Seven years ago, I recorded my swooning-fanboy professional farewell to Daniel Day-Lewis who at the age of 60 had announced his retirement from movies. He was just going to do Phantom Thread with Paul Thomas Anderson, apparently, and then that would be it.
No. Surely not. I dared to hope that he would change his mind. Now he has dramatically retired from retirement, and is shooting a movie called Anemone, co-starring Sean Bean and Samantha Morton. It should be great news. It is great news. And yet many DDL fans will have woken up this morning, pondering a strange and disturbing dream they’ve had about Jaden Smith, son of Will. Whatever can it mean?
Day-Lewis’s new film is going to be directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis, who has a music video and a short under his belt, and father and son have co-written the script, which is reportedly about the father-son dynamic.
It’s high-risk. Will Smith and his son Jaden have worked together on movies such as The Karate Kid and After Earth and also collaborated on musical projects: the results were mixed, to say the least, although Will did very well in the emotional drama The Pursuit of Happyness, which co-starred Jaden. Kurt Russell has worked with his son Wyatt. Tom Hanks has worked with his sons Colin and Truman and Clint Eastwood has worked with his son Scott. Martin Sheen was directed by his son Emilio Estevez in The Way, and he of course worked with son Charlie Sheen, too. These projects worked out perfectly plausibly. Sofia Coppola endured nepo baby jibes and became one of the most brilliant directors of her generation. Many pundits derided Flag Day, a movie about a complex father-daughter relationship, directed by Sean Penn and co-starring Penn with his daughter Dylan. I myself found it very enjoyable.
It’s pretty clear that working with your children is one thing – actually being directed by them is something else. Any great actor of Day-Lewis’s calibre is bound to occasionally feel that a young, inexperienced director is making a mistake. He might even be upset about it. What happens if that director is your son? Might the actor in this case subconsciously feel that submitting to the director’s view is an Oedipal catastrophe? That really is a tricky father-son dynamic.
Day-Lewis has worked with his nearest and dearest before. In 2005, he starred in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller, in which he played a tough-minded Scottish environmentalist and farmer in the US who has a close relationship with his daughter Rose. It was a curious, uneasy film in some ways, although Day-Lewis was reliably charismatic. If the director was working through her own feelings about her father, Arthur Miller, well, that was a matter of speculation.
Again and again, Day-Lewis has surprised – and thrilled – his public. However difficult it turns out to be, I certainly wouldn’t bet against him doing it again. John Huston directed his father, Walter Huston, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and that was a glorious classic. I’m looking forward to Ronan Day-Lewis’s Anemone already.
