回复：【资料】丹尼尔的英文文章

"I wanted to know what I could make of this, if there was anything in me for it," Day-Lewis explains at a typically deliberate pace that suggests to the listener either a well-honed talent for circumspection or perhaps the residue of muscle-relaxing pharmaceuticals. "Because I didn't see the point in doing a film unless I could really learn to fight."
The McGuigan bio, as it happened, never materialized. Instead, Sheridan and George concocted a fictional scenario about a Belfast boxer being released from a prison after serving 14 years for Irish Republican Army activities that he has come to deplore. While the resultant film would take on the implosive, bottled-up character of its protagonist, it would feature three full-throttle boxing sequences, as Day-Lewis' character attempts to reignite his career and reinvigorate an old relationship with a now-married former girlfriend, played by Emily Watson ("Breaking the Waves").
When McGuigan was officially recruited to help stage those scenes, Day-Lewis' education in the ring began in earnest.
"What helps me an awful lot is to somehow get rid of the illusion that one is making a film," he says in an effort to make sense of his total immersion tactics, "because that, in itself creates a sensation of unreality. The great advantage of working with Barry was that he just treated me like any run-of-the-mill athlete who wanted to try and achieve the best they could. So for that period of time I could pretend I was training to be a fighter, and the film became something unspoken rather than a distant, illusory possibility."

McGuigan, a slight but solidly built man, was startled by his trainee's drive at the same time as he identified with it. "I worked my ass off," recalls this southern Ireland native of his own glory days. "I worked till I couldn't stand up. People say, 'Oh yes, it's natural.' There's no such thing as natural. You have athleticism, and the rest is hard work.
"Daniel doesn't do anything easy. He trained like a nut. He trained harder than any fighter that I've ever worked with. Daniel worked twice a day, seven days a week. I said, 'Daniel, you don't have to make it this tough.' He said, 'Look, in order for me to understand what a fighter goes through, I have to simulate what it's like.'
"It was amazing. I commentate on sports every week, and I have no hesitation saying that, of the top 15 middleweights in the country, if you eliminated the top five, Daniel could have boxed any of the other ones. Without any problem. And that's how good he got. But that's due to his assiduous attitude toward preparation."
Good as his pupil was, McGuigan was obliged to map out the matches in such a way that served the story's design, minimized the chance injury and yet allowed some latitude for spontaneity. The balance was struck by weaving tightly planned moves into a prelude of free, come-what-may fighting.
"We looked at all the Hollywood fight scenes," says McGuigan, who spikes his boxing jargon with the no-nonsense feistiness of a seasoned sports analyst. "I don't mean to be denigrating, but a lot of them would have these clean hits, smashing punches and exaggerated effects. I'd watch them and think, C'mon, guys, don't give me that.' We wanted to take a step back to make it realistic: Put in half hits and blocks, and grabbing, and punches that miss. So we'd have some free sparring and some choreographed stuff, and try to make it look continuous."
Pugilistic pursuits are no stranger to Day-Lewis, who, despite his comfy upbringing (he is the grandson of Ealing Studios magnate Sir Michael Balcon and son of England's Irish-born poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon) was initially sent to a rough-and-tumble local school in southwest London.

"I grew up in a neighborhood where there were lots of gangs," he says. "If a kid gave you a problem, you just socked him, and that was that. I got into scraps. I never particularly enjoyed it, but I think if someone had taken me in hand and helped me to discover boxing at that age, I would have loved it. As it was, I was defenseless in situations where you had to be pretty vicious."
The actor is intrigued by the great irony presented by "The Boxer," the notion that a violently confrontational sport can be used as a lightning rod with which to unify a people embedded in, and separated by, violence.
"There was an extraordinary atmosphere in Ireland during Barry's career. The Troubles [as the political violence in Northern Ireland has become known] were very bad at the time. And Barry single-handedly, through some form of violence controlled by rules, somehow managed to draw two warring sides together. It brought out in the community, if never at a conscious level, a very simple fact--which is that these people are the same. The same experiences, the same culture, the same hopes, the same fears. What they have in common for two supposedly different communities is so much more than what divides them."
Day-Lewis seems as passionate about his acquired sport as he is about his chosen profession. The temptation to look for connections between the two is irresistible, particularly in the wake of David Mamet's recently published snarling on the actor's craft, "True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor," peppered as it is with analogies between acting and boxing. Day-Lewis concedes some parallels, albeit with a cautiousness that reveals a person anxious about never taking a false step, either intellectually or in performance.

"Although a boxing match seems so personal to those two men going at it in the ring, it's very much to do with a very strange exchange that takes place between the spectator and what goes on in that arena, or stage, if you like. The one I am always dubious about has to do with risk and fear. Actors talk about 'taking risks' and 'overcoming our fears.' But there is something so pure about the fear you experience when you step through the ropes and face up to somebody who is trying to do you harm. Not just the fear of getting hurt. Thefear of not acquitting yourself well, the fear of being vanquished in an unseemly way. That fear washes through you like white lightning.
"So, I've been loathe to compare that. I mean, what is the worst that can happen [to an actor]? You can make a bad film? So what?"
Mamet, whose book disdains the pretensions of academic acting methods, would have a field day commenting on the elaborate lengths to which Day-Lewis has gone to prepare for a role. When a relevant Mamet pronouncement is shared ("All the knowledge in the world of the Elizabethan era will not help you play Mary Stuart"), the actor stares down at his lap and offers up a laugh at his own expense. "But it may make you think that it helps you," he says in his defense, "and that's as good as anything. Whatever it takes to loosen up that place inside you that either gives you something or doesn't.
"Boxing would not be at all bad training for actors actually. Because it teaches you discipline, the ability to overcome problems both physically and mentally, and it certainly deals with the confrontation with fear and anxiety. The great irony being that in the ring, you can only fight well when you are relaxed. It's not natural to feel relaxed when someone is trying to belt you around the head. So you have to achieve that somehow. That's something you learn by endless repetition."

The gold band on the actor's left ring finger attests to his 1996 marriage to actress Rebecca Miller, whom he got to know over the course of making "The Crucible," written by her father, playwright Arthur Miller. That union put the brakes on a head-turning parade of purported affairs with such women as Juliette Binoche (his "Unbearable Lightness of Being" co-star), Winona Ryder (his "Age of Innocence" co-star), Greta Scacchi, Tilda Swinton, Julia Roberts, Sinead O'Connor and, most prominently, Isabelle Adjani, with whom he shared a six-year relationship and fathered a son. Could his current spinal malaise be seen as hubris for a sensationally athletic social life?
That question would be better addressed to his former flames than to Day-Lewis, whose go-for-broke performances belie a characteristically tight-lipped English reverence for privacy. Even in matters surrounding his work, the actor can be evasive, if charmingly so. When asked if there were any among his many chameleonic roles that presented a greater challenge than his Oscar-winning assignment as the disabled Christy Brown in "My Left Foot," he demurs at first, then protects himself with a litany of maybes.
"I don't know. At the time, they all seem more or less impossible. And then you claw your way to some kind of an understanding.
"I think maybe the toughest film to make, maybe, was 'In the Name of the Father.' Maybe psychologically, it was more stressful. Maybe. The mind plays tricks. In a strange way, Christy's predicament, his [physical] incarceration, was the same as Gerry Conlon's. But the shooting of 'In the Name of the Father' took much longer, and the pressure of that work seemed much harder to bear, to hold onto that reality. Living within prison walls, that's a tough thing. And we got out at the end of the day."
Both of those films, like his upcoming release, purveyed a favorite celluloid theme: the triumph of the common man over adverse situations. Which leads us to wonder: If Day-Lewis' life (famously riddled with sorrowful boarding school days, a migraine pill overdose in his teens and a nadir of exhaustion that prompted him to bail out in the middle of a performance of "Hamlet") could be crunched to fit the narrative requirements of a screenplay, where would he locate his own triumphs over adversity?

'If I look back upon my life, I see there are periods which I know to have been tremendously difficult. The triumph, it's not a sense of triumph, but a sense of having just got on with it and stuck around. And I think that's what most people seem to go through in their lives. Life itself has a gravity which can threaten to drag us down at certain moments. To some people, getting out of bed in the morning is a great triumph. Not taking a drink during the day is a great triumph to others. I don't think I've been spectacularly challenged, but there have been times when I've felt, as we do sometimes, as if the gods were persecuting me. Nothing more dramatic than that.
"I do feel like I've been given a chance to do things that I really wanted to do, not just once or twice but maybe half a dozen times. And that is a gift that sometimes isn't bestowed on people once in their life. I've been hugely blessed in that sense."
Rising carefully from his chair as the interview winds down, Day-Lewis apologizes for not being more succinct in his responses. As he inches toward the door with a robotic gait, we ask what he plans to do after his body mends.
He breaks into a smile that seems to confess his gluttony for punishment, then replies without hesitation, "I'll probably jump back in the ring."

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS— who raced in moccasins through the New World's forests in The Last of the Mohicans, and danced through swinging sixties London in platform shoes in In the Name of the Father—is limping awkwardly as he enters a midtown Manhattan hotel suite. Tilted haphazardly to the left as he tentatively moves forward, the sturdy actor plops down on a straight-back chair, breathes a sigh, and grins.
Day-Lewis's current plight, a herniated disc in his lower back, is the result of giving yet another movie his all. He spent two years training with Ireland's former featherweight boxing champ to become convincing for his role in The Boxer as IRA pugilist Danny Boy Flynn. And that was before he reteamed with Jim Sheridan—his director on My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father—for the grueling, seventeen-week Boxer shoot. Finally, once he was no longer actively training, the back gave out.
Day-Lewis, now forty years old, is legendary for his intense approach to his work. He spent five months carrying a primitive flint rifle to prepare for The Last of the Mohicans , and for his role as The Crucible's John Proctor, he spent weeks planting fields with primitive seventeenth-century tools. For his Best Actor Oscar-winning work as paralyzed Christy Brown in My Left Foot, his committment was so complete that he refused to walk on the set. As his Boxer co-star Emily Watson says, "I never met [the real] Daniel."
The real Day-Lewis can be equally difficult to locate during an interview. He steadfastly refuses to discuss his private life (once a target of tabloid scrutiny, he's now married to actress-director Rebecca Miller), and he initially seems a bit uncomfortable when asked about his unusual acting method. But it doesn't take long for the London-born thesp to open up and shed some light on the politics and history behind his films, his remarkable career, and the reasons he doesn't act like any other actor working today.

How did you hurt your back?
I had an injury while I was training. The time was very tight and I jumped in at lunch hour for a training session or whenever I could. On this one occasion I jumped in cold and just didn't warm up enough and I knew I'd done something but we managed to get through [the shoot] okay, although I was 'seized up' for a few days. I think it was something just waiting to go. [The current injury] just happened a few weeks ago [in early December].
In boxing, when you're fighting, there's a lot of stress on the lower back. If you're twisting and turning, if you over-reach on one occasion, all your weight goes over the lower back and it can quite easily go out.
Has surgery been recommended?
Possibly, but only a very small surgery. More than anything it's like a useless leg, but the pain is minimal. It was pretty bad for a while but the treatment's relieved it somewhat. It's just like a dead leg. Don't go into too many details. [Laughs.] I might not get insured for any [other films]!
Sheridan told me when he started The Boxer he didn't know what the ending was going to be.
We didn't have a clue. Or the beginning or the middle, come to think of it. We only knew the end about two weeks ago. Sheridan often begins filming without knowing how his films will end.
The Boxer is surprisingly critical of the IRA. Is this an anti-IRA movie?

It doesn't set out to be an anti-IRA film, although the effect may be to give people an understanding of a world which they feel very off-putting. Think of it more as a pro-peace movement film. The Irish Republican Army has gone through so many transformations over the years. There's still this great romantic ideal from 1916 that people hold onto, and it doesn't hold up under contemporary scrutiny. What we're looking at now is an organization that has got to transform itself if it's going to do any good at all. So maybe there could be an IRA, if they would only accept that acts of terrorism were not the way to go.
Britain's new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, recently hosted IRA leader Gerry Adams at a meeting at his residence on Downing Street, a development that would've been considered impossible a decade ago. How does that make you feel?
It's hard to remain optimistic about the situation in Northern Ireland, but I think one has an obligation to remain optimistic, even if it's a dulled optimism. But the fact is at the moment things are moving. That is largely due to the great efforts being made by the new British government - and I'm all in favor of that. And I haven't been in favor of British governments before Blair. Because how the hell when two armies, in effect, are entrenched and staring at each other over a parapet with hate and fear and bewilderment, how can you change that unless you enter with some open dialogue?
You're English, yet you have this image as an Irish patriot. Is this an accident of fate, or something you've cultivated?

I think it's a mixture of two things: part accident and part will. I am English and I've had an English education. I'm very proud of whichever part of me is Irish, but I am English. I grew up in England. My mother's family is from Latvia, for God's sake. It's not like I can claim to be an Irish thoroughbred, and I don't. I'm very proud to get an Irish passport because my father was Irish and I keep that and travel with it. Maybe there's a tradition there too, of people who are Anglo-Irish who have become acutely aware of the role the British have played and wish to do something to redress the balance. I live in the Republic and there's no battle to be fought there. But when I first came to Irish history—because it's not taught in the British educational system—I was so astonished at the part the British had played in the history of Ireland, and so ashamed in a certain sense. It made me feel a kind of kinship with the place. Not because I was Irish, but as a person reaching out across the sea in a way.
Talk about the pressure of coming to do a third film with Sheridan after the success of the first two.
The only way to survive is to have tunnel vision. There's even more pressure on Jim than on me, because of the money [$25 million] and the weight of the production. It's not the preconceived expectations, but the greatest stress was we started from the ground upwards, and the way we work relies on chaos. We hope order and some kind of sense will come out of it. The fact is, we were reworking and reworking the script until we finished shooting it. And then we went and shot some more. We had to find its borders and its boundaries. There was a good deal of stress involved in that. The important thing is to not have any hopes for the film. That's hard to do but I try to just do the work and see what happens. That applies to the other two films we did as well. I had no expectations off the other films, what came afterwards was just icing on the cake.
Your relationship with Sheridan is obviously close. Do you see it as father and son, or more a couple of brothers?

Quite a brotherly relationship, more rough-and-tumble than what would be between father and son. It's a more open relationship than what people would generally see as a father and son. Surrogate father, no. But certainly brothers in arms.
Your string of acclaimed collaborations with Sheridan has brought comparison with Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. How do you feel about that?
I think it's a mad comparison to make. If you look at the trajectory of work of those two—Raging Bull, New York, New York, Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, Casino, Cape Fear, King of Comedy—those guys, gosh, they have two handfuls of extraordinary films. Shay [his nickname for Sheridan] and I have just completed the third. Those two men are in a league of their own. It's crazy to make comparisons.
I just spoke with Robert Forster, who's been acting for thirty years now and is in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown. For Forster, who you are is what is going to inform your characters. He says an actor only has himself to give. I thought then specifically of how you differ in your approach, where you transform yourself to become this other person. You've been doing this now for over a dozen years, starring in films that reach an international audience. Can you still really lose yourself in a role?

The fact is, it's weird. [Grimaces.] Although it's not like I consciously set out with a pre-formed idea that I'm going to become somebody else. It's more to do with an exchange of some kind that takes place, because I'm drawn towards a life for a period of time, which I find intriguing for one reason or another. It's not with the intention of undergoing a transformation. If any transformation takes place, it happens as a by-product of the work that goes on in an attempt to meet this person on their own ground. It's not that you just become someone else. That doesn't happen. Whatever finally takes place, it's bound to contain within it a large part of one's own internal mechanism, I suppose, as much as it does another. But I find it helpful to me at any rate to create the illusion—or delusion, whichever way you look at it—of occupying someone else's shoes in my work. That's where I find pleasure. But the idea of a total transformation is a little bit mythical. I don't necessarily believe in that. I love it when people feel that another life has been told them and it's not recognizably one's own. That's what my work is; I think that's where it lies. If I were just in the business of continually re-exploring my own sensibilities all the time, then I think I would lose interest that much quicker. But we're still one and the same person—it's the same engine, it's my desire that always draws me into that place. So it has to be my desire that propels me into discovering what goes on in that place. So finally, you could just say it's all you. [Laughs.] I've probably tried to say it before, and I don't know why I'm trying again, but I've never achieved any explanation that made any sense. [Laughs.]
I wonder if you ever say to yourself, "This is a new way of approaching a role. I'm not going to do like I did for that other film."
Again, the same rules never apply. There's no system or procedure whereby I go from A to B, where I've left one place for another.
For The Boxer you were in training for years before you really decided to do this movie weren't you?
I was in training for about two years, yeah.

That was long before there was an actual start date for the movie. Yet when you were doing interviews to promote The Crucible, you wouldn't confirm that you were going to actually make The Boxer.
I was in training for two years and for a large part of that time, I genuinely kidded myself that the film was fairly unlikely. Because wherever the truth might lie, I like to think I'm doing things for their own reasons. Somehow, if I place a film at the end of this tunnel, it's going to already make conscious the sense of illusion about it. So I begin at the outset saying, "This is me. I'm interested in this." Of course the fighting, the boxing and the training, all that stuff that goes on, that's just between me and whoever I'm doing it with. That had nothing to do, in the early stages, with Danny Boy Flynn. Later on, it became his fight and his game and his life. But in the initial stages it was just me being interested in that.
Any idea what you're going to do next?
No.
Where is home for you? Is it England and Dublin and New York?
England, [just] for visits, because my family and a lot of my friends are still there. Home is more between Ireland and here.
You're forty. Do you have a feeling that you've hit your prime, that you know yourself better now?

It'd be strange to say yes, bearing in mind the intense battleground that was the filming of The Boxer. But in an overall sense, it's true. I have a far less troubled attitude toward the whole business. I know what I like and what I don't like about it and there's no sense worrying about it anymore. I'm clear about what I need to do and what I want to do and there's no sense losing any sleep over it.
Will you ever return to the stage?
Hard to say. I can't imagine it happening. Then again, it could.
You don't miss it at all?
No, I don't miss it at all. I thought I would, but then it never occurred to me that I wasn't going to do it again. Although a lot of people thought just because of the Hamlet episode [in 1989, Day-Lewis hallucinated about his late father during a performance, and walked off the stage] that this is some terrible dark secret in the closet. But it never seemed that way to me. I thought I'd just take a break for a while. Things just worked out differently. In my mind I thought I'd do some work in the theater again, but I'm not very well suited in temperament for the stage. I'm not really well suited to film work either. [Laughs.] Maybe you could suggest an alternative to both of those.

Sizzling Movie Lover - People Magazine - 1988
http://kathyddl.tripod.com/people.htm