January 25–February 1, 2001

movies

Let’s Pretend

Vamp’s ire: Dafoe as one ticked-off bloodsucker.

Willem Dafoe talks about acting like a child.

by Sam Adams

"Pretend is a big word for me," explains Willem Dafoe. "I probably overuse it, but I think it best explains what I do."

Given that Dafoe’s played everyone from Jesus Christ to an immortal, undead creature of the night (in Shadow of the Vampire, which opens this weekend), "pretend" isn’t quite a strong enough word to cover the intensity with which he throws himself into his work. But Dafoe, neither a Method obsessive nor a classical craftsman, tends to talk about his acting in terms of play — even if he takes his recreation very seriously. It’s like when kids play cops and robbers, he ventures. "As the kid is chasing the other kid, he’s absolutely that cop. But the second his mother says, ‘Billy! Time for dinner!’ he cuts it off and he can go and have dinner."

Shadow lets the Wisconsin-born actor play to his heart’s content. As Max Schreck, the star of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, Dafoe plays an ageless bloodsucker whom Murnau has employed to heighten the production’s realism. (Unbeknownst to the cast and crew, he’s been offered the lead actress’ blood as payment.) Though Dafoe’s rarely been accused of holding back, his performance in Shadow may be his most unrestrained yet.

What drew him to the part, Dafoe says from his home in Manhattan, was just that opportunity to cut loose. "I did something I don’t normally do, which is I sort of anticipated what my process would be, and I got thrilled by that. I knew this was a world that could hold behavior and impulses that were other than naturalistic, maybe guided by less-than-traditional psychology. All those things were great opportunities to step out and pretend and have fun."

Much of that inhuman psychology, he explains, comes not from the vampire’s predatory nature (familiar enough in some sense) but from his immortality. "So much of our behavior is colored or conditioned or informed by our relationship to death, and here you have a character where that’s an impossibility. That puts normal psychology on its head. And it makes it a rich place, ironically, for us to see ourselves."

Shadow gives Dafoe ample opportunity to explore the inhuman, as in one scene where Schreck yanks a bat out of the air and promptly crams it into his mouth while his mortal onlookers blanch. But even in such extreme moments, Dafoe kept the impulse toward parody in check.

"A movie like this, where it’s a riff on something? Where it goes wrong is when it stands too far outside. It’s [like] that conventional wisdom about comedy — you play it for keeps. You’re only aware of when you’re starting to separate from the world, when you’re no longer in the world, and that is when you become ‘over-the-top’ or commenting. Then you aren’t giving yourself over to the story. All I know is the guy’s eating a bat, and he loves that."

In order to keep away from self-consciousness, Dafoe avoids watching dailies unless the director insists. (In the case of Shadow, there simply wasn’t time; during the three weeks that his part was filmed, Dafoe spent three hours a day in makeup and then worked 12- to 15-hour days.) Just as a review (good or bad) destroys a theater actor’s unselfconsciousness on stage, so watching oneself on screen makes a film actor cling to certain parts of his performance, and stay away from others.

"You can have awareness," Dafoe says, "but that kind of self-consciousness is going to make you protect yourself in a way that is not very interesting. We have that impulse enough as it is, and I try to do everything I can to beat it. An actor who has too much control is going to be too tight, and is going to scrutinize his impulses by doing only what he feels comfortable with. That’s going to bleed out a lot of accident, a lot of risk, a lot of stuff that comes from not knowing — all the magic."