The Wild Delight of Willem Dafoe

I’m pretty good at doing other things. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do what I need to do. But I think the most difficult thing is that I always like to be engaged in something that’s tickling me or challenging me or directing me in activity. I like to be in movement. I like waking up in the day knowing that I have a specific thing to accomplish. That’s always the pleasure of working on a film set. You have something to do and each time it’s different.

Even when you aren’t filming or performing, you’re usually preparing. And because of the restrictions of the strike, to retain a certain bargaining position, that was all cut off. So, not only was there an uncertain future, but there was nobody talking about the future. When you’re making things and you’re involved in a life that’s nomadic and you take it project by project, it’s quite stressful to have that faucet turned off.

I think that was what was hard. Did I suffer? Only because of that. But also—it’s a spanking. It reminds you how lucky you are to be doing something that you like to do. And it also reminds you that you could do other things if you had to.

You do as much as you feel you need to do to feel confident and engaged. To be able to pretend, to be able to say, “I’m this guy. No one else is this guy. I’m this guy.” So, how do you do that? You either do research or do something that engages you, makes you own it; makes you proceed in a way that you have that kind of authority to pretend. Sometimes, it can be very minimal. And sometimes, it can be very extensive.

Reading all of his letters, reading biographies about him, reading histories about him, reading commentary about him—things had a different meaning to me. But I had to learn how to paint, because there’s so much practical painting in that. And then, of course, the beauty is that that became the key. Then, my life was van Gogh because that’s what I was engaged in. That’s the kind of feeling that you want. When you do something like Poor Things, I can read the book. I can read the script. I can work on an accent. I can learn how to suture…

I did. I did.

A woman that worked in a mortuary in Budapest. She was one of the main people in the city morgue. And she was a wonderful teacher and very demanding. That was her job. A young woman, too. All the rest of her time, she was an obsessive gamer. We’d practice on pieces of meat, cutting and flaying. Maybe it’s overkill, but what that does is: it gives you a stake. You learn something and then can swing with it a little bit. Not that you’re gonna do that in the movie, but it gives you an experience that you never had before and that feeds your being there. It makes your being there specific because I’m transformed by that. There’s me who didn’t know how to suture, and then there’s me who knows how to suture. It helps you to say my life has changed. So, I am Godwin Baxter.

I think so. I think so.

A nice guy. Nice. I like being on set. Because that’s where the action is. I don’t hang out in my trailer. I’ve done movies where I never even go in my trailer. It’s fun to watch other people. After you’re there for a while maybe it gets a little boring, a little tedious. There’s lots of waiting. But still, it’s a special environment. You watch and it gives you the dynamics of everybody and everything that’s going on. I cannot be in my trailer, have them knock on the door and say, “Willem, we’re ready for you,” walk on the set, and be shooting in 30 seconds. I like to be there, see who’s fighting, see who’s happy, see how the last scene went, see if they had a jam with the last camera take. All that factors in. So, what am I like on set? I’m like a Peeping Tom on set. I like to hang out.

You’re doing things. Doing them gracefully and with superhuman attention. Because even emotions come from actions. I trust actions. I trust doing. Like a dancer, you get a score and then there’s nothing blind about that. Or a musician doing scales. You craft something, and then the beauty is applying yourself to it and then playing. Going from one note to the next. And if that sounds boring—if that doesn’t sound loose and inspired—you’re wrong. Because you’re going from note to note, and how you get off one note and onto another is the beauty of it in the same way that how you get from one action to another is the beauty of it.

And when I say action, I mean language can be action. Handling props can be action. Looking at someone can be action. Hopping from one thing to the other. You say existential, which sounded a little heavy, but, yeah, you’re given the beautiful discipline of this camera. That’s like a gun to your head. So, you’ve got to have something together. You have to be wildly present.

In our daily lives, we should be present, but we don’t have to be present. We get all kinds of ways to be distracted and all kinds of ways not to be present. But existentially, how beautiful it would be if we could live like when we perform, when we’re in the groove. Because it’s connecting the dots. It’s going from one thing to the next. And if you could do that all your life, then there’s no death. There’s just an end to that.

They have done things that interest me, so I want to be with them. It’s about helping—being material for these people that are doing interesting things. And it’s the old story: It’s not about you. You’re best when it’s not about you. You have to give yourself to something else, and ironically, I think that’s the way you realize your best self.

That sounds very high minded, and it is, but that’s the impulse. If they’ve made a movie, made several movies, and they’ve touched me or moved me, I say, “I wanna be in the room with that guy, see how he does that.” It’s an expression of their experience of living. You want to steal that. You wanna be there for that. You wanna learn that. So, you take it on. Maybe I’m like a vampire. That’s terrible. But, you get it.

Yes.

I’m not telling you [laughs]. No, listen. I don’t obsessively watch myself, but I always watch my movies at least once to see how they turned out and to be able to talk about them. And some movies, I can actually watch myself objectively and say, “Oh, there’s that guy and I know him quite well. Oh, he’s doing that. Oh, I like it when he does that. Oh, that’s not so good when he does that.”

But I will not lie: Sometimes, I make myself laugh. I don’t really know what it is, but when things work well, yeah, I can watch myself and say, “Hey. Cool.” I can also watch myself and say, “Oh, fuck.” Sometimes you’re better than other times. And sometimes, the setup is better than other times. And sometimes, your collaborators are better than other times. There’s so many moving parts that you have to be kind and patient and laugh.

I’m a Midwesterner—I don’t worry about discipline and rigor. That, I have too much of, probably. So, through the years, you really cultivate a flexibility and a sense of humor. If you’re too tight, everything becomes transactional. Everything becomes egotistical. Everything becomes painful. And while pain’s a part of life and it’s a good teacher and all that—actually, I have a high tolerance for pain—I don’t seek it.

Physical pain, I think, I’m pretty good at. I don’t know about emotional pain.

I don’t know. All I know is I’ve never trained heavily. I didn’t have traditional actor aspirations. I started out in a small theater world that was avant-garde. You never thought of it as a career but you end up being there for almost 30 years. I’ve always lived in New York and now I live in other places. So, while sometimes I have lived in LA for movies, and I enjoy it for a time, that’s not my life. My life is on the road and in movies and in working with people in this nomadic life.

When you say the level of celebrity, I think that’s hard to measure for anyone. Maybe someone like Tom Cruise finds his way to enjoy it. People are generally nice to me. And if they aren’t into me, they don’t bother me. Basically, most things are good that come from it. Of course, there’s awkward moments, those classic things of a guy wanting an interview with you while you’re at a urinal, or you happen to have a fight with someone you’re with in a restaurant and you storm out and someone watching says, “Wow, I know who that was. What was he so mad about?” But you keep moving and be kind. So far, so good, at least. Nobody’s done anything nasty to me because I’m an actor—yet.

It was a good movie! And I enjoyed working with the people. I enjoy doing that stunt stuff. It’s like being in the circus because there wasn’t so much CGI then, so there was wire work. The stuntman does stuff, I do stuff, and then they mix it. It was fun. And then, to see it be so popular worldwide. I’ve done some movies where it makes me cry that they don’t get seen because of how they’re placed in the world. Well, that’s not a problem with Spider-Man.

As far as the whole Marvel world and all that, the success it has, the scope of it, it’s quite impressive. Of course, with a big movie, there’s more cooks. There’s more considerations. There’s more risk. But also, there can be, amazingly sometimes, some looseness, because they cut things out and they leave little places where they want something to happen. And they’re hoping that you can do that. When things are so built, it’s trying to live in them and honor the construction and do what’s required, but also do something for yourself.

I don’t know. When we’re talking about the movie industry, we’re really talking about how people see movies. And call me old fashioned, but I love going into that dark room with a bunch of strangers and having an experience with them. A bunch of people sitting down, paying attention, looking at the light on the screen, and having this kind of collective experience—individual and collective at the same time—that is very cool.

When that was a tradition and that was a normal thing, I think that it was very dynamic. Now, in other ways, beautiful things have happened. Movies have become more democratic so different kinds of people can make movies. Different stories can be told.

How we see movies has changed. Right now, the difficulty is when movies become like soap operas, like a series where you befriend the people. The eight episode thing where actors come in, directors come in, a showrunner runs it, and people binge watch. It becomes your show. “I gotta get home for my show.” And you attach yourself to a narrative and to these personalities, just like people do with soap opera. They become your friends. You go home, you get food in front of the TV, and you stream some series.

And then, there’s some question about the quality of attention. How many people go home and say to their partner, “Hey, let’s watch something stupid tonight,” and they click. “No, I don’t like that.” Click. “No.” If they don’t like it after five minutes, they end up saying, “Let’s go to bed.” That’s not very good for the health of movies.

I think movies should be shared and movies should be social, and we should see them together so there can be some kind of discourse. I like the discipline of having to unload it in an hour and a half, two hours. But then, it’s not my business. My business is to be an actor and to be responsible for the things that I’m involved in. That’s the best I can do. So, I really have nothing smart to say. And even saying what I just said, I feel a little smarmy because I don’t really know. And if my life was different, if I had a series on a streamer and it was wildly popular and I did it for 10 years, I would probably think that was great and that that was the future.

It’s practical. They asked me to do a campaign when they were having actors do their campaign, and I did one and really enjoyed it. The pictures were good. The clothes were good. The people were very decent. And I did a runway show with them. Then, in the theater and in film, when it was appropriate, I’d sometimes ask if I could use some of their clothes, and they were very generous. And very generous in the respect that sometimes, like in the theater, we were even allowed without restriction to play with their design, use them as a base for something else. When I do photoshoots, I always say as a security blanket, “Let’s make sure that there’s some Prada in there.” Just because they’re beautifully made. They’re made for someone my size. I feel good in them.

I do know Mrs. Prada—not intimately, but I see her occasionally at events and things. And then, let’s not even talk about the Prada foundation in Milan. It’s a fantastic place. I like this idea, that it’s where fashion meets art. They do a lot for artists. They are artists. And I like that.

I mean, what flavor do you want [laughs]? He was great. I got friendly with him again toward the end of his life. I was always hoping that we might be able to do something, but it never quite happened. To Live and Die in L.A. was the movie that I worked with him on, and he was full of surprises. And he was deeply iconoclastic but also had a kind of respect for classical things. Sometimes you’d get to the set and be ready to do one thing and he’d say, “We’re not doing that at all. On the way home, I saw this other location.” He was fluid. He was always trying to approach things from a different angle. Nothing was in lockstep with him. He seemed pretty loose. He cast basically unknown actors. I had made some movies, but I wasn’t well known. He cast theater actors. He was an adventurer. He shot from the hip and, of course, he knew his stuff.

I don’t have a single great story. Most of them, I won’t tell to the world. But always—you never knew what was gonna happen. It was flying by the seat of your pants.

When we talk about Scorsese, we’re talking about my experience on Last Temptation. And that movie was very particular because it was a no-budget movie. They had very little money. It was essential, and I think that’s what made it beautiful. The first thing—the thing that he told me to do for preparation—was that he sent me an article about forgiveness, an article about some archeological find where they found out that they crucified people in the way I was crucified in the movie, and he asked me to watch Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

It was incredible because this is a movie that he had thought about for many years. He had it in his head. Of course, he’s wildly skilled. And we shot it simply and quickly. It was a low-budget movie in Morocco. And Hollywood couldn’t be any further away. So, it was really down and dirty. I had beautiful things to do in it, and it was one of my favorite experiences because it demanded a lot from me. And not demanded a lot from me like you think: “Oh, you’re Jesus.” Because the whole point was: I’m a guy that’s not down with being Jesus. He is Jesus, but he’s not. He doesn’t wanna be. You try to summon that everyman quality to something that’s very loaded.

Oh, all over the place. There’s not a single one. I’ve always had a fascination with—it’s not a kitschy thing—B-movie actors that aren’t well known and aren’t considered good, but they have a humanity that I think, “How beautiful is that?” And when I see that, I get turned on.

When I first started watching foreign films, when I was maybe 15, 16, 17 years old, it was fun to see movies where you didn’t know who the people were and you didn’t know whether they were famous. You didn’t know if they were supposed to be good actors. You didn’t know whether this was their first role or their eightieth. Watch a Satyajit Ray movie and you see something on screen that turns you on and just gives you a sense of wonder and hope. That’s what I like.

When I was younger, some would say, “Who’s your favorite actor?” And I could say someone like Warren Oates, just because of that everyman quality. He’s not known as a terrifically versatile actor, but he has a rootedness. Or the way someone like Harry Dean Stanton can be. They have a quality. That’s a little what I express in Hollywood terms—that thing of when someone pops on the screen in a not-obvious way.

That’s what I’m more into than seeing great performances. You see someone that’s so fantastic that you say, “Wow, how did they do that?” I’ve seen plenty of beautifully crafted performances. I’ve seen people be beautiful, handsome, graceful, clever—and I do like that. But the ones that you really love are the ones that sneak up on you.