Magnolia influenced Ronan Day-Lewis' Anemone more than he realized
Anemone, co-written by Ronan and Daniel Day-Lewis, delivers the latter's first on-screen credit since Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread.
Photo: Focus Features
Before he even knew what the concept of acting was, Ronan Day-Lewis, the son of Daniel Day-Lewis, was palling around with great filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Rebecca Miller (the latter of whom just so happens to be his mom). But while five-year-old Ronan may have thought his dad was in “construction” at the time, as the father-and-son-duo recalled in a September interview with Rolling Stone, that early exposure to the magic of filmmaking set something alight in the younger Day-Lewis. Ronan Day-Lewis’ directorial debut, Anemone, just premiered at the New York Film Festival (where it was screened by this writer). In an interview with The A.V. Club, the director shared that growing up on these sets—specifically for Miller’s Angela and Anderson’s There Will Be Blood—was “intoxicating and gave me a lot of appetite when it came to making films.”
“Getting to go on set and just seeing this sprawling world that they created and that kind of sense of make believe, but then just entering it and it being real was really incredible,” Day-Lewis continued. His father starred in multiple films for Paul Thomas Anderson during Ronan’s childhood and adolescence. Now that Ronan is making his own films, Anderson’s have become “incredibly influential,” he shared. There’s one film in particular—specifically its obsession with stormy (and occasionally amphibious) weather patterns—that seeped into the finished product more than even its director realized at the time. That film is, of course, Magnolia.
