Angels in America and Caroline, or Change playwright Kushner, whose screenplay for Spielberg’s Munich was Oscar-nominated, gave five years of his life to Lincoln, Spielberg says. “He licked it, after three years of real struggle, then two when he was on a roll.”
Kushner started with a five-hundred-page script that needed whittling down; it was more than four times the length of an average two-hour screenplay. Spielberg helped Kushner figure out which slice of Lincoln’s life to choose; he wanted to show audiences the president’s human face. Spielberg was the one who saw as the potential dramatic focus of the film the last months of Lincoln’s life, when he fought to pass the Thirteenth Amendment and worked to wind down the Civil War. The most daring sequence in the movie shows Lincoln berating his cabinet for fighting him on the amendment, an eight-minute scene that Day-Lewis insisted on shooting in one uninterrupted take.
One of the bold decisions the filmmakers made on Lincoln was not to dumb down Kushner’s script. Lincoln is an unapologetic smart person’s movie. At its center, underpinning the entire film, is a speech that no self-respecting screenwriter would have included. Kushner knows he broke the rules. “I ducked it in a way because I’m a playwright primarily,” he tells me in an interview. “And so this wasn’t so long for a speech in a play. You can get away with it. I’ve written longer monologues. I’ve written an hour-long monologue in Homebody/Kabul.”
In March 2006 the writer had started detailing the last two years of Lincoln’s administration, from September 1863 to the end. “I couldn’t find a way to condense it, to speed it up; the material was overwhelmingly rich,” Kushner recalls. As he was writing, Spielberg would tell Kushner, “That’s going to leave people in the dark,” or, “They won’t care about it.” “Spielberg liked this scene or that scene, but I started getting panicky. He was patient. I thought maybe it was impossible to do.”
The Writers Guild strike gave Kushner permission to put the script away, and he stopped reading about Lincoln. When the strike was over, Spielberg asked him to come out to L.A. and sit down and talk through things and see where they were. “Two days before I got on the plane I suddenly thought, ‘If I just did the last four months . . .’ In all the reading beyond Team of Rivals, several themes kept reappearing on the central conundrum Lincoln faced. So I wrote this speech. I just said, ‘He’s a lawyer.’ I found the little story about this old lady that’s a great illustration of this question of the gray areas of legality. And then I, in as lawyerly a fashion as I could, using the terms Lincoln would have used, tried to work my way through the issue. The speech was quite long.”
For years, Spielberg had been trying to convince a recalcitrant Daniel Day-Lewis to take on the role of Lincoln. But the two-time Oscar-winning actor wasn’t convinced he could do justice to this quintessentially American icon. (After the movie opened to triumphant success, Spielberg released to the media one of Day-Lewis’s rejection letters.)
After years of demurring, it was Kushner’s script—and the chance to work for the first time with Spielberg—that tipped the scales. But not before Day-Lewis invited Spielberg, Kushner, and producer Kathleen Kennedy to his home in Ireland so they could talk in person and meet the actor’s family.
Day-Lewis put them up in a quaintly beautiful inn in the Irish countryside near the old, wisteria-covered farmhouse in the Wicklow Mountains outside Dublin where the actor lived at the time with his wife, filmmaker and author Rebecca Miller, and their two children. Kennedy told People magazine that for the first several hours of that meeting, the filmmakers simply stood in the kitchen, getting to know the kids.
Kushner, meanwhile, had to plow ahead with the script not knowing whether Day-Lewis was on board. “I sent in the draft after Steven and Daniel and I had met for the first time in Ireland,” says Kushner. “So I was writing a draft with the possibility that Daniel, who I always wanted, was actually maybe going to do this. He hadn’t said yes, but he was waiting for the rewrite to see if he felt that he could do this.”
Spielberg himself sets the budget for each of his movies, in this case $65 million, and forces everyone around him, including Kennedy, to meet it. “They have no choice,” his DreamWorks cochairman Stacey Snider tells me in an interview. “Steven is not used to anyone saying no.”
Luckily, Day-Lewis finally stopped saying no to Spielberg. The British actor may not appear to be a marquee movie star, but audiences are starting to get the idea that when he does a movie—and he picks them carefully, willing to wait years between roles—they should check it out. At a time when many actors risk overexposure, grabbing all the roles they can while interest is hot, Day-Lewis steps back and keeps himself grounded in his family and waits for the muse to hit him.
He’s a draw for moviegoers because when he steps up, when the match is perfect between director and role, when it feels right, he gives his all. He embraces a role so totally that it consumes and overtakes him. He loses himself in the part throughout production. It’s fair to say that Day-Lewis is Abraham Lincoln, and that people went to see the movie because the actor was in it.
From the start of his career, he showed a penchant for muscular, angry, and violent roles, from Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, and The Boxer, to Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
“I spent most of my time on the front line of London street life,” he tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg at a Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute in February, “playing soccer, fighting on the school playground, and rebelling against authority and the British class system.” His socialist father, the poet laureate of England Cecil Day-Lewis, died when Daniel was fifteen. “He had more than enough chances to see me screw up,” Day-Lewis says. At the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School he embraced the Stanislavski method, and he learned via three films with Sheridan that steeping himself over time in a role, with familiarity, worked best for him: “If I was going to carry on doing this, I could only work in this way.”
Day-Lewis admits that he can’t do the work without the “reclusive need to withdraw from that. These two things are mutually dependent upon each other. I cannot do the work I love to do unless I take time away from it. It’s the time taken away from it when, God forbid, I reengage with life, that allows me to do the work in the hope that I would bring something of my experience to it, not lurching from one film set to another.”
“But the life that we bring to our work has to come from elsewhere, it has to,” he continues. “So as much as I love the work, so I love to stay away from it, and that time away, I am always engaged in some kind of skullduggery that allows me to come back to it. I don’t know what allowed this little kernel of self-knowledge at such an early age, but without it I would have given up this work a long time ago, because I would have exhausted my capacity or desire to do it. It’s not an endlessly regenerating compulsion. It has to be recognized and honored when it comes. If it’s not there you should be occupied doing something else . . . Without that personal need, that curiosity that is unleashed out of some compulsive need to explore some field of human experience, there are no arts. That’s all there is.”
On November 19, 2010, DreamWorks finally announced that two-time Academy Award winner Day-Lewis was starring as the sixteenth president of the United States in Lincoln. Day-Lewis worked in complete seclusion on his Lincoln voice, a reedy tenor: the higher the pitch the more travel power a voice has. Kushner believes it’s one of the reasons that Lincoln’s voice worked effectively: “Daniel finally sent Steven a recording of himself doing the voice in a little tiny battery-operated tape recorder so he could hear it. I got to hear it a few months before we started filming, when he and David Strathairn [who played Secretary of State William Seward] read a couple of scenes together. I got to sit behind Daniel and listen. But Steven called me after he first listened to the voice and said, ‘I just listened to Abraham
Lincoln.’ ”
The remarkable eight-minute speech Kushner devised, concerning the reasons why the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t enough—it had to be bolstered by the passage of a law—was the first “dialogue” scene Day-Lewis filmed on location in Richmond, Virginia. Kushner was afraid it would never make the cut. It was not only densely written, but extremely long. “Steven really wanted me to address the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation in the screenplay. I sent him the draft before I sent it to Daniel. But I thought that he was going to say, ‘The speech is ridiculously long and you can’t do this and it’s so hard to follow.’ But he loved it. He was more excited than he’d ever been by anything I’d written.”
Day-Lewis asked Spielberg prior to the first take if they could just go through the entire scene once, then break it up, Kushner recalls. There was no on-set rehearsal. “Well, Daniel sat down, and they did the whole attack on him, ‘Why are you doing this? What are you doing?’ And then Daniel walks into the thing and went through it word-perfect. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life, and everyone just had their jaws on the floor. The reactions of the cabinet were real. Everyone just thought, ‘How is he doing this?’ He came in with this pencil, he was just whittling, and I thought, ‘That’s not in the script. Why does he have a pencil and what is he doing?’ And then at the end he pulls it out—he’s going to sign the amendment and he has a pencil in his hand.”
The action seemed completely spontaneous, Kushner says. “I have never seen anything like it. Steven forgot to call ‘cut.’ It just sort of stopped and there was a stunned silence. And David [Strathairn], who I have known for a long time, was just sort of shaking. You know it was like being with Lincoln. It was just astonishing.”
The Lincoln set was “a cathedral, an almost sanctified place,” says Snider. “And everyone simply dived into history.” Day-Lewis stayed in character throughout the shoot, addressed by all as “Mr. President.”
On the Charlie Rose show, Strathairn, one of a “wealth of New York actors” on the film (which features 140 speaking parts), admits that Day-Lewis set the tone on the set. “We were in 1864,” he says. “You could choose to be there, or if you didn’t want to be there, you’d remove yourself from the energy of the room. It brought focus, something very precious, to investing in this man at this moment. Lincoln was a man of the highest resolve and will and humility, Machiavellian, with a force of will, in combination with his cleverness. And the movie gives a window into his sadness.”
As he admitted in an unusually frank chat with the BBC during the height of the Oscar race, Day-Lewis himself is reticent to talk about this aspect of his craft. “I always feel like I’m digging my own grave. I will seem self-important, adding to the fairly comprehensive impression that people seem to have that I’m strange when I work.” But wasn’t it extremely draining to be Abraham Lincoln, nonstop, for months?
“Part of my job is to be drained,” he says. “It’s logical for me to remain within that world. But it’s also my pleasure, because that’s where the work is. You’re not discovering anything when you’re having a tea and a laugh with the grips, as tempting as that would be, because there are a lot of great people on a film set. I wore myself out the first couple of movies I was in. The thing that wore me out was the socializing on the set.”
Kushner says that Day-Lewis’s extreme focus enabled him to come up with many of his own bits of business, including a moment during a story Lincoln tells to break tension during the assault on Williamsburg. As everyone anxiously awaits the sound of the telegraph, he pours himself coffee and describes someone relieving himself. Yes, Spielberg used an old-fashioned riser to make Day-Lewis look taller. And he wasn’t afraid to let there be silence amid the rush of Kushner’s dialogue.
The writer provided some comic relief in the form of three guys chasing votes—by hook or by crook. Tommy Lee Jones also lightened the somber mood as the windy Great Commoner, antislavery activist Thaddeus Stevens, who was portrayed as a monster in previous films such as The Birth of a Nation and Tennessee Johnson.
Goodwin says that Sally Field nails the role of the president’s high-strung wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who has been portrayed in so many differing ways over the years: “She is semi-manic-depressive, but she’s fierce, she’s strong, she’s smart, and she’s a little crazy.” Kushner was trying to amend the bad rap given to her. “There were certain bipolar features in there,” he says. “One of her cousins said she was always either in the attic or the cellar. She was a very difficult person, but she was a brilliant woman and she danced with Lincoln as a lawyer in Springfield. The first night she met him and right after dancing with him she turned to her cousin and said: ‘I’ve just danced with the greatest man of his time, and he’s going to be president of the United States.’ And this is a woman to whom all three candidates for president in 1860 had proposed marriage.”
Production designer Rick Carter, who shared an Oscar for his work on Avatar, says the crew leaned on Lincoln’s detailed diaries—they knew exactly what he was doing on any given day, and could even re-create the content of the papers strewn on desks. During an interview on Charlie Rose, Goodwin marveled at the re-creation of the newly constructed 1864 White House, from the wallpaper and maps to first-edition books and carpets. “Here’s my Lincoln!” she marveled. “He’s back again!”
Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, who won Oscars for Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, tried to use natural light whenever he could on Lincoln, taking full advantage of Richmond’s historic buildings. Who knew the nation’s Capitol had a black dome back then?
And eighty-year-old John Williams—who has composed muscular scores for Star Wars and every Spielberg film since The Sugarland Express—sticks to a delicately minimal period-inflected score. “He never borrows from himself,” says Snider. “Everyone stepped up their game.”
There are few visual effects, as Spielberg was less interested in battles than in human-scale emotions—but Spielberg went CG on Lincoln’s surreal dream and the Battle of Williamsburg. As for the 150-minute running time: “It was what it needed to be,” says Snider.
After the AFI Fest premiere, Day-Lewis, Field, and Jones were all instant shoo-ins for nominations—not to mention Spielberg, Kushner, Kamiński, Carter, editor Michael Kahn, and Williams.
Day-Lewis was vying for his third Oscar (after My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood), which would mean winning more Best Actor Oscars than any actor in history. Several lead actors, including Fredric March and Jack Nicholson, have two; Nicholson also won a supporting statuette for his role in Terms of Endearment as astronaut Garrett Breedlove. Katharine Hepburn holds the leading actress record: four.
Even though films featured in the fall fests get a major boost on their road to the Oscars, there are also ones not finished in time that come out at the end of the year and have another advantage: they’re fresh in voters’ minds. Take, for example, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby or Sandra Bullock vehicle The Blind Side. In 2012, the late arrivals skipping the festival circuit were Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.
CHAPTER 7
WOMEN, POLITICS, AND ZERO DARK THIRTY
From the start, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s ripped-from-the-headlines drama Zero Dark Thirty was a different species than its predecessor, The Hurt Locker. In order to make that film, the director and her writing and producing partner had raised independent financing to fund their tough, stylish $15 million Iraq war movie starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Guy Pearce.
The earlier film, an intense thriller, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2008, was swiftly acquired by neophyte film company Summit Entertainment, and toured the international festival circuit before its eventual release in June 2009. The Hurt Locker persevered through award season, riding a swell of year-end praise to win six Oscars and beat out Bigelow’s ex-husband J
ames Cameron and his mighty Avatar for Best Picture and Best Director.
That year, several factors swayed the Academy in Bigelow’s direction. One, The Hurt Locker was an anomaly—a rigorously intelligent, well-made, male-friendly, underdog war film that just about every branch of the Academy could admire. And two, Bigelow offered the right opportunity for the liberal-leaning, politically correct Academy to remedy an historic oversight—never before awarding Best Director to a woman. Bigelow deserved it, but she also stood in for all the other women directors who had not received their due.
In its history, the Academy’s largely male directors’ branch had nominated only three other women directors—Italian Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties), New Zealander Jane Campion (The Piano), and American Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), daughter of Oscar-winning Godfather creator Francis Ford Coppola.
Gender politics in Hollywood—as everywhere else—are complex, layered, often unconscious, and difficult to parse. One can argue that things are slowly improving for women in the film industry, but they are still woefully underrepresented in too many areas, from hiring, especially as directors, to roles onscreen.
In 2012, female representation in popular movies hit its lowest level in five years, according to a study by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. That was despite a steady succession of high-profile box-office successes starring women over the decades, from Silkwood and The Rose to A League of Their Own, 9 to 5, The First Wives Club, Sister Act, Mamma Mia!, Bridesmaids, and two recent mighty franchises, The Hunger Games and Twilight.
Among the hundred highest-grossing movies at the U.S. box office in 2012, the USC study reported, 28 percent of speaking characters were female. That marked a drop from 32.8 percent three years ago—even though, as actress Geena Davis pointed out at CinemaCon 2013, 51 percent of the moviegoing audience is female. In the United States, 40 percent of managerial jobs are held by women, but in Hollywood, the much lower proportions have stayed the same for at least twenty years: in both the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild, only 13 percent of members are women.
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