"Actors should never give interviews. Once you know what colour socks they wear, you'll remember it next time you see them performing, and it will get in the way. It is not in anyone's interest." That's how Daniel Day-Lewis begins an interview, so I guess that Peter Stanford, who conducted this one for the London Telegraph, deserves credit for not shaking his hand and heading off to the library to cobble together quotes from back issues of People. (Stanford: "Can I ask you about your method?" Day-Lewis: "God help you.") Still, for a guy who clearly regards the work of promoting a movie as a regrettable necessity, Day-Lewis sure does seem like an open guy, especially where his work process is concerned. One surprise is that he regards his fine performance in Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being as "a mistake": "If I'd really shut out the din and looked at that script, I'd have known that I wasn't ready for that. I felt I was short-changing them somehow because I was missing the centre of it. It was sliding away from me. . . And apart from anything else, the exploration of sexuality in the film was just — well, I was in no way prepared for how that would feel."
Since then, Day-Lewis has been selective enough about his roles that it was a calculated gamble for Paul Thomas Anderson to write There Will Be Blood with him in mind for the lead — a part that requires Day-Lewis to be onscreen for damn near the movie's entire, long running time — but the gamble paid off. "I'd loved his films," Day-Lewis says of Anderson. "And the idea had occurred to me that we might enjoy getting up to the same kind of mischief, but when this script came it really took me quite by surprise in the most wonderful way. The bag was packed once I'd read it." As for the idea that the movie is meant to be taken as a comment on contemporary events, "Paul's not unaware of what is going on in the world but our focus had to be a much narrower and more selfish one. If you enter into the realm of trying to create a parable or cautionary tale, you've already strayed so far off course that you might as well stay in bed. So no, it was utterly and specifically that man in that story in that place at that time in America's social history." As the actor sees it, the screenwriter "honestly told unblinkingly the story of one man's life from the first scene to this outrageous conclusion. I couldn't begin to imagine where some of that had come from because it didn't always appear to have a logic, and yet it appeared to me to have its own innate logic."