Anemone is the 2025 directorial debut of Ronan Day-Lewis. Ronan wrote the screenplay with his father, Daniel Day-Lewis, who is also the film's star in the leading role.  Daniel Day-Lewis has not been on screen in 8 years. This film has him sharing the screen with Sean Bean and Samantha Morton.

The 63rd New York Film Festival screening on Sunday, September 28, 2025 was the film's world premiere. Focus Features plans to give the film a limited release in the United States starting October 3rd and then expand a week later October 10, 2025.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Ray Stoker, a former military man. Sean Bean plays his brother, and Samantha Morton as Nessa Stoker, a lover and wife in his life who gave birth to his son Brian Stoker played by Samuel Bottomley.

Principal photography began on October 1, 2024 in Manchester, England. In September 2025, it was announced that Bobby Krlic would compose the score for the feature film.

Some excerpts from the Q&A after the World premiere screening on Sunday the 28th:

Moderator: I thought I would start by asking you, Ronan and Daniel to just tell us how it started because you co-wrote the film. When did that start?

Ronan: Yeah, so, I had for years this big sense of wanting to write something about brotherhood and find a way into that kind of archetype, but at first, I thought maybe it could be a coming of age type story or something like that. And then at one point after my dad had stopped acting for the time being, he said to me that he wanted to find something that we could work on together. It turned out that he independently had this inclination to do something about brotherhood.

Moderator: What was that writing process like for both of you?

Ronan: It was interesting. We started very kind of intuitively, at very low stakes. Like we didn't have any sense of... we didn't start like an outline or anything, which was very different from the past scripts that I had worked on. So we were kind of almost like walking into the dark with a flashlight. And we had this sense of there being this man living in the state of kind of self exile and put in this remote environment then his brother turning up after 20 years of no contact. But beyond that, it was we didn't really the circumstances of their past and their lives and their kind of their connections, sort of revealed themselves over time. It was very much a lot of improvisation that went into it where my dad would actually speak as the characters and especially Ray, as him kind of slipping into that character really early on in the process, which is remarkable and like, unexpected man.

Moderator: Sean, your response to the script?

Sean: I love this as soon as I read it and Daniel called me. I couldn't believe he was calling me actually ... told me about this wonderful script that Ron and he had written and I was very flattered and honored that he should ask me for starters. And then after reading the script and seeing his courage and his potential. It just is the beauty, poignancy, and these incredibly fractured and mysterious characters that are... I was just blown away by it and there was just something I wanted to you know, I was just so much looking forward to working with these guys.

Moderator: Yeah. I'd be curious to hear it from Daniel's perspective.

Daniel: Yes, he's coming back to the work that I love. I felt that I had a vocation at a very early age as a child still, but it was going to be my future, one way or another, the better or worse. And I hoped that I would remain working for some time. And yeah, I have taken time away from it. Apparently I've been accused of retiring twice now. It would never occur to me to use the word retirement, because you know, sometimes I have stopped working doing this work because I'd wish to do some other work for a given period of time. And in the case of the latest one, after the last one, I made out. I definitely been very low spirits. You know I made a fucking fool of myself, that you know, announcing that I was going to stop working and you know, probably a bigger fool of myself coming back, but to deny myself possibility of working with wrong than just to stand on my pride, I think that would have been, you know, probably, you know, a worse decision than just, well, I said that, so I'm sticking to it, but it didn't occur to me after the last one, you know, how long years have I probably not well suited to the work was always very precious to me. But I think I have it in common with a lot of actors that I'm very, I'm ill-suited for the life around it, the public aspects of it. Like a lot of us, we're rather. It's a paradox, you know, we seem to be begging for attention, just by virtue of doing that work. But it never really occurs to you that you can't switch that attention off, but well, if you get it, if you're lucky enough to get it. There's nothing to bemoan about, because it means you've been lucky, if you do get, if your work has paid attention to work. But yeah, I was always in at ease with the public aspect of the life, which very much involves the promotional part of it and I never quite I thought I'd get used to it, but I never really did. And so it sort of left me wondering if I wasn't just better off, you know, keeping out of it.

Moderator: Sorry to make you do this.

Daniel: But, it's fine I'm grateful for a chance to talk about it a little bit, because I realize that it raised questions and of course, it's dark to make statements about stuff. You're meant to just crawl away and die quietly. You know it just seems so self important to me, but in that case, I was at very low air, and I thought, I'm doing this because I don't really expect to find my way back to an appetite for this work again, and I did, and I'm really grateful for it. Now I hope I do again.

Here are photos from the red carpet that accompanied the screening on Sunday and some are from the press conference on Friday.