Two years ago, as part of his preparation process to incarnate designer Reynolds Woodcock in Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film, The Invisible Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis attempted to redesign a Balenciaga dress. At that time, he did not imagine that Woodcock would be the last character he would play. He had no way of knowing that this tape would plunge him into such a deep depression that he would eventually announce his intention to retire. On the contrary, he was impatient to fully assume a new cinematographic identity, as he usually does every time he has a new project. To become Woodcock, Day-Lewis, who has already turned 60 years old, began to study fashion show archives from the 40s and 50s, read about the lives of several designers and, most importantly, learned to sew . Over several months, he served as an apprentice to Marc Happel, who is in charge of the costume department of the New York City Ballet, where he carefully observed and then helped to reconstruct the famous Marc Chagall outfits for a production of Stravinski's Firebird. At the end of the ballet season, Daniel realized that he needed to make a piece of haute couture himself, from scratch.
"I saw a photograph of a Balenciaga tube dress, inspired by a school uniform," Daniel Day-Lewis told me on a cold October day. We were in a discreet room at the Marlton Hotel, near the Greenwich Village apartment where he lives with his wife, the filmmaker Rebecca Miller, and with Cashel, 15, the youngest of the two children he has with her (he also has one older , Gabriel Kane, product of his previous relationship with the French actress Isabelle Adjani).
"Balenciaga's dress was very simple. Or at least that seemed, until I faced the problem of how I was going to do it and I noticed that, oh, God, it's something incredibly complicated. " It was not possible for him to borrow the original dress, since it is housed in the Balenciaga cellars in Paris, so Daniel made a sketch of the garment, asked his wife to be the model and wrapped his tall and slim waist with a dense gray wool fabric. "Rebecca was very patient," confessed Day-Lewis with a slight smile. "Both Marc and I worked on our own versions and, finally, we managed to elucidate how it was built, after a process of trial and error". The actor chose a silk lining for the dress, a lilac shade with pink hues that would become the classic color of Woodcock. "Rebecca has worn that dress," she says proudly. "In fact, it's very beautiful."
When he was a teenager and lived in London, Daniel Day-Lewis studied carpentry, and he was more attracted to the idea of becoming an artisan than a furniture designer. At age 19, before being accepted into the Bristol Old Vic Theater School (one of the most renowned drama schools in the United Kingdom), he felt torn between his desire to become an actor or a furniture designer.
Throughout his career, he has always been involved in the interests and physical limitations of each of the characters he has played. Just by reading the beginning of the screenplay for My Left Foot (1989), he was attracted to the main character, Christy Brown, the Irish painter and writer with cerebral palsy. In that first scene, Christy uses her left foot to put a vinyl record on a turntable. The needle jumps and the foot picks it up and gently replaces it on the vinyl. Daniel was sure that he would not be able to execute that movement, but after several weeks of practice - despite a few months in the company of people with cerebral palsy - he was able to move the scene forward in the first shot. Something similar happened when he was preparing the character of Bill "The Butcher" Cutting in Gangs of New York (2002), by Martin Scorsese, because he learned how to throw big and clogged knives with great precision. And practically he designed an oil well like those that proliferated at the beginning of the 20th century, in There Will be Blood (2007).
In order to immerse himself in Reynolds Woodcock's way of thinking, he not only learned the trade of couturier, but he also meticulously invented every aspect of Woodcock's personal wardrobe, from the woolen and cashmere fabrics he selected at the Anderson House. Sheppard, from Savile Row, to the purple socks he ordered from an ecclesiastical store in Rome, or the shoes he ordered made to order at George Cleverley, in London. He did not leave out Woodcock's surroundings: how his house would be decorated, the pens and sketchbooks he would use, what objects he would have on his night table. He chose even the dogs for the character: "I wanted hunting dogs," says Day-Lewis. "I took care of every detail. Surely, I was exasperating. "
The invisible thread is a story that delves into the intimacy of a man obsessed with the creative process. It takes place in London, during the post-World War II period, when England was still struggling to recover from years of devastation and deprivation. Woodcock designs garments for upper-class women and royalty, and spends all her time working. Woodcock is also persecuted by the memory of his mother, for whom he designed a wedding dress -which she wore in his second nuptials- when he was just a little boy. Woodcock meets Alma, another of his muses (played by Vicky Krieps), and she gets to mess up her routine in ways he can not control, but which, in the end, are necessary.