Willem Dafoe
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Willem Dafoe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think absolutely. I can pretty much tell what movies people have seen by how they behave. approach me or how they speak to me. What's the thing that you get approached about the most? Well, the most widely seen movie probably is Spider-Man, that series. So that's a lot. But I'm ridiculously admittedly proud to say that it's pretty varied, you know? Yeah.
Sometimes people try to even impress you by coming up and saying, Giving a shout out to a really obscure movie. Right. Because I make lots of movies, and some are small movies, some are big movies. So someone comes up, they talk about Spider-Man, or some older guy comes up, talks about Platoon, or some guy that is probably 30 years old now comes up and talks about Boondock Saints.
But then occasionally someone will say, I saw a new Rose Hotel yesterday. Wow, fantastic. So it's pretty varied.
Okay. Those are a lot of questions, and they're all fine questions. First of all, generally, when I see someone that has a specific vision, and they tend to be auteurs, and also they're attracted to telling certain kinds of stories or creating certain kinds of worlds.
I want to have an experience that serves that vision, that expresses that vision, but is personal to me and is transparent enough that the audience can be with me. I become them and they become me. And that's the experience I like. And when you want that, you're only going to give yourself to someone who you think is worth it and knows how to take care of it. A lot of people talk about character.
Well, you don't know the character until you get there. A lot of people talk about the script. And great writing is great to have, and it can really lead the way and really shape things in such a definitive way. But if the camera's in the wrong place, if you don't know how to capture this, it's useless. Let's go back to Robert Eggers.
The thing that's beautiful about him is he gives you a beautiful setup. When I saw The Witch, which I knew nothing about, I walked in and I saw this movie really blindly without expectation. And I thought, wow, there's a filmmaker here. And I asked myself why. And I said, well, it's because I entered this world so easily. The movie sort of transports you.
Yes, that's true, but how you can enter it without being conscious that it's a period film. Robert Eggers has a talent for making these period films that are based on fables or histories or their genre films feel relevant, feel authentic, feel rooted. And I think it's because when you go on one of his sets, everything is so well-researched and has a reason. has a kind of historical background.
Everything has a function. Also, he designs these shots. You go to the rehearsal before you start the movie and the shots are already designed. And he tells you what they are and you have to fold yourself into them. And some actors may find that very oppressive. I don't at all. It's a beautiful structure. It gives you a container to live in. You don't have to think about certain things.
And when you do a Robert Eggers movie, there's a wealth of detail, and it's rooted in history and reasons already there. So you enter it, and the world works on you. And I love that.
I don't think about my own. I mean, I get the question. I do the research, and I learn things, and then I become engaged. What I imagine he may be thinking, because he's an occultist, he's an alchemist, he's interested in unseen things. You're correct, it's a Van Helsing type of character.
And when he's called in to help them with this problem of the plague and Ellen, the role played by Lily Rose Depp, her condition, he tries to make them understand the value of recognizing the shadow parts of life and also tries to tell them of factual evidence of evil.
So it was really to try to get in his thinking, I guess, and basically have the authority to pretend when I say these very specific things about the nature of Solomonari and vampire lore.
That's really sort of a Rob Eggers question, but I've been doing enough press with him. I can pretend I'm him for a moment. But basically, you know, this is a movie he saw when he was very young. And he was obsessed with it. Initially, he saw a video of it when he was nine years old. He did a play of Nosferatu when he was in high school. He's been thinking about it a long time.
He's tried to make this movie for 10 years. He said, it's not enough to just be obsessed with something. You have to have a reason. There have been something like 170 movies Dracula vampire lore Nosferatu films made. And we've really gotten away from the scary vampire. We've come full circle and gotten to the character in Twilight, okay, who's kind of a sympathetic, sweet vampire.
He wanted him to be scary again. And he said, how do we do that? Well, we go back to the time where people actually believed there were vampires. and see what people would do, what their imagination was about it, what their evidence was of it, how they felt. So he tries to base all this on stuff that actually existed. A good example is the look of Orlok. which is very different in this film.
And to create that, he really went back to the idea of what would a 16th century Romanian nobleman that had been dead for many years look like.
So that pointed to the design of the costume, that pointed to facially how he'd look, pointed to many things. He's leaning into folklore because he trusts that, he believes that. He's separating the tropes that have been created through the years in cinema, vampires, and he's trying to give it some historic base.
when it brings up all these questions that are kind of central to vampire lore about sex and death, it has real bones. It has, you know, it has structure. This is a horror movie, but it's also a gothic romance, you know, and it's about this triangle, this romantic triangle between Nosferatu, Ellen, and her husband.
We hope. No, I don't know. I think it's beautiful because that's a time where people are off and it certainly opens things up to a large audience. It's the kind of movie that really will be beautiful to see in the theaters because... Particularly his way of shooting, he works with his DP, Jerem Blaschke, on these very, very long designed takes. There's no conventional coverage.
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