Situated above Ronan Day-Lewis, the writer/director of “Anemone” and son of Rebecca Miller and the film‘s star Daniel Day-Lewis, in his apartment is a painting of a luminescent creature you’ll meet in the film during a particularly dreamy sequence. Day-Lewis, 27, is a painter himself, having shown work in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and beyond. He spoke to me over Zoom from his place in New York, where he just premiered “Anemone” at the New York Film Festival.
The 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 directing debut off the ground, as a former English soldier who served during the Troubles of Northern Ireland — deployed to neutralize conflict between the IRA and paramilitary groups — and is haunted by his memories. Twenty years prior to the present day of the movie, Ray Stoker (Day-Lewis) abandoned his family to live off the grid in a hut in the woods after a scarring incident during the conflict, which pitted Catholics against Protestants within Northern Ireland, and union loyalists against republicans. He’s also evolved into an alcoholic recluse who can barely take care of himself due to traumas he shared with his brother Jem (Sean Bean) at the literal hands of a Catholic priest.
Now married to Ray’s former girlfriend (Samantha Morton) and raising Ray’s haunted son (Samuel Bottomley), Jem shows up at Ray’s doorstep (of sorts, as his living quarters are truly a shack) hoping to bring him out of the woods, back to the city, and to talk some sense into his kid who’s headed into the military and recently attacked a fellow serviceman. The Day-Lewises shot the film primarily on location in Wales and in Manchester, England last year, and it’s now headed into awards season touting Day-Lewis’ triumphant return to the screen. (It’s a searing performance built on a series of extended monologues in which Ray slowly starts to reveal the nature of his wounds.) Will we see him in another movie? That’s unclear, as Day-Lewis wouldn’t have re-emerged without the assist from his son, with whom he co-wrote the script over a period of years.
Below, IndieWire talks to Ronan Day-Lewis about his father’s infamous Method acting style (which involves Daniel never breaking character on or off the set), how the mercurial English weather ended up dictating parts of the story, and avoiding the pitfalls of flashbacks to tell a dense story steeped in recent history.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
IndieWire: Daniel Day-Lewis is known for staying in character even off-set throughout a production. What does that look like when you’re also his son and you’re already spending a lot of time together outside shooting hours?
Ronan Day-Lewis: Some of my experiences of seeing him work were as a kid, and at that point, he would have a bit more of a divide when he would come home because it would be confusing for a five-year-old. [Laughs] This was maybe the most I had seen him really staying in character on- and off-set in all the times I’ve seen him work, and it was pretty amazing to see it from that different vantage point.
What does that look like off-set?
It was mainly to do with his voice and manner of speech and phrasing of things. It’s kind of a strange double thing because it’s still him, but it’s almost like two people superimposed over each other at times when we weren’t on set and dialed into that world.
But it’s not like you’re out to dinner, and he’s ordering off the menu in the voice of Ray Stoker. Or is it?
It actually was like that in this case. [Laughs]
The writing process took a while as you’re also a busy painter with work being exhibited during that time. You were able to write the script in bursts going back to the pandemic. Did the germ of the idea begin with you? And at one point did it become clear your father would also act in this film?
It’s hard to pinpoint because, for years, I had an independent inclination to do something about brothers. I was writing other scripts and never found a way into it because I was thinking it might have been a coming-of-age story 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 point, we weren’t talking about a specific idea. A couple years later, it turned out he had this fascination with brotherhood, and the silence and negative space between siblings. Once we locked into that, the ball just started rolling very slowly. We didn’t go in with any kind of outline. It was very intuitive.
How did Plan B, with producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, become the chosen partners for this film?
My dad’s dear friend and agent, Tor Belfrage, put us in touch with them early on. She spoke so highly of them as collaborators and the way they foster filmmakers and the spirit by which they operate. Obviously, the films that they have produced were some of my favorite films, “The Tree of Life” and “Moonlight,” and so many others. We were pretty nervous to send them the script because not many people had read it at that point, and they just really understood the film’s blend of the intimate and mythic, and the way that those can dovetail together in a way that was so encouraging to us. We weren’t sure at that point whether that would feel harmonious or if those elements would clash for other people.
When Jem locates his brother, Ray has been living off the grid for 20 years, having fled the family nest. How much of the production mirrored that off-the-gridness of the story? You shot those sequences on location in Wales.
We were really reckoning with real, natural environments and weather, and that became a huge part of the film’s visual identity. There are moments of wind written into the script, but certain things happened when we were shooting that ended up making the wind into a far bigger character and narrator in the film. The combination of being forced to embrace the chaos of those environments — we were shooting in the woods, when it rained the mud was just insane, so we were trudging through mud — and then we shot in this abandoned copper mine where we were wading through knee-deep water that was filled with jagged rocks. But also having the artifice of the soundstage was really important. Chris Oddy, the production designer, meticulously recreated the hut on the stage down to matching floorboards with similar blemishes in similar places to have this seamless match. There were certain shots that required moving a wall or operating a crane inside the hut that ended up allowing it to go beyond the claustrophobia of the literal setting and giving it a bit more of that cosmic background.
This movie asks you to listen closely to the dialogue, as there are a number of extended monologues that provide historical backdrop. But there’s no visual affirmation in the form of flashbacks. Were you tempted to include them?
That was definitely what we were wrestling with during the entire writing process. So much of the film almost takes place before the film begins, so much of the story, so much is about the weight of the past on the present. That ended up meaning that the performances had a huge brunt to bear in terms of communicating not just 20 years but these entire lives within this moment in the present. Whether or not to have a flashback, we always knew we wanted to avoid them at all costs because it felt like somehow it would just betray the tone of the film in a way that we couldn’t quite put our fingers on. There are moments you could call flashbacks, but they have a slightly hallucinatory quality and the kind of wooziness of a distant, fragmented memory. It was important to me that when the past came in, it wasn’t in a literal way because that felt like an easy way out.
You lived in Ireland for a decent stretch of time as a kid. What brought you there?
My dad was living in Ireland by the time he met my mom. She’s a New Yorker, so they ended up basically striking a deal where the first half of me and my brother’s upbringing would be in Ireland, and then we’d 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 Catholic school there, and we learned about the Troubles, of course, and they really loomed large in my imagination since then, which was part of the reason why we gravitated toward that as a historical framework for the film.
My understanding of the Troubles came out of film and television. It’s not often taught, at least it wasn’t in my American school.
Neither when I was here. It was really important to me that you didn’t have to know anything about the Troubles to watch the film. I don’t want to take away from the specificity of that as the past of the characters, but the film also has that mythic quality … among many other things, I think of it as an antiwar film. I felt like the more that the details of the conflict are revealed in this seemingly incidental way, the less an audience would feel they need to understand something where they don’t come in with a preset knowledge. At a certain point we were like, do we need to put in title cards to give some backstory? It always felt like the film rejected anything that felt too explanatory like that. It felt like it betrayed the spirit of the silence and the mystery of the film and the more spiritual aspect of it.
You’ve directed a short and have done some music, but you are foremost a painter. Are you hoping to continue doing both, or do you want to pivot toward filmmaking now?
If I get the chance, I would love to make more films and also continue painting in equal capacity. That would be the dream. I was working on a show of paintings that just opened, which I was making during the edit, and that was a really intense experience. I’m glad it worked out that way this time because they ended up influencing each other in mysterious ways, but I was basically working full days on the film and going upstairs and painting until late at night. They gave me this little room above the cutting room to paint in, which was amazing. Then, on the weekends, painting, and it ended up feeling like in the future, I need to plan my time better if I do end up continuing with both. [Laughs] It was cool to see how they could coexist so closely.
I don’t know if you’ve seen “All That Jazz,” but that is a cautionary tale about multitasking. Roy Scheider’s character is mounting a Broadway production while editing a Hollywood movie, and it takes him down.
I’ve been meaning to watch that forever. [In my case, that experience] is I think a one time thing.
“Anemone” opens in theaters from Focus Features on Friday, October 3, 2025.