1919
‘To be involved
with people
intimately that
way is strange.
And it’s sort
of powerful.’
WILLEM DAFOE,
after taking a photo
with a fan on the streethappiest when he’s working with people who, like
Ferrara, Eggers and Motherless Brooklyn’s Norton,
need to make something, as opposed to directors
who are simply being paid to do it. “There’s more
possibility. They have to make this thing, they
have to find something out. I think that inquiry,
using film to find that thing that they need, is
real contact. And I think that’s the heart of great
movies.” The key word here is movies, because
Dafoe has done very little work in television and
confesses a preference for the former—though he’s
also quick to add, “Believe me, if I could only find
work in TV, I’d be right there. I’m not a snob.”
That goes without saying, especially when
Dafoe admits, a beat later, that as much as he
believes movies ought to be watched on thebig screen, he, like just about everyone
else, sometimes catches up with them
on airplanes. He works so much that
he spends plenty of time on them:
he’ll go where the work takes him, and
the locales aren’t always glamorous.
The Lighthouse was filmed on a rocky
peninsula in Nova Scotia, a stand-in
for New England, and the shoot was
demanding. “When it whipped up, the
wind was so strong that someone my
size could get blown into the water—off
the land, into the water.”
Dafoe could be on easy street, if
he wanted it. Why subject himself to
weeks of shooting on a peninsula in
Nova Scotia? He answers the question
as you’d expect him to. “But I love it!
Not because I’m a masochist—I’m not.
For me it’s all about waking up, all about
beating the lockstep. Not just changing
things up for the sheer sake of variety.
But really, do things that don’t let you
decide definitively who you are and the
way things are.”
So much of what we do, Dafoe says,
is predicated on an idea of ourselves
that we’re trying to protect. And when
you’re an actor, you have a public face
as well. If he’s serious about being an
actor, he seems even more serious about
just being a person, which is, perhaps,
why he has such a particular fondness for
just walking around New York, even the
New York of today, which he recognizes
is highly gentrified. He tells a story about
a woman who recently approached him
for a selfie. “She came up to me and
she said, ‘Hey, how are you? We took a
picture 10 years ago together and I had
no hair because I had cancer. And shortly
after that I started getting better, and
I was free of cancer. And just recently,
I found out it’s back. Can we take a
picture?’ ”
Dafoe, of course, said yes. “To be
involved with people intimately that
way is strange. And it’s sort of powerful.
I don’t think it’s an egotistical thing.
You just feel the reach of what you do.
Because they don’t know me—it’s not
about me. But that woman is a stranger
that I have a relationship to. I don’t want
to overstate that —but it’s interesting,
no?” It couldn’t have happened if Dafoe
hadn’t been walking around, present in
all ways, cherishing a city he doesn’t get
SIMON EMMETT—TRUNK ARCHIVE to spend enough time in. □