The Way He Lives Now

He read letters written home by the "men who were living in holes in the ground," florid letters, "full of sentimentality, full of love and loss." He pored over photographs of the period, "of these lads scooping up oil from the ground in buckets and saucepans and whatever they could take with them before drilling was developed," and of the landscape of oil-rich Southern California pockmarked with oil fields.

"From Bakersfield to Signal Hill to Los Angeles, it was a forest of oil derricks," he says. "Squeezed between these derricks intermittently were these tiny little houses in which people were living their lives, stepping out of their front doors into a quagmire of crude oil just running down the streets. That was the foundation of this city!" He also read up on oil tycoon Edward Doheny (a name he pronounces Do-HAY-ny), who, like Plainview, was born in Fond-du-Lac, Wisconsin, and made his way west to a millionaire future in Los Angeles, although the book on which There Will Be Blood is loosely based, Upton Sinclair's Oil!, is itself only loosely based on Doheny.

"In the end," Day-Lewis says, "no matter what stimulus you can find that belonged to that world, that world that you're trying to imagine, finally imagination is the only thing that's going to take you there. And more than anything else, I had time. I had time, and a quiet place, and neutral surroundings. I've got a room at home where I can really daydream without being disturbed, and I suppose it's there where things ferment." Things like Daniel Plainview's voice, which the actor says came to him in pieces and parts, and recordings from the Dust Bowl and the '20s-era Fond-du-Lac proved less helpful than his own ear.

"I like to have the illusion that I can hear that voice before I'm able to speak with that voice," he says. "I do use a little tape recorder. I talk to myself a lot. I try without thinking about it to have a sense of whether that voice belongs to me in my new life." For Plainview, "I discarded a lot of ideas that didn't work, and a lot of possibilities. Finally, I just began to hear a voice which seemed to be right. I couldn't make the sounds initially. I could hear them, but I couldn't make them." Gradually, it began to stick: The way Daniel Plainview sounds matters as much as the way he crouches down to marvel at the flames erupting out of a newly exploded well.

"We don't choose our voices," Day-Lewis says. "So within the voice, there's an expression of the very self."

"Do you really want to know about that?" Day-Lewis protests when I ask how he manages to live on set in character. He looks down at his hands and laughs. He has just been profiled in a many-thousand-word New York Times Magazine story by Lynn Hirschberg, which had Day-Lewis on the cover, smiling, nearly life-size; you could see pores. He's reluctant to "gob off" even more about himself, not out of humility or standoffishness but out of a firm conviction that there should be other things to talk about, like what's happening in Pakistan, or Gaza. But like it or not, Day-Lewis has come here to gob off, and Paramount Pictures is paying for the hotel suite, and so he complies.

But not without objections: "The odd thing about this particular period of time is that if you do what you have to do to try to encourage people to see a film you've worked very hard on, it appears, I suppose, as if you're engaged in an orgy of self-promotion. Which really wouldn't be my thing." I get that, I assure him, but still, I want to know: Did he really eat, smoke and drink as Daniel Plainview even when the cameras weren't rolling?

I should mention here that the way Daniel Day-Lewis sounds on the page, uttering these clean, neat, clearly composed sentences right off the cuff, isn't really a fair representation of how he sounds in person. There are "um"s, "ah"s and pauses so long that it's hard to resist finishing his sentences or interrupting him to get on to the next point. He comes off neither overly learned nor haughty, only obdurately sincere, always checking himself to make sure that he means what he says. He interjects the name of the person he's talking to as he speaks, as if to remind himself to treat each new interrogator lumbering through an inevitably dreary day of publicity as an individual. He brightens up when the discussion veers off filmmaking to politics, world events or California State Highway 1. "It's hard driving that coast," says the motorbike enthusiast, who drove the route recently on his way from Los Angeles to a race in Monterey. "Every 200 yards, you have to stop and drink it in."