Based on the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s work “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” published in 2005, the movie “Lincoln” is a sweeping epic drama by Steven Spielberg starring two-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis.
Day-Lewis delivers a towering performance that has won him the recent Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor, playing the 16th president of the United States. The drama paints an insightful portrait of the leader, the political genius and the visionary, also revealing an engaging and inspiring man. It focuses on four tumultuous months in 1865 when Lincoln set about achieving his goal of outlawing slavery, in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and a deeply divided nation ravaged by the Civil War.
Goodwin was a close collaborator on the movie with Spielberg.
What did you discover about Lincoln that hadn’t previously been revealed?
Lincoln is thought of as a great statesman: winning the Civil War, saving the Union and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; but the first thing that intrigued me was that his political genius was even greater than his statesmanship.
He had the ability to deal with the factions that were opposed to one another and bring them all together and navigate all that in an extraordinary way. You think of Lincoln as being above politics somehow because he’s come down to us as an icon, but he was actually deeply into politics.
The second thing I found was that although many people have thought about Lincoln as permanently depressed, I came away with a very different impression: that he wasn’t a depressive. He had a melancholy temperament from the time he was born probably, but the depression that he suffered when he was young was more because of a gap that existed between his huge ambitions and his concerns about whether he would ever be able to realize those ambitions.”
How ambitious was the young Abraham Lincoln?
When he was young, Lincoln really wanted to do something important so that his story could be told after he died. At one point when he was depressed he said: “I haven’t yet done anything to make any human being remember that I have lived.” He must have known he had great talent from the time he was young. After his mother died, Lincoln had an obsession that there was nothing after life, that when you died you were just gone, unless you could do something important and then your story would be told. I think when he was young he wondered, “How will I ever achieve that?”
He seemed like a warm and inspiring man who really loved life.
He was. When I talked to Tony (Kushner) the one thing I would always say to him was: “You have to get his humor in there. Make sure he’s telling stories.” In the film, Daniel starts telling stories and his eyes are shining, he’s smiling, his whole face lights up and he looks like a different person. That is what happened with Lincoln. He had that sad look which was partly physiological, but contemporaries said his face would be transformed when he told stories.
How excited were you about Steven Spielberg’s decision to make Lincoln?
I was thrilled and I couldn’t imagine it being in better hands. He is a real “mensch” of a guy. One might imagine that sometimes people at the top of the world like Spielberg are going to take some things for granted, but Steven doesn’t take anything for granted. I would watch him on the set and he was always there at six in the morning. He was there late at night working. He gave everything he could to this film and it’s a joy to watch that kind of dedication and talent. I love Steven. I think he’s a wonderful man.
How much of the Lincoln you have come to know will audiences see in “Lincoln”?
The film focused on a compressed time period, but I’d like to believe that the Lincoln I wrote about throughout the whole book informed the movie. The movie shows how well he could communicate, how he was devastated by his son Willie’s death but had to be continue being a father to his son, Tad, despite his grief. It incorporates more than those last months. What mattered to me was that Lincoln came to life. I think they did amazingly well in the film. I took 800 pages to describe Lincoln and get to know him. But somehow the Lincoln I got to know comes out in this compressed time span in the movie.
If you met Lincoln, what would you want to discuss with him?
If I could spend an evening with Lincoln I’d just ask him to tell me stories so that I could listen to him come alive with all that humor. Then I could watch that face be transformed by his storytelling.”
“Lincoln,” a 20th Century Fox presentation, opens in cinemas on Feb. 20; distributed by Warner Bros.