You’d think just having his father in his debut would be sufficient, but Ronan Day-Lewis had access to another legend: Steven Spielberg, who directed Daniel Day-Lewis to his third Oscar with Lincoln.
Ronan Day-Lewis — who is making his directorial debut with Anemone — told Entertainment Weekly that Spielberg was generous enough to lend support and check in on the technical aspects of the film. “This is pretty crazy, but I got to talk a bit with Steven Spielberg, who’s a family friend. He checked in a couple of times, and he was really, really supportive, and we talked through things. He was asking like, ‘What lenses are you using?’ and stuff like that. It was pretty amazing to check in like that after a week of shooting. Obviously, he is a hero to me.”
Ronan Day-Lewis also said that he tried getting a project going with his father before, although it took quite some to find the perfect subject matter. “Years ago, way before we ever talked about doing anything together, I had this idea of wanting to write something about brotherhood. I have two brothers, and the archetype of that relationship was something I was really interested in, but I couldn’t really figure out the way in. Then, when my dad and I started talking about doing something together, we couldn’t really land on something. And then it turned out that he had separately had this inclination to do something about brothers. That was a lightning rod for us.”
That lighting rod, Anemone, finds DDL out of his second “retirement,” although the actor has recently admitted he should have never announced it. It’s his first film since Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2017 and only his second film since working with Spielberg on Lincoln five years prior to that.
Ronan Day-Lewis’s Anemone hits theaters on October 3rd and also stars Sean Bean and Samantha Morton.
Of Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning roles — Lincoln, There Will Be Blood and My Left Foot — which do you think is his best? Do you see him getting any notable awards attention for Anemone?
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