Daniel Day-Lewis delivered himself a knockout blow five years ago after the box-office failure of The Boxer. He announced he’d had enough of acting and withdrew to Florence, Italy, with his new wife, Rebecca Miller. He became a cobbler. That was it, he insisted. Don’t go near him with ideas. Don’t make contact with scripts. Just don’t ask. The fact that he’s back on screen soon as the scene-stealing William Cutting — nickname “Bill the Butcher” — in a potential Oscar-winning role in Gangs of New York seems to suggest you can take Day-Lewis’s protests with a ton of salt. Or cobblers.
But such an impression would be far from the truth, according to the group of decision-makers who have put this film together over the past two years. Its director, Martin Scorsese, describes Day-Lewis by turns as “reluctant”, “impossible” and “a genius”. Harvey Weinstein, chief executive of the film company Miramax, puts it more bluntly: “At first, he told us all to f*** off,” he recalls. But they claim the participation of the 45-year-old actor was so vital to the film’s success that they pursued him from Italy to his main home in Co Wicklow, Ireland, offering every bit of inducement, persuasion and flattery. Even Leonardo DiCaprio, his Gangs co-star, was flown over from LA and reduced to a supporting role of knocking on the Day-Lewis front door to plead the cause.
“This was not easy,” Weinstein recollects, looking irritated at the memory. “Robert De Niro was always the guy who was going to play this part. Then he got involved with a custody battle for his kids, which meant he could not get out of America. As we were due to film in Rome, his deal collapsed. So how do you replace someone like Bobby? You look around, think about it and then realise there’s only Day-Lewis. Yet he’d announced he was finished.”
With preparations well under way for the delayed project — it had been on and off for the previous 10 years and had been Scorsese’s ambition for half his life — DiCaprio poured scorn on the prospect of getting Day-Lewis to change his mind. Weinstein recalls: “He said, ‘You will never get him — let’s go for someone else.’ I said, ‘We are not only going to get him, but you are going to help me.’ So Marty, Leo and I went to work on him.” But there was another factor. The power behind the financing of the $97.5m film was the 45-year-old Londoner Graham King, then president of Initial Entertainment Group, which had raised $65m of the budget. “I could not see De Niro playing that big role,” he tells me, bluntly. “Maybe 10 years ago — but not now. We did not need a big star. What we did need was a great actor. I began to feel instantly better when I heard the name Daniel Day-Lewis.”
Day-Lewis has never done anything by half measures. He taught himself to paint with a brush between his toes for his Oscar-winning performance as Christy Brown in the 1989 film My Left Foot. He slept with a rifle, which he could load and fire on the run, while filming 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans. But his devotion to duty can sometimes run away with him. His stage career ended 12 years ago in an odd fashion. He was playing Hamlet at London’s National Theatre, when he left the stage one night, never to return, claiming he had really seen the ghost of his own father, the late poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. He also became an Irish citizen in 1993 after In the Name of the Father, in which he played Gerry Conlon, wrongly convicted of being an IRA bomber.
Day-Lewis has an obsession with privacy, especially since he married his writer/director wife, Rebecca, 40, the daughter of the American playwright Arthur Miller. He met her in 1995 when preparing the film version of Miller’s play The Crucible. They have just celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary and have two young sons. Weinstein is unapologetic about using Rebecca to get to his prey: “She told me Daniel was on a weekend away from Italy and had returned to Ireland to get something,” he says. “So I caught him, unawares, at the house. He gave me a few choice words. I know he said ‘f*** you’ a lot. But I played on his affection for Marty. Here is this great director — and Daniel worked with him on Age of Innocence — trying to get a film made which has been a lifetime’s ambition.” DiCaprio was then sent in, as the cavalry. “Leo told him, ‘I look up to you — I want to work with somebody I respect,’” says Weinstein. “He made Daniel feel like The Man.” Things took an even stranger turn. “We persuaded him to come to New York to meet Marty in a couple of mafia joints,” he relates. “He finally signed up. But that was not the end of it, because when you get Day-Lewis, you have to deal with other things.”
Those other things manifested themselves over a filming marathon of eight months. On the mile-long set that doubled for mid-19th century New York in the vast Cinecitta studio in Rome, it was discovered, with some alarm, that Day-Lewis did not want to use stuntmen for the violent scenes, particularly when his fiercely protestant Bill the Butcher battles with Irish-American Amsterdam Vallon, played by Di-Caprio. “They would beat each other up,” reports Scorsese. “We could not have that. The stuntmen would do these scenes better and faster and without risk. I’d say to Leo, ‘You cannot do this stunt.’ He would point to Daniel and say, ‘Talk to him.’ I’d then tell Daniel, who would say, ‘I did not sign to do this f***ing movie to let some f***ing stuntguy do my f***ing scenes.’ He would go on and on, you know. Blah, blah. You are dealing with someone who has unbelievable principles. Every actor loves him, and he sets the tone on set. Leo was willing to star and be brilliant, but he would do what Daniel said. So we had eventually to draw a line in the sand and insist on parting them. Otherwise it would have gone too far, and neither man would have been on his feet.”
Scorsese, 60, is still very much on his feet, despite the critical battering he’s taken over delays on Gangs. It is his longest-held ambition, since reading the 1927 factual book of the same name by Herbert Asbury, an ambition that has not cooled between delivering 25 films in the past 30 years, some of which — Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Colour of Money (1986), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995) — have established him as one of the world’s most revered, though still Oscar-less directors. But the Gangs shoot has been long, secretive and riddled with stories of fallouts and behaviour problems. He’s convinced these are minor matters, since the story is big enough to become a film classic.
The historical facts are certainly intriguing. Throughout the 1840s, even before the Irish famine of 1846, thousands of Irish immigrants crossed the Atlantic to New York. Their mass arrival, which was like a tidal wave throughout the 1850s, was met with fierce resistance by an anti-immigrant faction of locals — a mixture of English, Dutch, Welsh and Germans — called the Nativists, who believed in sovereign allegiance to the American flag and not to the Roman Catholic church. There was regular open warfare with the Irish on the streets, culminating in the Draft Riots of July 1863, during which hundreds were slaughtered on both sides. Every one of the city’s 300-strong police force was either killed or wounded trying to prevent the violence.
“We are telling a great and bloody story of the making of New York,” asserts Scorsese. “This is why we needed people like Daniel and Leo to play the main characters. We have Cameron Diaz (a thief, Jenny Everdeane) doing her worst between them. There are also great actors like Jim Broadbent (as politician William Tweed), John C Reilly (police chief, Happy Jack), Brendan Gleeson (a loner called Monk McGinn) and Liam Neeson (Priest Vallon, the leader of the Dead Rabbits gang), who bring quality to all the scenes.”
But it is quantity, not quality, which has been the most worrying factor about the film since it wrapped in the summer of 2001. Gangs was expected to be delivered to cinemas in time for Oscar consideration, just before last Christmas. Scorsese jokes thinly that the film company misunderstood which Christmas he meant. But tempers have flared during the long editing process. King is frank in his reaction at viewing an early version, running to a bum-numbing 3hrs, 45mins. “I felt like killing myself,” he says, only half-joking. “But I am learning. I backed the film Traffic, and when I first saw the uncut version of that, I went home and cried. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, God, what have I done?’” The only similar emotion he had on Gangs was having second thoughts before Day-Lewis was cast. “I reread the script and, all of a sudden, it hit me. I thought, ‘If this does not work, then, at $65m, I am finished in this business for ever.’”
He is far from finished, having presold the film on the strength of Scorsese and his impressive cast. He has also since sold his company to Intermedia, where he has a place on the board. But he had long since recouped his money on the film, from international buyers. “At one point, I had people sleeping in the corridor outside my hotel bedroom door, waiting to buy the movie,” he recalls. “I had one Japanese client grabbing my legs as I walked past. The most Japan had ever paid for an independent film was $11m. They paid $16m for this.”
Gangs of New York, out on December 20 in America, is still to be screened to the anxious buyers, including Britain’s Entertainment Films. But, based on advance word only, they can relax. Scorsese has been persuaded to cut and cut again to a 2hr, 45mins masterpiece, and Day-Lewis will, indeed, collect an Oscar nomination and perhaps even the golden statue itself. His reaction? He’s back in Ireland, with his family, reportedly swearing he will never make another film again.
Gangs of New York opens in the UK on Jan 10
