IT TURNS out Daniel Day-Lewis isn’t the only one Paul Thomas Anderson has driven into retirement with his latest movie, Phantom Thread.

At a cast and crew get together in London last week, a year after the film was shot, the writer-director asked his colleagues if they had they been working lately.

One by one, he recalls, “they said, ‘No, I’m retired. I’m knackered after that movie’. I said, ‘Come on, it wasn’t that hard!’,” he laughs.

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Camera Icon Revered filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is up for Best Director and Best Credit: Getty Images, at the Oscars with his latest work, Phantom Thread — a movie that left cast and crew exhausted. Picture: John Phillips/Getty Images

“But that’s how I am. It takes me three or four days and I’m right back to normal, I’m running around saying, ‘Wasn’t that fun?’ And everybody else is saying, ‘No, it wasn’t fun. At all. It was really hard’.”

Three-time Oscar winner Day-Lewis issued a statement last June announcing he would “no longer be working as an actor”. If Phantom Thread does turn out to be his last hurrah, he’s going out on a high with another nomination for his performance as Reynolds Woodcock, a dress designer in post-war London whose fastidious world is up-ended by the arrival of his strong-willed new muse, Alma (Vicky Krieps).

Camera Icon Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, a post-war dress designer to the upper echelons of European society, in Phantom Thread. Credit: Supplied, Universal Pictures

Anderson, who previously steered Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, isn’t certain this is the last we’ll see of his leading man.

“He’s been threatening to retire long before I ever came into the picture. You could look at it two ways. You could say: He’s gone out on a high note and he’s given us so many great performances that we should all just respect his decision and be happy. Or, you could protest and say, ‘That’s not good enough, we want more!’

“I would vote for the second one,” he laughs. “But aren’t retirement announcements made to be broken?”

Anderson, who has four children with his partner of 17 years, actor and comedian Maya Rudolph, considers Phantom Thread his “relationship” movie.

Camera Icon “Love is strange,” says Anderson — especially for Phantom Thread’s Reynolds (Day-Lewis) and Alma (Vicky Krieps). Credit: Supplied, Universal Pictures

But it’s a heck of a strange relationship, where the tables are turned on a monstrous man by a woman determined not to be cast aside. At least five occurrences in the first date between Reynolds and Alma would have made a sane woman bolt.

“I agree!” declares Anderson. “But then again, I’d dare a lot of people to look back at their first dates and say, ‘Well, you could have seen all the red flags, yet there you are, you’re married with children now’.

“My favourite couple that I know,” he adds, laughing, “on their first date, he drank so much he threw up in the back of a taxi and they ended up kissing at the end of the night. Now they’ve been married for 35 years.

“But yes, I’m going to show Phantom Thread to my daughters: ‘OK, if you go on a date with anybody like this, here are the red flags you should look out for’.”

Camera Icon Philip Seymour Hoffman in Anderson’s 2012 film The Master. Credit: AP, Supplied

Camera Icon Day-Lewis as the violent prospector of There Will Be Blood. Credit: News Limited, Supplied

Anderson has made a lot of movies about men no daughter should go near: the cult leader of The Master, the egotistical porn star of Boogie Nights, the greedy and violent prospector of There Will Be Blood.

But that’s not the angle he takes on Phantom Thread.

“It’s about a girl who’s an immigrant who falls in love with a man she probably shouldn’t go near. But love is strange. And love is peculiar. And circumstances throw people together. And relationships can be dramatic. To heighten those relationships up for the purposes of a movie is what you’re supposed to do, I think, to make something that’s entertaining.”

Anderson says Day-Lewis never stopped surprising him on Phantom Thread.

Camera Icon Anderson at work on the London set of Phantom Thread. Credit: Supplied, Universal Pictures

“He’s a bottomless pit of new moves. He doesn’t just play the hits or recycle the old ones. He’s so inventive and very spontaneous.”

He reckons Day-Lewis is “underrated as a comedic actor”; it was his perverse costume choices that tickled Anderson this time.

“Everybody takes him very seriously, as they should, but if you watch Gangs of New York again there is some funny, funny stuff in that movie that he’s doing. Same with There Will Be Blood.”

Dark funny, perhaps.

“Yeah, super dark. But funny.”

Camera Icon Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler in 1997 breakout Boogie Nights. Credit: News Corp Australia, Supplied

Camera Icon Anderson on the set of Boogie Nights with actor Heather Graham. Credit: News Corp Australia, Supplied

It’s been 21 years since Anderson made his name and made a movie star out of Mark Wahlberg with Boogie Nights.

Wahlberg was recently quoted as saying he hoped God would forgive him his “poor choices” — Boogie Nights being “at the top of the list”.

Anderson reckons Wahlberg’s words were taken “wildly out of context by the internet” and that he was “just f---ing around”.

Besides, the director jokes, “he needs God’s forgiveness for a lot worse s--- that he’s done than Boogie Nights!”

Anderson personally doesn’t consider his films — among them Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love — as things to cringe at or second guess in hindsight, but rather as photo albums of his life.

Camera Icon Anderson at the 2008 Oscars with Maya Rudolph. He was nominated that night for Best Director, Credit: AP, and Adapted Screenplay for There Will Be Blood. Picture: AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian

“It’s a really good record book,” he says. “I’d probably have forgotten so many things in my life if I didn’t have those films to look back on. I’m terrible — I can remember the years my kids were born by the movie I was working on.

“In fairness to me,” he laughs, “there’s four of them, so it’s hard to keep track of.”

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