Willem Dafoe, the world-famous actor who was awarded the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival for his outstanding contribution to film art, held a Masterclass this morning moderated by critic Neil Young. At the beginning, Dafoe recalled his first visit to the Sarajevo Film Festival, exactly 25 years ago, when Steve Buscemi’s film “Animal Factory” was shown.
He emphasized that, unlike Buscemi, a colleague and longtime friend whom he has known since his days as a firefighter, he has no ambition to try his hand at directing.
“I love when I have someone who will tell me what they see. For me, part of the excitement is precisely in realizing someone’s vision, because through that you always learn something and it challenges your perception and your state. I think the best things come from that ignorance,” explained Dafoe.
Moderator Neil Young began to chronologically “comb” Dafoe’s life and career path, and the audience thus discovered many details from his childhood and growing up period, before his fame.
“It was good to have a childhood in my hometown, but the second I became an adult I knew I wanted to leave there,” confided the actor.
This prompted him to move to New York, where he acted in the theater for a long time, because as he says: “At that time, for me, acting was theater. I didn’t think about film then. When I was first called to act in a film, I remember calling a friend to ask him how much money I should ask for it. I never remember how much I was paid, I only remember the experience”.
Dafoe is an actor characterized by a variety of roles and genres, as well as an examination of the psychological and physical limits of human nature. He is also known from independent arthouse productions, but also from commercial Hollywood films. However, it seems that despite this, his roles are never ordinary. He has collaborated with David Lynch, Robert Eggers, Sean Baker. He has played the roles of Jesus Christ, the Antichrist, a vampire, the Green Goblin, a mad scientist, a Dutch painter. He also talked about how all this influenced him and what helps him get into the role.
“When you have some kind of mask, it affects the experience of the role, it triggers something in you and your imagination, it instinctively changes the way you behave,” said Dafoe, referring in particular to the role of a vampire in the film “Shadow of the Vampire”, but also to the characters in the films “Spider-Man”, “Wild at Heart”, “The Last Temptation of Christ”.
“I’m always looking for moments where you can be transformed. It frees you and teaches you how to live. If you do it honestly and bare, then the audience experiences the same in a certain way – I think that’s the real power of the film,” said Dafoe, explaining why he often chooses painful roles, stressing that, although they are painful, they pay off in the end, because what you get from them is much greater.
Given the fact that he made more than 150 films, it was inevitable to ask whether he had seen them all and whether he would return to them.
“In a way, it’s the way I remember my life,” he began, adding: “When I see a clip from one of my films, I don’t remember that film so much as I remember the period of filming, what my life looked like then, what worries I had, where I lived, what I did, and so on. All this merges into one overall picture. Watching parts of my films, I remember my life.”
He highlighted the role in the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ” as the role that perhaps had the most influence on him and his career, underlining that he does not have a favorite role, because he believes that it confines the actor to certain frameworks in which he compares everything he does with her and tries to repeat it in every subsequent one.
Despite this, he singles out his role as Vincent Van Gogh in the film “At Eternity’s Gate” as a special experience, which taught him different ways of looking at things and brought him closer to nature, art, reading and painting.
When talking about collaboration with directors, he expressed regret that he did not have the opportunity to work with Stanley Cubrick and highlighted working with Robert Eggers as quite productive, because “he knows how to draw you into a challenge and a world that maybe you initially did not think was for him”. He also revealed that the next film he is working on is with him.
“There is something wonderful about submitting yourself to someone else’s vision and then having it become your vision”, he explained.
In addition to his films, we also touched on unusual, but well-known, photoshoots.
“You’re using yourself as material, but you don’t have a character, there’s nothing to achieve. It gives you the opportunity to experiment with your body and different poses,” Dafoe explained, adding that he finds it interesting to play with those elements.
“I appreciate that the art of film is a joint effort”, are the words spoken by Willem Dafoe during the Masterclass, and through them can perhaps be best explained his successful collaborations with numerous artists, who seem to be completely different from each other.
“Your career path is an expression of you,” Neil Young then summed up.
Tonight, at the Coca-Cola Open Air Cinema, Dafeu will be presented with the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, followed by a screening of the film THE BIRTHDAY PARTY directed by Miguel Ángel Jiménez.
