"The Ballad of Jack and Rose" follows the story of Jack (Day-Lewis), a widowed, terminally ill father raising his teenage daughter on an isolated island at the site of what was once a thriving commune. Sheltered from the outside world, Rose (Camilla Belle) and Jack share everything and have only each other to depend upon. Their idyllic situation changes when Jack, sensing the end isn't far away, invites Kathleen (Catherine Keener) and her two teenage boys to move in and help take care of the house and 16 year-old Rose.
INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL DAY-LEWIS ('Jack'):
Where have you been the last year or two? It seems so quiet in your camp.
Not from where I'm standing. (Laughing) It's mayhem in the camp where I'm standing. No, I've been working on this for a long time because I worked on this
through pre-production with Rebecca [Miller], through the filming, through
post-production and now we're finally entering into this stage, the final frontier. So it really does feel like it's taken up two years of our lives.
Of course, we've done lots of other things as well in the meantime, but I started thinking about this and working on this not long after the whole kind of merry-go-around of “Gangs of New York,” and when that finished. So it's not quiet from where I am.
So you didn’t really take any time off between projects?
Well, the thing about this taking time off which apparently...my life doesn't
feel separated, divided into two parts in the way that it apparently seems to
most other people. It's true that I'm not always doing this work, but
whatever I'm doing when I'm not doing this work, from my point of view, seems to be as much a part of this as anything else. I wouldn't really be able to do one without the other. So I don't feel that sense of separation.
It's not that the impulse to hide, that I take myself away or that I'm not actively involved in making movies. It's more to do with the positive need to do something else for a while, to work away at something else. And that's always been true. It's never been not like that. I suppose that maybe I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past. And I try, as much as possible, to honor that bargain that I made with myself that I wouldn't do this work unless I really felt the need to. I just didn't see the point. And yeah, so maybe it appears as if, maybe from the outside, that I do this sort of hit and run and then I flee from the scene of the crime. But it's not like that from my point of view at all.
Is it true you remain in character even when the camera is off?
Well, I don't look at it in that way. I tend to look at it in this way: The
reason that I set about that task in the first place is because I feel like, “So be it. I can't avoid this thing. I'm going to do it.” And my curiosity
sustains me for, certainly for the period of preparation, and for the period of the shoot. I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that
other world long after the film is finished. And having spent that period of time finding a way in and entering into this other world, I see that it's really,
for me, a matter of pleasure to remain within it. I see no reason to look
elsewhere for a while. I mean, why go to all that trouble if you're just going to pop in and out? Do you know what I mean?
But it's all a game. It's a complete illusion, this notion. We create for ourselves this strange delusion that we exchange our lives for someone else's. It is, of course, just a game. You remain, and better remain, at the core ourselves because that's the fuel. Without that there is nothing. But the illusion is everything. I just enjoy kidding myself, I suppose, for a period of time. I suppose that partly the reason why I do love this work is because, in certain periods of time, that other life is more interesting to me. It's certainly interesting enough that it beckons.
PAGE 2: The Road to "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" and Working with Rebecca Miller
