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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
There's no cutting away. And what's significant about that is... There's a fluidity. You can enter into these scenes much better because you're not constantly thrown out by a change of point of view. You're with these people because the incredibly long takes and when they're done skillfully, of course, you don't feel the camera movement, but you're with the people.
And for actors, it's very interesting because they're difficult to do because not only do you have to execute the actions and the intentions of your character, but you have all these technical things to think about. And when you're played as full as an actor, you can't fall out. You can only give yourself to action, and it's like an athlete, you know, running from here to there.
The task seems very simple, but how you do it, what happens to you as you do that simple task is really where the drama and the life and the presence and the revelation is.
Yeah, when there's opportunity. I don't do movies just to do, but I do... I do think actors need practice, and I do like that. I love being on a set, so I do like to work. I like the adventure of going away someplace, leaving my world behind, my life behind for a little while and making a new one, and then coming back to my life.
And when we say seven, you know, it seems like a lot, like I was talking to my colleague, Nick Holt, who is in Nosferatu. And it seems like every week there's a new Nick Holt film. And I tease him. I say, wow, do you ever sleep? And he says, no, I was, you know, I've been home for whatever, you know, I've been home for six months. Movies get held sometimes to position them for release.
And it can seem like more than it is. I get some downtime. You know, I'm not on one set Tuesday and then starting a new one on Thursday. There are little breaks.
You said it. I mean, you know, theaters are closing. People are getting out of the habit of going to theaters regularly. And, you know, you don't want to be an old crank and say times were better back then. But I lament that experience of where strangers go into a dark room, watch light on the screen together, and have an experience. Streaming does some great things.
They finance some good movies. It feels a little overstuffed now. I think people don't know where to go because the discourse about movies is not public. Word of mouth is like a thing of the past a little bit. Right. And the problem is that on streaming, of course, it's really impossible if you're watching stuff at home or you're watching stuff on a phone.
You take away what you put in, and if your attention is distracted, you're not going to be able to receive a movie in the right way. The beauty of it, the depth of it, the complexity of it. So then kind of more superficial, more noisy, more obvious films are more watchable in that form and more difficult, more challenging, which are usually the more rewarding.
Don't perform well with that kind of environment where you don't get your feet held to the fire. Right. And I think everybody thinks they see movies to escape, but I think ultimately people do want to be changed. They want to be challenged. Entertainment isn't about running away.
I think people, once they find something that really touches them or makes them think about how things could be different and thinking how their lives could be different, that really elevates them. And if you don't allow tougher, more challenging movies with which feed the art form a chance, then the form is going to slowly die.
Just a huge thing, you know, now you're speaking to influencers also, and there's a lot of things to tapping to the TikTok of it all, so they want you to play games and do things that may not definitely define the movie, but they get... people knowing about an awareness. So it gets a little dumbed down. It's a complicated question.
It's like, yeah, I have feelings about these things, but I, you know, I'm not... I'm not a guy, when someone says, are you in the business? I kind of like look behind me and around me and think, who are you talking to? And of course I am. I've made a lot of movies. I've been making movies for, I don't know, over 40 years. So I am, but I don't think of it as a business.
So all these questions, it's like I'm too busy working in movies to think about these things.
I hope I was coherent enough for you.
Okay. All right. Okay. Ciao, ciao.
Showing 21–36 of 36 · page 2 of 2
← Previous