For 25 years, Willem Dafoe has been one of cinema's most versatile character actors. A two-time Academy Award nominee for his performances in Platoon and Shadow Of The Vampire, Dafoe's list of memorable roles includes Jesus Christ in The Last Temptation Of Christ, The Green Goblin in the Spider-Man movies, the psychotic Bobby Peru in Wild At Heart, and the guy who got completely nude and performed cunnilingus on Madonna in Body Of Evidence. In recent years, Dafoe has split his time between successful studio projects like Finding Nemo and Inside Man and low-budget independent features seeking distributors on the festival circuit. Two recent Dafoe films—the serial-killer thriller Anamorph and Abel Ferrara's long-gestating comedy Go Go Tales—fall into the latter category, though he also recently appeared as a pretentious film director in the decidedly un-edgy Mr. Bean's Holiday. Dafoe recently spoke with The A.V. Club about his professional duality as a Hollywood insider who occasionally steps outside the system to rail against it.
The A.V. Club: You've been in blockbusters, and you've been in movies few people got the chance to see. Obviously, you can't control any of that, so do you try not to have expectations about whether a movie will find an audience?
Willem Dafoe: I'm an optimist. I hope if a movie's good that it will be a success, but as we know, that's not always true, just because of popular taste, advertising, distribution patterns—there's lots of reasons. When something doesn't do better than it deserves to in your mind, it's pretty transparent—you usually know why. Is that a comfort? Yes, because it's logical. Does it make you happy? No, because if you think a movie is beautiful or interesting, you want to share it. It's really true—there's no accounting for taste. Sometimes you make very interesting movies that aren't meant for everybody. But this is a capitalist society, so everything conspires to put value on whether it sells or not. While we have a very strong popular culture, the roots of our culture are very shallow, and we put emphasis on how a movie does as far as the box office goes. Many years ago, it would have been vulgar to print box-office grosses in the paper. Now The New York Times does it, and it's the big story for people interested in arts and entertainment on Monday. Which is why emphasis has shifted away from filmmakers and fallen on movie stars and business people.
That's all crybaby stuff, but that's the reality I live in. Sometimes I'm part of it, and sometimes I'm outside of it and I rail against it. It's all about the health of what's going on. Right now, the middle has dropped out. There are very big films and very tiny films. It's almost like a metaphor for society—when the middle class drops out, the stability gets a little shakier.
AVC: Perhaps the worst case in your career of a film not getting proper distribution is The Last Temptation Of Christ. What was it like to be in the middle of the media firestorm that film sparked?
WD: They don't blame the actor. They think actors are whores, and they don't hold them responsible. The weird thing is, I remember the Christian right calling the Jesus character effeminate and unmanly and a waffler, which really, of course, were fighting words. I thought they obviously were missing the point. It's an interesting movie, because Marty Scorsese is such a great filmmaker, and he thought of doing this movie for many, many years, and it was very clear in his head. But it was a very low-budget movie; we had very little resources, and we were out in the middle of Morocco doing this stuff the best we could. So it had this low-budget urgency to it, but also the sophistication of the material and Marty's take on it.
AVC: Can you sense whether a movie is going to be good or bad while you're working on it?
WD: That's a tough one. You can trick yourself, you can delude yourself, you can be an optimist. You don't trust it; you just concentrate on the days. Look, there are three huge stages. First prep, then the actual shooting, then the huge, huge, huge part when the actors generally walk away, and people take your work and manipulate it in any number of ways. Film is an editor's medium. You can create very good raw material and they can make it horrible, or you can do not so well and they can make it beautiful. You don't really know. You don't control it, and you don't want to control it! [Laughs.] You want it to have a life of its own, and you have to let it go a little bit. Just do the work and not ask yourself too much, "Is this good?" or "Is this bad?" You have to ask yourself, "Does this scene work?" "Do I feel good?" "Does this makeup look good?" "How's that accent sound?" It's all practical work that is very loaded with less-than-practical things.
AVC: You worked as an extra on Heaven's Gate. Was there a sense of impending doom on that set?
WD: Yes and no. But only because it started out as a small film that was going to shoot in eight weeks, and it became very apparent that that was not what it was any more. The week before shooting, Michael Cimino won an Academy Award for The Deer Hunter, and Chris Walken won, and there was a real euphoria. They thought they had given Michael the resources to make a great, great film. He's a perfectionist, and he went to very extreme measures to try to make the film he wanted to make. Everybody was excited by that—they thought this was a great opportunity to work on a commercially viable film made by an artist. I think people started to think there was a problem when there was a pressure put on him by the studio and the schedule started going longer. People who thought they were going to be home in two months, six months later they were home. That one, people knew after three months that this was not your ordinary movie. But Heaven's Gate was a whipping boy. If the timing was different, and there was different gossip surrounding the movie, it could have been a success. Plenty of bad movies are very successful, and plenty of good movies are not. And distribution is so crazy, some films won't even get their day in court.
AVC: A movie that hopefully will have its day is Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales. How did that turn out?
WD: That's a great film. It's a comedy, and it has a Preston Sturges thing about it. It's sort of a metaphor for people in film. It's about an incorrigible dreamer, and he's worked every angle and all his IOUs are piling up and it looks like everybody is going to get him, and he slips the noose. I've worked with Abel before, and this was a much better experience, because he was so deeply involved in this world. We made it in Rome, even though we were shooting for New York—and the world he created on the set so much replicated the story, you didn't have to be a Method actor to step into this thing. That's why we could improvise in a real loose way. The camera could be loose. He created an environment we could really play with.
AVC: When is it coming out?
WD: I don't know. I don't think it has a distributor yet in the States, but I suspect it will. But the real difficulty for smaller films, when they're made independently and it's time to go for a distributor, sometimes if it's a tough film and the people who financed it need their money back right away, it's much easier and lucrative to take a DVD deal. You can be in the black like that. If you decide to go for a theatrical run, that costs money. So if the guy is thinking just as a pure businessman, and he's not patient, there's always that risk that these smaller movies will go to DVD. It used to never happen if you had a star. But it's happening all the time now, with movies with huge stars going straight to DVD.
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