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method man
How Daniel Day-Lewis turned into BAFTA-winning Bill The Butcher in Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York.
Any resemblance between that rather slim, diffident, soft-spoken, shaven-haired actor who walked to the stage to collect the Best Actor BAFTA and the big, brutal, boom-voiced, hairy villain he prize-winningly por- trayed in Gangs Of New York seems almost coincidental.
That’s the way of Daniel Day- Lewis in his rare forays on to the big screen. The way of the chameleon. They’ve become even rarer down the years. Gangs Of New York was his first role in five years and only about his fifteenth film in all, since he first played, uncredit- ed, a posh teenage delinquent in John Schlesinger’s 1971 drama, Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Since The Boxer in 1997, the year after he married Arthur Miller’s filmmaker daughter, Rebecca, Day-Lewis, 45, seemed to show little interest in returning to the cinema. In the end the prospect of re-uniting with direc- tor Martin Scorsese lured him out of semi-retirement.
“I remember that during the shooting of The Age Of Innocence (1993), we all felt amazed at our own good fortune at being able to spend time with Marty. It was a wonderful sense of privilege,” said Day-Lewis.
“Obviously he and I had a wonderful foundation for working together. It goes without saying that I trust him implicitly, and it seemed perfect to be able to work with him again.”
And what better than a colourful character like monstrous Bill ‘The Butcher’ Cutting, alto- gether larger than life than any- thing Day-Lewis had portrayed previously in an award-winning career spanning everything from quadriplegic artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot and fierce fron-
tiersman Hawkeye in Last Of The Mohicans to a wrongfully con- victed IRA suspect in In The Name Of The Father.
In addition to reading books and researching the period Day- Lewis even apprenticed with a butcher to learn the details of Bill’s business. He left no area of Bill’s life unturned. “For my part, in an imag- inative sense, all those doors that have Do Not Enter written on them in bold red letters – I just crashed right through them without knock- ing,” he said of his process.
The deeper he delved into Bill’s personality, the more he found him endlessly fascinating. “Part of my work was to share Bill’s conviction, and conviction is a lot easier to live with than doubt. He’s a man of unassail- able conviction. A very danger- ous state of mind, yet highly enjoyable and strangely relaxing. And, thank God, he has a sense of humour.”
When he followed up his BAFTA award with a Best Actor win in Los Angeles at the Screen Actors’ Guild Awards, he told the audience that he got his inspira- tion from watching On The Waterfront, Night Of The Hunter and all-night showings of the Dirty Harry movies.
“It was like a group of grungy guys would emerge into the half- dawn, bleary-eyed, trying to be loose-limbed and mean and taci- turn,” he added.
Day-Lewis also had very clear notions as to how Bill should look. “Daniel wanted to accentuate his long-ness,” explained costume designer Sandy Powell.
“The character wears a full- length coat in many scenes, a kind of signature garment under which he hides his deadly cutlery belt. The coat accentuated
Daniel’s height and his rail-thin frame, It gave him a spidery look.”
To which was added Scorsese’s desire to make Bill something of a dandy. “A real hooligan dandy”, as Day-Lewis would describe it.
That look was completed with the addition of a luxuriant mous- tache and a glass eye on which is engraved the emblem of the American eagle, befitting the leader of the immigrant-loathing Natives gang.
Then there was the way Bill talked. According to dialogue coach Tim Monich, “Daniel worked very hard on creating a unique manner of speech. He decided that Bill was a very liter- ate person who knew how to read and
write. So what did people read in those days? First of all, the Bible, so Daniel and I read the Bible aloud together, hav- ing the text shape some sounds. We also read Whitman.
“Daniel then wanted to do something different with the rate of speech at which the Butcher spoke. We think of New Yorkers as speaking fast these days, but Daniel didn’t want to do that. He wanted something slow, deliberate. Marty found that very interesting.”
The son of writer C Day Lewis and actress Jill Balcon – and the grandson of Sir Michael Balcon – Day-Lewis has always had a com- bative relationship with acting, whether it’s total immersion or
walking out of a stage perform- ance as Hamlet mid-performance. In a recent Guardian interview with the actor, Simon Hattenstone
wrote: “Day-Lewis says he has always felt compelled and repelled by his profession. He was inspired by what he calls the poetry of the inarticulate. ‘It was Ken Loach and Barrie Keefe and Phil Davis that opened up the world for me before I came across Scorsese and Mean Streets. I thought for the first time that there was a purpose in this goddamn work other than just strutting around and spouting.’”
It was a gentle, clearly con- tented man, a world apart from the fearsome Bill and perhaps a younger Daniel, who collected
profile plus
his second BAFTA (14 years after his first for My Left Foot) on that February night.
Not a word about the work or the character, merely a gracious mention for his fellow nominees, his producers and, of course, “that heavenly man, Martin Scorsese.” Quentin Falk
Photos above: Daniel Day-Lewis with his Bafta for Performance by an Actor in a Leading role and in Gangs
Of New York
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