Willem Dafoe said he is going to reunite with The Lighthouse and Nosferatu director Robert Eggers on his next film. “He’s giving me material tha
Willem Dafoe said he is going to reunite with The Lighthouse and Nosferatu director Robert Eggers on his next film.
“He’s giving me material that excites me and turns me on,” said Dafoe during his 90-minute masterclass session at Sarajevo Film Festival.
The actor did not specify what the film will be. Eggers is writing and directing an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ ghost story A Christmas Carol for Warner Bros, with Dafoe attached to star as Ebenezer Scrooge.
Dafoe spoke glowingly of Eggers in his Sarajevo session, mentioning the director’s well-known love of period detail but adding that “he really avoids showing off the research.
“The research creates an engagement, a relationship to the material,” said Dafoe.
The sold-out session attracted the most excitable audience of this year’s Sarajevo masterclasses, with regular interruptions for applause.
Going back to the start of his career which includes 109 feature film credits, Dafoe said “my identity was always in theatre. Kathryn Bigelow saw me in a theatre piece and invited me to do a movie [1981’s The Loveless, his first credited screen role].
“I remember calling friends and saying ‘how much money should I ask for?’, ‘cos I knew nothing.” The actor added that he has “never chased the money” and that is the only one of his roles where he can recall his salary, of $10,000.
He took the audience through the filming of one of his most renowned scenes, the slow-motion death of Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film Platoon. “The beauty of the way it was constructed was it was very simple,” said Dafoe. “I had a simple task – run for my life. Some of the cameras were built into the ground. I’m running like hell, and detonating the bullets on me. It’s a pure technical task.”
Of another iconic role, in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 The Last Temptation Of Christ, Dafoe said, “To play Jesus Christ you’ve got to remember you’re not the Jesus Christ, you’re a Jesus Christ.”
He recalled a backlash against the film, which he said came with a political context. “It was particularly driven by the religious right who needed something to get behind to energise their cause,” said Dafoe. “They complained about the idea of it, they hadn’t seen the movie. Jesus rejects his job and lives as a normal man; he has children, he has sex. That was scandalous for them.”
“Then it morphed into a strange thing about Jews in Hollywood and it snowballed. The perception was it was the Catholic church – it wasn’t, it was the fundamental right in America. It really did keep it from being wildly distributed.”
Dafoe had fond recollections of being crucified while shooting the film. “I’ve never seen a bluer sky,” said the actor. “Put any one of you up on a cross and you’d have an experience.”
Hackman, Lynch
The actor recalled working with two film icons who died earlier this year – Gene Hackman, with whom he starred in 1988’s Mississippi Burning; and David Lynch, who directed him in 1990’s Wild At Heart.
Hackman was “sweet” but didn’t “suffer fools, he could be very tough”, while Lynch “was very unconventional, he was an artist,” said Dafoe. “He’d say very abstract things like ‘Willem, you know when you start this, you’re green, then you become brown’.”
He also spoke fondly of his experience filming Sam Raimi’s 2002 Marvel film Spider-Man as Norman Osborn and the Green Goblin; then returning to the roles in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
“The original Spider-Man was a lot of fun; within a scene it could switch from dramatic to comic like that,” said Dafoe. “I like doing the action stuff. When the first Spider-Man was made, we were still using wires – it’s very concrete, very tangible.”
Having told US talkshow host in 2017 that America was “not going in the right direction” under Donald Trump, Dafoe declined to answer a question on the returned US president, saying “you gotta be kidding me with that question!”
Dafoe’s talk concluded the masterclass programme at Sarajevo. The festival presents its CineLink industry awards this evening, before the festival closing ceremony tomorrow (Friday, August 22).
COMMENTS