story, so much is about the importance of the past in the present. It ended by means that the performances had a tremendous bit to carry when it comes to communicating not just 20 years but these whole lives within this moment in the present. Whether we would have a flashback, we always knew that we wanted to avoid them at all costs because it felt like it would in some way just betray the tone in the movie in a way we couldn’t really put our fingers on. There are moments you can call flashbacks, but they have a somewhat hallucinatory quality and the type of wooziness of a distant, fragmented memory. It was important to me that when the past came in it was not literally because it felt like a simple way out.
You lived in Ireland for a decent time as a child. What brought you there?
My dad lived in Ireland when he met my mother. She is a New Yorker, so they basically ended up a deal where the first half of me and my brother’s upbringing would be in Ireland, and then we would move to the states. I was there from seven to 13, but I was born in New York. It was definitely formative years. I went to a Catholic school there, and of course we learned problems, and they were really big in my imagination since then, which was part of the reason why we forced it as a historical framework for the film.
My understanding of the problems came out of film and television. It is not often taught, at least it was not in my American school.
Not when I was here. It was really important to me that you didn’t have to know anything about the problems to watch the movie. I do not want to remove from the specificity of what the characters’ past, but the film also has the mythical quality … among many other things, I think about it as an antiwar movie. I felt more that the details of the conflict are revealed in this seemingly temporary way, the less an audience would feel that they need to understand something where they do not come in with a preset knowledge. At a certain time we were like, do we need to enter title cards to give some backstory? It always felt like the film rejected everything that felt too explanatory. It felt like it betrayed the spirit of the silence and the mystery of the film and the more spiritual aspect of it.
You have directed a short and have made some music, but you are primarily a painter. Do you hope to continue to do both, or do you want to swing against filmmaking now?
If I get the chance, I would love to make more movies and also continue to paint in equal capacity. That would be the dream. I worked on a show of paintings that just opened, as I did during the editing, and it was a really intense experience. I’m glad it worked that way this time because they stopped affecting each other in mysterious ways, but I basically worked all days on the movie and went up and painted until late at night. They gave me this little room above the cutting room to paint in, which was fantastic. Then, on the weekends, the painting, and it ended up feeling like in the future, I have to plan my time better if I stop continuing with both. (Laughs) It was cool to see how they could coexist so close.
I don’t know if you’ve seen “All That Jazz”, but it’s a precautionary story about multitasking. Roy Scheider’s character assembles a Broadway production while editing a Hollywood movie, and it takes him down.
I’ve been thinking of looking at it forever. (In my case that experience) I think a one -time thing.
“Anemone” opens in theaters from focus functions on Friday, October 3, 2025.
