The Odd Couple Gets Even

A small, historical milestone was reached last weekend, all but unnoticed. It was the opening of an English-language film that was made, for the first time since the movies began to talk, by a woman directing her husband in a leading role. While it hardly warrants a commemorative edition of Ms. magazine, the news will be greeted in many households across the land with a certain amount of wry satisfaction.

The couple in question, Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller, have pretty good ancestry for revolutionaries. He's the son of British Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon. She's the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. They met in 1996 at an early screening of The Crucible, a film of her father's play. By that time Day-Lewis, already an Oscar-winning actor (for My Left Foot), had been offered, and had turned down, a role in one of Rebecca Miller's movies. Their new film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose--an unusual love story between a hippie father and daughter who seem to teeter on the brink of incest as they try to create a Utopian life on an island in the Atlantic--is the very one he rejected.

To see them together now is to wonder a little that they were ever apart. Day-Lewis, 47, and Miller, 42, are

striking and strikingly similar with their long, lanky limbs, dark hair and sparkling blue-green eyes. She's wearing the hip-girl wardrobe: designer jeans, a floaty blue top, and turquoise earrings that peek through her long hair. His shaggy hair and flowing beard are tinged with gray. He has tucked the curls partly under a knit cap, giving him the appearance of a trendy mad fisherman. His corduroy pants, tapering to his ankles, look either vintage '80s or just unfashionable--it's hard to tell. His sweatshirt sleeves are pulled up to his elbows to show off the intricate tattoo that covers his right forearm, a mix of Pueblo tribal bands embellished with dots and a central star motif that he designed.

Day-Lewis also carries the tattoo of his own legend: the actor who goes beyond method to near madness, so encased in his films' characters that he stays in them on the set and off; the star who takes off years at a time to work as a cobbler. (Before the new film was shot, he helped build the house Jack and Rose live in. During shooting, he lived by himself in a shack on the beach.) Yet, for a reputed recluse, Day-Lewis is very chatty. He and Miller are easy with each other, looking at each other as they speak, seeming at times as if they were on a date rather than being interviewed. The only time silence descends is when talk turns to parenting. Miller's father Arthur is recently deceased. But in an interview, as in a play or film, the silences can be as eloquent as the words.

WHERE DID JACK AND ROSE COME FROM?

REBECCA MILLER: Ten years ago I had written a film called Angela, and there was a young girl, 6 years old, and her father who are sort of left in the end. I wanted to write something else, and I thought to myself, Ten years later, where would they be? What kind of relationship would they have? From there they kind of diverged and became these other characters. This screenplay was kind of special in the sense that it really kept evolving and changing over a decade. Even when we were shooting I was making significant changes to the script.

HOW WAS THAT, TO BE WORKING ON SOMETHING THAT'S CHANGING?