The Temptation of Willem Dafoe

We meet in Chelsea, in New York’s downtown district, where a multitude of gal­leries stand door to door to one another, like pearls on a necklace. Willem Dafoe, after a day’s rehearsal at the Public Theater, arrives at the photo studio, dressed casually, with a quiet intensity, gracious, at once warm yet reserved. While chatting, he says he feels most inspired when looking at art. “There is something so transparent in the ideas and art you see in galleries. I think that the most interesting things cannot be explained through logic, like truth; what inspires a moment of clarity always comes from the things that cannot be quite conceptualized.”

As our conversation continues, we begin exchanging thoughts on the latest contro­versial Lars von Trier film, Antichrist, which he stars in, and the word phobia comes out regularly from the actor’s lips. The interview­er wonders. Does Dafoe have any phobia of his own? “Yes,” he admits, “it’s crossing a bridge.” The interviewer, surprised, gives a shy smile, to which he comments, “serious­ly.” As an actor, Dafoe has crossed success­fully many challenging bridges, on stage and on big screen, as a leading man and sup­porting actor. As an individual, in real life, bridges are not that simple for him. “It’s a particular phobia I have. It calls me. It’s a sense of that moment if you had a lapse of reason, you’d be gone, and that’s a very powerful feeling. That’s why when I go over a bridge I’ve a tendency to walk with bent knees; it gives me an extra second to think,” he tells.

Born in the Midwest, the sixth of eight children, Dafoe is 54 years old, strongly built, with deeply defined features. He gravi­tated to acting and particularly to theater in his late teens, moved to New York, and became a founding member of the experi­mental ensemble The Wooster Group. “I came to the city with the intention to do tra­ditional theater, yet I always found myself going downtown, going to do improvisa­tional stuff. I certainly wasn’t sophisticated then, I don’t know what I’m now. All that world excited me. When you’re in your early twenties you’re not worried about making a career or money. It was the beginning of the punk club scene, there was lots going on at the time, I just wanted to be with those peo­ple and wanted the freedom to make things. It wasn’t appealing to me to get headshots, banging on doors, trying to be in the traditional theater. Still today, I’m slightly more drawn to unconventional peo­ple and projects,” he says.

Gradually stepping into the film world, an early example is Kathryn Bigelow’s Loveless in 1984, Dafoe reached wide recognition in Oliver Stone’s Platoon in 1986. Since then, the movies he has made have enhanced his much-respected status as a character-actor, showcasing his innate talent for deciphering the humanity in the most complex charac­ters. Throughout his influential career, he has managed to juggle successfully the three artistic beasts: Hollywood, independent cin­ema, and foreign films. The long list of movies he’s starred in includes Spider-Man, The English Patient, Clear and Present Dan­ger, White Sands, Mississippi Burning, The Boondock Saints, American Psycho, Man­derlay, and Edges of the Lord.

He has collaborated with remarkable directors — Martin Scorsese in The Last Temptation of Christ, Wes Anderson in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Paul Schrader in Light Sleeper, David Cronen­berg in eXistenZ, David Lynch in Wild at Heart, William Friedkin in To Live and Die in L.A., and Wim Wenders in Far Away So Close, among others. He was nominated twice for the Academy Award (Platoon in 1986, and Shadow of the Vampire in 2000).

“There are all kinds of acting, and there are all kinds of functions. People get con­fused when they think acting is one thing. It is not,” he says. “Part of making movies for me is when you arrive to finding out what your interest is and what is needed, how can you serve the construct the best way, and to serve it well you have to always rethink the activity — what are we doing here, and apply yourself. In my work, what I do is always changing. Sometimes I’m suit­ed for it, sometimes I’m not, sometimes I have to make up for the gap when I’m not suited, sometimes I have to not do so much, sometimes I have to work very hard; it’s always different. The consistent thing I look for is to collaborate with people who are good and humble. I’ve worked with some real crazy egomaniacs who can be beautiful in movies, so there is always a contradiction. When I get in a room I like to be with people who are smart and flexible, because then you can take it where it goes, there aren’t too many rules, and you can really be free.”

With two movies opening this month — von Trier’s Antichrist, and Paul Weitz’s Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant — along with a stage performance in New York City, the actor is committed to inspire audi­ences this Fall with a variety of roles.

Here is Willem Dafoe — focused, frank, and free.

Venice: How would you verbalize the feeling you get from acting?

Willem Dafoe: At its best, you want to arrive to those moments when you’re deeply concentrated; it’s like being an athlete, when they apply themselves to the task, they’re in the task, and they are transformed by it. I like that feeling, it puts me more in touch with the things that sustain me, like poetry or mys­tery, the things where you feel you get your finger on the pulse of life.

And exactly when do those moments take place?

It’s usually when you disappear into what you’re doing. For me it’s one of the attrac­tions of performing, you feel a kind of power being present and useful in nature and in movement, in a way where you’re everything and you’re nothing at the same time; it’s a powerful feeling. In a perfect world that’s the way we’d feel all the time, to be nothing and everything at once.

You are often cast as unstable or villain­ous characters. How would you explain that?

I think it’s the product of a couple of things. I think the most interesting stories come from the margins, and those are usual­ly the more interesting characters because they are thinking outside of the box. I think, practically speaking, when you’re young and you’re seen as a character actor you’re not like a leading man, those are the juiciest roles and that’s what I started with. If people cannot quite place you, this is the good and the bad news, I find myself playing things sometimes, like vampires and monsters, so that has to do with who I am physically and my background. 

Set versus stage, film versus theater: How different is the process and the plea­sure?

No matter what kind of theater it is, whether it is widely improvisational or very structured, you’re still repeating a score, in a way that you don’t really do so much in film. In the latter, you can rehearse but you shoot it and you move on, you shoot it and you move on, while in theater you sit with the material and your job is very much to reani­mate and rethink it. In theater, you are con­sidering the material over and over again, and there is something about it that is very active and meditative at the same time, in a way that feels very healthy. In film you don’t get that; you can say plenty of things about actors not controlling their rhythms, films being about editors and directors, but it has to do with that fundamental matter of the returning to the material over and over again, the ritual, the habit, and somehow it suits me. I love waking up in the morning, yeah, you are going to have your day, yeah, you are going to have your life, but everything kind of points to feed that structured activity that you’re going to do in the evening. In a funny way it’s closer to life, how you approach it and how you revisit it is your quality of life, and I think theater allows you to play with that.

You are performing in “Idiot Savant,” written and directed by Richard Foreman. How does it feel being back on stage?

Richard has been making theater for a long time. I worked with him many years ago, and love many things he says. The other day he was sort of orienting us to frame the experience. He said, “Stories hide the truth,” which is sort of heresy. He is a one-man band. He looks for those moments when you are awakened by something. Most audiences hop on the train when they get into a narrative because they are waiting for the resolution of that narrative and that’s what drives them, that’s what keeps them attached to it. If you fragment that it confus­es people, but if they are open, they’ll realize that the stuff between the understandable things is more welcoming than the stuff you recognize right away. When I watch his the­ater, and I have through the years, I’m a per­fect audience member for him, because I’m happy to be there and I like how I think when I’m in his theater, it poses lots of philosophi­cal questions and riddles. The other day we were doing a run-through, he said, “ah, terri­ble, this is not Hamlet, this is a little thing, you have to have that kind of lightness to do this.” And another day, he said, “I distrust group response, I only trust individual response, most people are not going to get it.” He was talking about his theater, and he said, “rattle in the elitism of it.” And elitism gets everybody reaching for their gun here, but he means that certain things cannot always be held to the tyranny of democracy. 

Which also can be applied to von Trier’s new movie Antichrist, which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival this year. It is certainly not a film for every­body.

This is a movie that is dense enough to have many interpretations, I don’t care to interpret it so much, there are many things that are very evocative to me, that speak to me strongly. Which is not strange, it’s built on a series of images and dreams and paranoid fantasies that Lars had. When you make something you do get protective about it, and when you value it, you want other people to value it. I’m moved by the movie even though it’s quite dark, and there are many things that I cannot account for and I think it’s going to mean different things to different people, but there are many moments of mystery and beauty that move me about our condition and our humanness. I find that when I go to that dark place, it inspires me, it’s about confronting fear and playing with the idea of what fear does to you. Even though he is not sympathetic [the character Dafoe portrays in the film], there are some elements of what that character is trying to do that I value a great deal and that’s to see where our mind goes, where we create problems for ourselves, where fear traps us. I think Lars has a talent for going to places that are taboo to discuss, and when you go to that guilty place, you unlock some things and it can free you. The irony is you have this darkness on the sur­face, this horrific picture, but it unlocks some of my own little demons and makes me feel liberated.

How is it working so closely with such a director? He’s known to be quite demanding of his actors.

He is very demanding; in this case it was very particular. He was quite ill, in a serious depression, and out of the depression, not unlike the woman in the story, he had terrific phobias. He was making this film partly because the only place he felt he wasn’t afraid was on a film set. This was dealing with some of his fears and fantasies, so he is very vulnerable, he is very intelligent, can be very sarcastic, and can be quite tough intellectually. He has got a nasty sense of play. He was demanding in the sense that he really needed us, Charlotte [Gainsbourg] and me, to trust him and to support him, and we did, for our own selfish reasons, because we were both attracted to the material and to working with him. It was rewarding, but one of the best rewards for me in all of that, in trying to help him, in allowing certain conditions — like the possi­bility that the film won’t get finished, working in an unprotected way — it felt risky but when you take a leap of faith like that and it is met with great care, it’s really a creative power. You’re always looking for that kind of complicity, that kind of trust, that kind of inti­macy in work, in this case it was such a per­sonal film for Lars; there have been few experiences where I’ve seen a filmmaker give so much of himself, even though he was always complaining that he wasn’t up to the job because he was feeling quite ill. My experience was that his way of working is scary, but personally he couldn’t have been a kinder, more considerate person. So, is he demanding? Terrifically! But we asked for it. [laughs]

I will throw some words out there, tell me the first thing that comes to your mind, when I say…

Platoon— A real good life experience, a case of a little movie that I did for my own pleasure, because I wanted to be part of it, I had very little expectation, and it became a very important movie in my career and a generally quite esteemed one, and popular, which is nice when those two go together. 

Spider-Man— Really fun, a great suc­cess, the first one, which is the one I identify with, really captured without cynicism what is interesting about the story, the kind of coming of age story, Tobey [Maguire] was really well-suited, Sam [Raimi, the director] was great, he loved this like a kid loves a comic.

David Lynch— A very graceful, fun expe­rience. I like his movies very much, and I like how he conducts the set, really surprisingly playful.

Portraying Jesus Christ— A beautiful set up, a beautiful opportunity, when I fin­ished I felt very spent. People forget it was a low budget movie, we were in Morocco by ourselves, Hollywood felt so far away. Martin Scorsese knew the story he wanted to tell, didn’t have to do preparation for it, I almost had to cleanse myself of any expec­tation, since it was a reactive role I had to be in a place where I could receive the story and that’s a very interesting place to be because it was built that way, this stuff hap­pens to this guy and he reacts, and this movie happened to me. Considering it’s such a period movie, so complicated to find the right tone, but I didn’t think about these things, I just tried to give myself to the story and to Martin.

Yoga [Dafoe has been a yoga devotee for years]-- Sri K. Pattabhi Jois said, “practice and all is coming.” It’s an important line. “Practice and all is coming.”

Being interviewed— Social, fun initially, and usually traumatizing after. [laughs]

Is it really that bad? What makes it so?

At the end of an interview, when a jour­nalist says is there anything you want to talk about, I can never think of something. I feel like what I want to talk about is not important. Maybe that says something about me. People misunderstand some­times. I love to work through other people’s stuff, I don’t want to do my stuff. When I attach myself to a director or to a project, it’s nice for it to be far away from me, and my job is coming to their story and doing it for them and that gives you much more power when you aren’t dealing with your own prejudices. Being an actor you’ve the license, there’s a bit of irresponsibility, and you say ok I’m this guy and you take on these points of views, actions, and traits.

Can one truly detach oneself from the core of who they are and not bring that into the character?

That’s the irony. It’s always you; you can­not get away from yourself. It’s not anybody else. But you’re creating a situation where you’re challenging who you are, you’re invit­ing this idea of disappearing, it sets into motion the possibility to think in other ways, feel in other ways, be in other ways. With acting, we’re taking on different roles, con­sidering different situations, it’s beautifully therapeutic, it lets you realize how fragile the idea of identity and personality is.

How much research and how much imagination go into your approach to embody a character?

It depends. Sometimes you feel a great need for it, sometimes you don’t. You do whatever you need to have the authority to pretend, to say I’m in contact with the char­acter, I’m engaged in the story. If you’re playing a game, how much do you train to play it better? In some cases you have to train a lot, otherwise the game is totally lost on you if you don’t have a certain level of skill. In some games, you are almost better off if you play with lightheartedness. Games always reveal people’s characters, they deal with performance, and with where you place your mind.

Looking in retrospect to your career and life, what do you see?

You learn your lesson, and real lessons are learned without your thinking about them too much. If you are going to make mistakes and you’re compelled to make the same mistakes over and over again, maybe that’s your faith. I’m not sure you can train yourself to make good choices, that’s an illusion. You find material, material finds you; you seek out situations but you cannot control it. I’m kind of surprised that I’ve been doing this for a while, but at the same time I feel like I’m innocent. In some way I’ve strong instincts and I feel like I’ve been around the block, but in another way, every time I get to a movie set I’m excited, it’s like new, I’m always nervous on the first day. The other thing is I’m a different person, you look at a movie, for good or for bad, and you wonder — is it you, is it the cul­ture, is it the timing — movies are a conver­gence of so many things. You can try to see patterns but you’re kind of fooled to obsess about it; inevitably you seek lessons and try not to make the same mistakes. I start from zero, sort of naturally, because you want to, you don’t want to have these stories run into each other, you want to make yourself available for a new set of impulses, and yes you can only do that to a relative degree, but to the degree that you can do it you encourage it.

I know you don’t like to talk much about the past, yet can you share with us a little the landscape of your childhood and upbringing?

Where I come from is not that important, what I do now is important. I grew up in the Midwest, a big family, sweet people, both of my parents are still alive, my sisters and brothers are alive. I’m more toward the end, there are good things about families and there are not so good things about families. When we would all get together, I was probably the least talented one. [laughs] They could all sing and dance and were good with jokes. If you put my family on some sort of talent show, I’d be the one to get booted out first. It wasn’t an artistic environment. I grew up in Wisconsin, indus­trious people who believed you've got to carry your own weight. Puritanical. I grew up sweet and square and afraid, a nice kid. And then I think I had some sort of a calling where I got interested in theater, and I went to the biggest and closest city to do that, and before you knew it I was in New York, a middle class kid with no money living in a bad neighborhood. It transforms you; you identify with a completely different group of people than who you grew up with. For me, that’s where my identity started. Of course, the truth is that my early life forms me more than I can even imagine, but in terms of making a life, choosing how to direct it, for me it really all started in New York. 

I found this quote from an interview you gave years ago. It says, “The worst thing is to get involved with people who aren’t passionate about what they’re doing.”

If you really give your time, your love, your energy to an activity you expect peo­ple to do the same. It’s not required, of course, sometimes I’m perfectly happy working with very relaxed, very easy actors, I’m really talking about the person leading the charge, usually the director, the inten­tion behind. If someone doesn’t really care I’ve trouble giving myself to them, because I feel too humiliated. I try to give myself — sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t — but the idea is I want to, and if I’m giving myself to someone who doesn’t really value or use it, it makes me feel really bad. 

Does art ought to have a function? Is its existence purely to express — emo­tions, ideas — and at its best, inspire and influence? Does an actor have a responsibility to fulfill in society?

I don’t think of myself as an interpreter as much as someone who makes things. I think you can play with different ways of seeing, and you can remind people by telling stories, by inhabiting other people’s lives, filming them and presenting them someway, to reconsider what they think, to challenge what they assume, so they can say, “oh, I never saw it that way,” it’s a shift of perspective, or on a deeper level a shift of consciousness. I’m interested in ways of seeing, in learning how not to be trapped by all the things that conspire us to be fear­ful and to just accept, accept, accept. By accepting what is handed to us, we let a lot to conspire to make us function for the machine. With a film or a play, you can cre­ate a forum that allows people to be there in a social way and think differently. I want people to like what I do, particularly if I like it, but I don’t trust that to motivate me. You have to make it for yourself and assume that there are like-minded people out there. If you are true and sincere in your approach to your craft and to life in general, if you’re not doing this to get that, people will natu­rally be inspired by what you do.  ▼

Antichrist and Cirque du Freak: The Vam­pire’s Assistant open in theaters on October 23. “Idiot Savant” is staged at the Public Theater in New York City, October 27 through December 13. For more informa­tion, please visit www.publictheater.org