IN CONVERSATION WITH RONAN DAY-LEWIS
Ronan Day-Lewis makes his feature film debut with, Anemone, a movie that explores the complex and profound ties that exist between brothers, fathers, and sons. Ronan teamed up with his father, Daniel Day-Lewis, who makes his long awaited return to the silver screen. We spoke to Ronan via zoom about leading a film crew for the first time, wearing the same thing every day, inheriting jewelry from his dad, the creature that haunts most of his work, his admiration for David Lynch, and so much more.
Hagop Kourounian: I’d love to spend some time talking about your own personal style and your relationship with clothing. How much time do you spend thinking about clothes? How did you develop your personal style?
Ronan Day-Lewis: I feel like I tend to wear a variation of pretty much the same thing every day, because whether it's film or painting, I’m so indecisive as a person. I think if I end up agonizing too much it can just derail the beginning of my day. I like the comfort of a uniform. So I tend to wear the same jeans pretty much every day, and pretty much the same Converse every day. I've had them for three months. My brother was shocked when I told them that they're three months old. He said they look like they're like three years old, they're really messed up at this point. Also just a lot of oversized t-shirts and like this certain Adidas jacket I wear all the time. I wore it on the shoot a lot. I tend to just fall into a rhythm with certain things that I just wear over and over again until they either fall apart or I start wearing something else that sort of takes this place. It's hard to say how my personal style has developed. I mean, it's definitely really different than it was earlier in college and high school which I guess is probably the same to be said for everyone.
Hagop Kourounian: I'm kind of the same way too. I wear pretty much the same thing all the time as well, and I buy the same items over and over again. I have the same pair of shoes that I buy in black, then next time in brown, then back to black. You mentioned that your personal style was a little different a few years ago. I think we're around the same age. I'm 28. I think you're 27?
Ronan Day-Lewis: Yeah, yeah.
Hagop Kourounian: I think we're in that kind of phase where we're still not fully developed yet and therefore maybe that personal style isn't fully formed just yet.
Ronan Day-Lewis: Yeah, it's true. It's funny how sometimes you look back on a photo from a few years ago and it's like you're looking at a different person in terms of what you were wearing. The skinny jeans faze for me feels so distant now.
Hagop Kourounian: A large part of this page is focused on looking at BTS photos of our favorite film sets. These photos are a big part of establishing the myth of a film and keeping its legacy alive in cinema history. With that being said… How did you typically get dressed for a day on set? Wardrobe wise, was there any added pressure with this being your directorial debut? You mentioned this Adidas jacket you wore often.
Ronan Day-Lewis: I had ideas of maybe what directors wore and behind the scenes photos I'd seen of films I admire. That definitely did come into the equation for me, but I also wanted to just feel like myself because I knew there was going to be a challenge, I guess, in terms of leading the crew and proving to everyone and myself that I was capable of doing this since it was my first time. I felt like if I was wearing something that didn't feel authentic to me or natural to me, it wouldn't help with that. So I ended up basically wearing a variation on what I would normally wear day to day. There were these baggy jeans I wore pretty much every day. They ripped in the most inopportune place so I think they're out of commission now. I can't remember what the brand was, they might have been Levi's. But yeah, also I wore Blundstone's pretty much every day that I'd been wearing for a few years. Sometimes I wore different shoes depending on what the environment we were working in was like. Then I’d have graphic t-shirts and this baggy corduroy light jacket shirt thing that I had thrifted recently before the shoot. The Adidas jacket I mentioned earlier I wore a lot and I had this Guinness Toucan sweater that my girlfriend had given me that I also wore a lot, it was good on the chillier days.
Hagop Kourounian: Guinness, like the beer?
Ronan Day-Lewis: Yeah, I think in one of the BTS photos that they’re using I'm wearing it.
Hagop Kourounian: I've been reading so much about the film and it seems like so many people are focusing on your dad, and I don't want to do that, but I do have to ask one thing. You know, he's a fashion mood board god. You see him posted about all the time and in a huge range of outfits. I'm curious, did you learn anything growing up with him on how to dress? I’ve noticed that sometimes you guys wear these similar south western looking belts with silver/turquoise buckles, can you talk about that?
Ronan Day-Lewis: Yeah, he gave me this belt that I wear every day and I wore it every day when I was shooting. It's got this beautiful Navajo buckle. I definitely also wear this bracelet which was his and he passed it down to me. I think I absorbed some of his taste in jewelry and just in clothes in general.
Hagop Kourounian: Like father, like son! I also read that you spent a part of your early life on film sets. Were there any filmmakers that had an influence on you in terms of getting dressed or just filmmakers whose style you admired?
Ronan Day-Lewis: I feel like there were, but it's now really vague when I try to think about it. It was actually more like a certain era of set photos that I feel like I was thinking of because Anemone is set in the mid ‘90s and I feel like I was thinking a lot about behind the scenes photos I've seen on films that were made around that era. Not that I consciously wanted to dress in a period way or anything, but it just felt appealing to me, I guess. That kind of casualness with the athletic wear, like Adidas and stuff. I know that's pretty vague… I love seeing behind the scenes photos of David Lynch on set. I feel like his style was so particular, he would just wear the same thing every day, which I admire.
Hagop Kourounian: I’d love to talk about your artwork for a second. I'm in LA so I'm planning on visiting the gallery you have here soon. I think I have another month or so to check it out.
Ronan Day-Lewis: Yeah, it's up till the beginning of November, so yeah, you definitely have time, but that's awesome.
Hagop Kourounian: There's a moment in the film without getting too much into plot spoilers or anything, but aside from the crazy taking a shit on a priest monologue, the part that really moved me so much was towards the end of the film where this creature appears. The same creature that’s just behind your head there on zoom and featured in a lot of your paintings and sculptures. I’d love to learn a little bit about that creature but also want to know if you always intended to have a thematic through line between your gallery work, your paintings, and the film?
Ronan Day-Lewis: It developed that way really unconsciously actually, so I didn't set out, I guess, to have a kind of signature. But I think as we developed the tone of the film when we started writing the script we felt like it would accept increasingly strange and abstract elements. We naturally started to veer more and more towards these moments of sort of hyper lucidity and this slightly kind of dreamlike intensity in general in the film. The creature had sort of been this image that had first come to me like seven years ago, I was in a painting class in college and we were on the floor doing these kind of stream of consciousness drawings and the teacher had a documentary playing in the background and this face emerged from this long awkward neck, and there was something both kind of disturbing but also sort of sublime to me about that shape. There was just something mysterious to me about it and so it started appearing in more of my paintings and the rest of the body sort of revealed itself and it just started consistently haunting most of my work. We didn't talk about it being in the film but it started to creep into the back of my head as the film got stranger. I started to imagine images of the creature existing in certain environments that we had already written about in the film. It just started to kind of suggest itself and then my dad independently, it turned out, had imagined the creature potentially being in the film because he was familiar with it from having seen my paintings the last few years. As we were shooting I realized more and more how many images from in the film were really overlapping or bleeding together with images in my paintings and there are definitely certain things, certain obsessions of mine that I've been cycling through in painting the last few years, like extreme weather. So yeah it was very unconscious.
Hagop Kourounian: It's very cool and I feel like it adds to your world building. It's cool that you take it from one medium to another, it's like a touch of auteurship if you will.
Ronan Day-Lewis: It's definitely fun to see, it's crazy to see certain images that I'm used to seeing in two dimensional space suddenly in three dimensional and with sound.
Hagop Kourounian: I watched it at the Dolby screening room in Burbank, which is a great theater.
Ronan Day-Lewis: That was probably crazy.
Hagop Kourounian: Yeah the soundtrack sounded unbelievable which I also wanted to compliment you on. But that scene itself was so cool because I didn't really expect this surreal element to pop up and when it did it hit really hard.
Ronan Day-Lewis: Oh I'm so glad. Up until you guys have started to see it I haven't been sure if those moments would really land for people so that means a lot.
Hagop Kourounian: I loved the costuming in the film, so many great gorp-y jackets… I especially loved the Taichi motorcycle riding jacket Sean Bean’s character wears. Can you talk a little about your vision for the costumes and collaborating with Jane Petrie for the wardrobe?
Ronan Day-Lewis: I was just gonna say Jane Petrie is an amazing costume designer and we had a lot of conversations early on about the kind of collectivism in the costumes. Ray has this pastoral aspect to the environment where it has this kind of fairy tale quality and I sort of wanted the costumes to be in contrast to that. We found a lot of really interesting athletic wear garments for Ray and we were thinking a lot about color and this pretty controlled palette. Thinking about what colors could mean emotionally and red became quite an important color to Ray as this kind of contrast to the blue in Bryan's world. Bryan's room and Ray's hut are sort of like prisons but they're like mirror images of each other or like reverse images of each other so we were thinking a lot about the color palette. It was exciting to me to see Sean and my dad wearing these things in this environment where you'd maybe expect different clothing I guess in pairing with this world.
Hagop Kourounian: Do you have any favorite brands right now? Where do you shop? Do you have any stores you frequent?
Ronan Day-Lewis: 10ft Single by Stella Dallas in Brooklyn is like a 10 minute walk from my apartment and I found some cool stuff there recently. I wear a lot of Carhartt jeans that have double knees. I wear a lot of Adidas, like the jacket I mentioned and then also this Adidas sweater and shirt. There's also this screen printing t-shirt company called Feels So Good in Texas that I've gotten a couple shirts from but yeah those are some just off the top of my head.
Hagop Kourounian: Cool man, thank you so much for the time I really appreciate hearing you talk about the movie and congratulations, I can't wait for it to hit theaters so more people see it
Ronan Day-Lewis: Thank you so much man this has been great, take care.