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"It's in these months before the camera starts to turn," Day-Lewis says, "when you have this other life, and you can take any avenue toward it. The game is that you learn enough to stimulate the imagination into believing in the reality. Acting is always an imaginative piece of work. That is the beginning and the end of it."
It must be tremendously debilitating, this training for a movie marathon of emotional exertions. "Actually, I'm a lazy bastard. I'm terribly happy doing nothing at all," Day-Lewis says. He has gone for two years without making a film -- during which time he read, traveled, visited friends and rode his beloved Triumph motorbike.
Just now, he is at liberty. No definite movie roles in his future. "Maybe there'll be a time when I'll bitterly regret not having made better use of my time. But that's unlikely because I know I can only be true to the impulses I have. And those impulses come very rarely."
He has this humbling and sacred idea: that acting deserves as much craft, sweat and devotion as, say, cabinetmaking. "Acting is a vocation," he insists.
"It has to be respected as such. But what tends to happen is that people go on contributing way beyond the time when they have anything within themselves to offer. By that time, usually it's all you know. It's a job, and you have to pay the bills. I find that sad. I'd rather pay the bills with any other means on God's earth than by performing. I think as soon as the work ceases to be vocational, you have a responsibility to get out."
Daniel Day-Lewis wouldn't mind getting out right now, we guess, on a bike that takes him to no particular place at all. Where he can observe without being stared at, converse without being quoted. Where a consummate actor does not have to act. Where he can just be.