An absolutely gorgeous film with great acting and beautiful costumes, but… I’m a huge Edith Wharton fan, but there’s something about Daniel Day-Lewis in this film that never quite works for me. Still, that’s my only complaint — see it for the beautiful bustle gowns and a wonderful examinations of the social mores, and emotions behind them, of 1870s New York society.
My wife and I were dress extras for the opera scene, which took two days to shoot. There were a lot of us, and there was a lot of down time. So much so that we organised a talent show to kill time. All for about two minutes on film. The two poor kids who were the opera performers had to do the same two bars about 200 times before Scorsese was happy with it. They made my wife dye her black hair brown so she wouldn’t distract from Wynona Ryder. Ryder was pretty ill for much of that; in one walking scene, she had to lean pretty heavily on her escort.