There’s a Phantom Thread one-liner for every situation. Is someone pestering you? “I cannot start my day with a confrontation. I simply have no time for confrontations.” Is someone making too much noise? “It’s like you just rode a horse across the room!” Have you just been served terrible food (especially if it’s asparagus with butter)? “I’m admiring my own gallantry for eating it the way you prepared it.” Are you playing a stupid game? “This is a stupid game.”
It’s an extremely quotable movie — no wonder; it’s from the same writer, Paul Thomas Anderson, who gave us, “I drink your milkshake” — but little dialogue is needed in the deleted scene above (although “it’d be a waste of tea” is a solid burn). The clip is a food fight between Reynolds Woodcock (Oscar nominee Daniel Day-Lewis) and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville, also nominated for an Oscar), and it’s glorious. If you’ve ever wanted to see Bill the Butcher/Daniel Plainview/Abraham Lincoln’s face covered in jam, today is your lucky day.
Day-Lewis is having a great time in the scene, but the rest of the shoot wasn’t always so fun. “We built a world we could create and just stay in and no one could get into it. But in this townhouse, which was very beautiful, it was a nightmare,” he said. “We were living on top of each other. It was an enormous unit. There was no space.” Don’t pick a fight with DDL — you won’t come out alive.
