Willem Dafoe (II)

Willem Dafoe on: Light Sleeper | Tom and Viv | big budget films | arch villains | European actors

Jonathan Romney: I wanted to ask you about Light Sleeper as well, because I really think it's one of those films that's been underrated. It's a very subtle, kind of elusive film that you can't sum up in a five line pitch and Paul Schrader, he wrote The Last Temptation and you also worked with him on Affliction, but he does seem to have a particularly elusive approach to film.

Willem Dafoe:Yes...umm.

JR: Well, he seems to be a bit of a theorist in a way.

WD:I don't know. That seems to be like an adjunctor. That's his reputation, but as a film maker he makes a really good story and they're very specific stories, then the spin is kind of put on after the effect. The second I read the script for Light Sleeper I just was dying to do it, although I saw this scene and I never try to judge my work, but I thought, oh, that's odd! Out of context, it looked like some acting exercise or something! All this back and forth and how it's shot, but you need the rest of the film to see it. But, there was something special about that movie because I had a very clear prototype so I was working from a real person and at the same time I had a very, I love to work with a mask of some sort and in this it was very thinly veiled and many ways I felt like clearly I'm not that guy, I felt like some of my friends to see it say that was most like you.

JR: Who was that person, someone that the script was based on or just someone that you brought in?

WD:It was based on, with a little few changes, Paul said this is the guy. So I met him and hung out with him and I did rounds with him.

JR: That must be a strange experience?

WD:That was strange, showing up at people's houses and sometimes they'd recognise me and I'd say, there goes my reputation! He's a drug dealer, so I'd go around with him and I suppose I could get arrested for doing that kind of thing.

JR: So the guy knew that you were looking for bits of him?

WD:Oh yes, absolutely and he was... It was funny at times, I've had real life people, you know people are funny, we're all easily flattered, as long as it's about us, you know? So this guy was very generous, he made himself very available to me.

JR: The real life person who comes to mind is almost an anomaly among your performances where it's almost an impersonation that you're getting the voice and getting the look as in Tom & Viv.

WD:Yeah, that was great fun because here I was and I'd end up on the set and I'd look around and think, "What am I doing here?" But so much about that film was passing and there was something about Eliot that was about passing and it was wonderful to be in this very British movie and I was the only American in it. But one of the best parts about Tom & Viv was this wonderful thing that his life was so well documented on so many levels; you got biography, you got the critical writing, then you have his work. You could put the three things next to each other and from that you could sort of approximate in your head what was going on in his life so you could say well, this was written then, and letters as well, so it was this wonderful thing where you had this wealth of information to play with in your head, so even though he was a very restrained character, I could keep it very much alive because I had lots of information.

JR: How accurate did you feel you wanted to be, because you do the voice?

WD:I thought that became part of the mask, you know? It's such an odd voice and I remember a critic for the New Yorker said "curious bore accent", but I thought, I very much wanted to imitate, there's plenty of audio tapes on him, but for me that was one of the keys, that was a little touchstone, that was one of the ways into the character.

JR: Well, we're going to get you to do the Wasteland for us later, but a completely different film that was quite notorious for its time, mainly because most people didn't like it very much, was Body of Evidence. What inveigled you into that, working with Madonna and the dripping wax?

WD:You got to remember, I saw it as one of these old-fashioned court room drama things with a little spin on it, and I do like Madonna and I knew she was attached first and also, it's kind of after that you find out it's going to be sold as an erotic thriller. Really, as much as anything the court room scenes appealed to me and love scenes in movies are very, very curious things. As an actor, they're very difficult and they're very curious, so I was interested in all of that. Besides, all the tittering, because you're not really there in the way that you're there in real life. So, there was plenty I was interested in. (Ulrich Edel) made a very interesting movie, Last Exit to Brooklyn and I also kind of, you know, Madonna's role being kind of femme fatale and being this character that's basically a good guy and then he gets seduced, it was almost like a, even though the femme fatale thing or dangerous woman is a stock Hollywood thing, in many ways there was almost like this gender shift that interested me - I like had the woman's part and she had the man's part. So there was plenty there that interested me. What happens, how it's received, I can't separate from all kinds of things from timing, from advertising, you know, I'm not going to say that it's good or bad, I just think that, yeah, I don't regret doing anything.

JR: If a film doesn't work out, do you feel philosophical about it?

WD:I do, I do, basically that it's preparation for the next thing. Think of all the, there's almost a ridiculous equation that the more success people sometimes have, the more boring people get and that's particularly true in Hollywood, sometimes, because there's more to protect, particularly with actors that are getting kind of movie star status, they have to protect the persona and the further they get down the line, they get more and more restricted and constricted. Sometimes that's interesting because there's a certain kind of refining and then you see them as this icon, like in the old days going through these vehicles for them, but there's a problem sometimes because then they kinda die and get cynical and there's no surprises and no heat and why you responded to them in the first place kinda loses its vigour.

JR: What's the appeal of doing something like Speed 2, apart from, obviously, it pays well?

WD:Well, forget that. I mean, because, the truth is in a big movie like that, the difference between getting paid on a big movie, you can sometimes get paid more for from an independent movie - because you may be a bigger element. In Speed 2, I am not the person making the movie, it's not hung on me, I'm a secondary character, they are happy to have me, yes they do pay me, but that's not why I do it. It's an action movie, it looked poised to be a popular movie - you like to mix it up pragmatically, be in big movies, be in small movies. If you only do small movies, pretty soon, you can't do small movies because you're worthless in terms of financing the small movies and there were certain elements, I still like the story around movies sometimes and I knew where this was going to be shot, I knew we'd be on this boat - it's funny, you need different things at different times.

JR: There seems to be something about the arch villain roles, that it seems to me that anyone who starts out doing kind of theatrical work and has particular artistic aspirations at some point has to do service with Bruce Willis in some flying glass movie.

WD:Sure, why not?

JR: Is this because the other roles, the villain. Alan Rickman has done them, Jeremy Irons has done them. They seem to be wide open for the kind of people with a theatrical background, but Hollywood does seem on the whole easier, maybe putting flamboyant actors, especially with a stage background into those kind of parts, rather than using them in lead roles.

WD:Right, I think that's true. Why not lead roles - is that what you're asking?

JR: Either way. Why is it easier to pigeonhole someone in a kind of moustachioed villain role?

WD:Well, you know, the villains get to do the fun stuff and they get to do the active stuff and sometimes with - I don't even have to tell you this - it's conventional wisdom, but I think that the principal role, as opposed to the villain tends to be someone they feel safe with and someone they can identify with and someone who isn't odd or ambiguous in any way. For me, I'm always looking for characters that you can't quite identify, in projects that you can't quite identify. There's an ambiguity there or an ambivalence, you know. At what point does the really, really bad guy come out on the other side. When does the really good guy come out on the other side - it happens.

JR: Let's talk briefly about Victory, the film you'll be able to see in the LLF. This is Mark Peploe's film of Joseph Conrad's novel and Conrad is famously one of the great unfilmable writers. You play Axel Heyst, who is the hermit on the island who rescues an orchestra violinist played by Irene Jacob and you've given the part quite a romantic sweep, although I remember first reading it and thinking this is a Max Von Sydow character. Quite kind of dry.

WD:Max and I. Very much, don't you think? He's a great actor.

JR: A lot of actors doing the classics, say I threw the book away and I worked with the script. What do you do?

WD:I remember reading the book and loving it, but putting it down and dealing with Mark's script. I'm not aware of putting any particular spin on it, I was just trying to play the scenes.

JR: Again, it looked like a fairly arduous shoot because you were in Indonesia.

WD:It was, but it was great fun as well. I love shooting on location because you are taken away from things familiar so it makes you much more available to rethink things and remake things. So you are in an adventurous frame of mind.

JR: In this you're working with Irene Jacob and I wanted to ask you about working with European actors because you obviously did in the Wim Wenders film Far Away, So Close and in The English Patient. Are you aware of different working styles, or does it make for an interesting clash?

WD:Maybe I don't have enough of a sampling but... The only thing I do remember that's worth remarking, the process is specific to each person, but I remember working on Tom & Viv, I found that British actors are very self-reliant and there's very little fuss and they get right to it and the director as well, Brian Gilbert was very much, "Lovely, you know what you're here for, let's do it!" He directed it very well. I suppose it's because there's a uniformity of training here, where there isn't in the States, so the language is clear I guess among actors. Everybody knows what they're supposed to do, there's a little less neuroses I think. Whereas in the States, in the same movie you can have a guy that's a male model, that was a cook last week, a guy that's been performing theatre for three hundred years, you know, you can have people from all these different backgrounds in the same world and the director has to really finesse how he/she gets them all on the same page.

Question one: How much do you listen to your manager/agent and how much influence do they have over your choice of roles?

WD:I have a manager and an agent. The manager I have been with since the very beginning so I work with her as an advisor, I'd say. The traditional process is that material presents itself to me in all manner of ways. They'll get my reaction and if they disagree with it wildly or they think I'm missing something she'll say, "Look at this again, or I think..." It's her business more to think about the career stuff that I don't want to think about, so it's a consideration. But I'm the guy who's got to do it. So, in the end I'll listen, but it's all information. So, I have never, for example, done something because someone told me to do it and I didn't have a feel for it - it's always a combination of things. Question two: Are you still attached to American Psycho? And if so can you give us any insider casting gossip?

WD:Yes, I am.

JR: Do you know in what capacity?

WD:Just as an adviser! ... Insider information. I don't know what the public word is on it. I'm not supposed to say! The movie's going to get made, but it's not being made with Leonardo di Caprio, I'll tell you that much.

JR: Is it getting made by Mary Harron?

WD:Oh definitely, most definitely. I'm playing the detective, which is slightly different than the novel, because in the novel he's something of a doppelganger, but obviously that's not the way it's going to be.

Question three: Did you approach Matt Groening for the episode of The Simpsons or did he approach you?

WD:It was a kind of straight-laced call, but I think I put a feeler out because I went through a period where I was watching The Simpsons regularly, and I don't watch much TV. It sounds kinda wholesome but it was the one thing I did regularly with my kid, like hey Jack, we're gonna watch The Simpsons tonight! I knew some people that knew the people there, and I put a feeler out saying why haven't they asked me to do a voice, I'd love to do a voice. So, there's a weird kind of personal attachment to it.

JR: Was it weird seeing your upper lip done in Matt Groening style?

WD:You know, I don't think I ever saw it aired, I saw it when I recorded it.

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