Daniel Day-Lewis did his ridiculous method acting thing in Lincoln, and it’s hard to imagine the movie without him, but did you know that he initially rejected the role? At the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (which, additional trivia, Armond White is a three-time former chairman of), Spielberg, presenting Day-Lewis’s best actor award, read the Dear Steve letter Day-Lewis sent him. That’s right, a letter. Like, through the mail, with stamps and ink and everything, just like in olden times.

Dear Steven,

It was a real pleasure just to sit and talk with you. I listened very carefully to what you had to say about this compelling history, and I’ve since read the script and found it in all the detail in which it describe these monumental events and in the compassionate portraits of all the principal characters, both powerful and moving. I can’t account for how at any given moment I feel the need to explore life as opposed to another, but I do know that I can only do this work if I feel almost as if there is no choice; that a subject coincides inexplicably with a very personal need and a very specific moment in time. In this case, as fascinated as I was by Abe, it was the fascination of a grateful spectator who longed to see a story told, rather than that of a participant. That’s how I feel now in spite of myself, and though I can’t be sure that this won’t change, I couldn’t dream of encouraging you to keep it open on a mere possibility. I do hope this makes sense Steven, I’m glad you’re making the film, I wish you the strength for it, and I send both my very best wishes and my sincere gratitude to you for having considered me. [THR]

Typical Daniel Day. “There is no choice. ‘Acting?’ Nay, for that you must call an actor. I merely choose to live my life a certain way, and if that manner of living happens to coincide with a story in a script, I consent to being filmed for a movIe. For one cannot ‘act,’ only live. I would never lie to my audience.”

Spielberg later had Tony Kushner re-write the script, Day-Lewis accepted, and the rest is history. Another piece of trivia, Daniel Day-Lewis actually acquired the “Day” in his surname after marrying former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day-O’Connor while preparing for a role as a judge. Maybe.

I did my best when I reviewed Lincoln, and it was pretty good because I’m a certified genius, but to a certain degree, my analysis of it as entertainment value doesn’t matter nearly as much as how accurate it was as history. Because while certain biopics about historical figures go more for historical fiction than literal history (Braveheart, say), the ones that do purport to be factual have a certain amount of responsibility. It’s scarily easy for popular myths to drown out actual truths in the popular memory, like that time Teddy Roosevelt ate three whole pheasants and still mollywhopped a Cossack. I’m not a Civil War historian, so I leave the historical analysis up to the experts, like Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College Jim Downs, who recently wrote a nice piece on Lincoln for Huffington Post.

Downs’ take on Lincoln is, predictably, nuanced. He refutes other historians charges that Spielberg portrayed blacks as passive, arguing that the subtlety of their objections to the proceedings in the movie actually seems period accurate. He praises Gloria Reuben’s performance as Lincoln’s housekeeper, Elizabeth Keckley, as “a masterful portrayal of subtlety and dissemblance” – a delicate balancing act of dual consciousness, fulfilling white expectations while maintaining an inner self.

Meanwhile, Downs takes Spielberg (or screenwriter Tony Kushner, depending on how you look at it) to task for failing to present Lincoln and others’ true motivations for wanting to abolish slavery, a good deal of which was economic. (This part involves some spoilers):

At that point, I wanted to jump up in the theater in the spirit of Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire and exclaim, “show me the money.” Were there no economic motivations for abolishing slavery? Economic concerns were integral in starting the war — the South wanted to move west to expand cotton production and needed slave labor to ensure its capital growth. The North feared that if slavery expanded to the West, then the Northern economy would crumble as a result of competition and the general desolation that slavery left in its wake. Yet Spielberg’s Lincoln never tips his stovepipe hat to economic considerations for ending slavery nor do any of the members of Congress who speak ardently for passage of the bill. In the film, the Speaker of the House, in an unprecedented move, interrupts the proceedings to announce that he wants to add his vote to the tally, claiming that he was breaking parliamentary procedure and voting for the bill in the name of history. Are we really supposed to believe that the whole of Congress voted to end slavery based solely on how they thought history would remember them, or did their economic self-interests play a part?

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