Makeup on a fight film usually goes on a clean face, which is not what happened here, and he says it is the only production he has ever been on where the process worked in reverse.
Daniel opens up about the day on their first film together when he stayed behind through lunch to watch his own close up on a monitor beside an Oscar winner’s, and calls it the single greatest acting lesson he has had. He talks about what he took from that, a kind of stillness and relationship with the lens he says he did not have before, and about how each of the three films they have made has pushed him further into the frame rather than beside it. He gets candid about becoming a father at forty, twenty three years into an acting career, and describes what that did to his work in a phrase most actors would not reach for. Daniel walks through the two things he hopes his son takes from him, one about ambition and one about being allowed to fail, and traces the second back to his own parents. He also explains what the production was actually chasing with the fight sequences, and gives a straight answer about how much of it was real.
An essential watch for anyone who has been told to be still and had no idea what that means.
