The hook in this interview in London's Telegraph magazine is Daniel Day-Lewis' meticulous, detail-oriented approach to acting, and indeed, there's plenty of that for those looking for such a thing. He talks at length of his immersive, Method-based approach (he built a tent of skins, paddled a canoe, and learned to handle a flintlock rifle while filming The Last of the Mohicans), compares his art to the craft of woodworking, and dismisses the many obvious tics of his characters -- being in jail or paralyzed in a wheelchair -- as surface fripperies, with the real heart of the character coming from making the lives of someone utterly different from them seem immediate and real. But much more interesting is the fact that the London-born actor, currently starring in P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, spends much of the interview (which is, after all, with a British newspaper) trashing the opportunities of British cinema. From an early age, he says, "I wanted to tell American stories." He articulates his near-contempt for the strict class structure of his homeland, and thinks of the tradition of honing your craft in theatrical classics as little more than an obstacle. "My love of American movies was like a secret that I carried around with me," he says, and admits that if it hadn't been Martin Scorsese who approached him about playing Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, he would have turned it down as "too English".
