This is terrible to hear. DDL rags on PTA's choice of how to shoot the movie, and then Vicky Krieps sides with Daniel, chimes in. Sounds like an ugly production. I had this strange feeling not all was well in paradise.
“It was awful,” Day-Lewis said bluntly of filming, noting that production started off wonderful in the countryside before becoming difficult when the bulk of filming had to take place inside the townhouse. “We had hoped to find that way of working again where we would be self-contained, beholden to no one, and uninterrupted. We built a world we could create and just stay in and no one could get into it. But in this townhouse, which was very beautiful, it was a nightmare.”
According to Day-Lewis: “We were living on top of each other. It was an enormous unit. There was no space. The way it works if it’s helpful is that these rooms belong to you. These rooms are yours, they are part of your life. But of course these rooms for us become storage spaces. You work in a room then you have to move all that shit into another room, and that space becomes a storage space. That entire house was like a termite nest.”
Krieps echoed Day-Lewis’ thoughts on the matter, saying the crowded rooms even gave her a panic attack on set one day. “Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe,” she remembered. “In every room there were just cables, there’s an energy to it and it’s taking the breath away of your character.” Day-Lewis is famous for his Method acting tendencies, but clearly staying in character was tough in such a small space. The actor even teased that the crew grew unhappy with the film’s tight-knit production, joking, “You see, it’s hard to work with a crew that really hates you…We must be fairly stupid because we didn’t realize it was going to be like that.”
[IndieWire]