Willem Dafoe Quotes
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My dad was a surgeon, my mom a nurse, and they were always out working. I had five sisters and a brother. They didn't care what I got up to.
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I aspire to be an instrument of the director. I'm happiest like that. The stronger the director, the more I'm willing to give them.
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The mask can be a limitation, but you just deal with it. You do get superhuman strength and pumpkin bombs and all this other stuff to express yourself with.'
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Celebrity is okay as long as you know it's not about you.
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While we have a very strong popular culture, the roots of American culture are very shallow, and we put emphasis on how a movie does as far as the box office goes. Many years ago, it would have been vulgar to print box - office grosses in the paper. Now The New York Times does it, and it's the big story for people interested in arts and entertainment on Monday. Which is why emphasis has shifted away from filmmakers and fallen on movie stars and business people.
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When I give over to somebody's vision rather than have an idea of what I need to do, it takes me to places I wouldn't have got to by myself. I'm always attracted to a strong director.
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The truth is I like the crazy ones better than the well-behaved ones normally because they tend to be the passionate ones. They never come after you if you're holding up your end. The only thing that's bad about an abusive director is that they bully the people they can.
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Truth is, generally I like film festivals; somewhere at some level there's an exchange of ideas.
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Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to fantasize about a world we aspire to.
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You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.
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It's fair to say that if you have a lot of experience, your power is greater. You have more of an opportunity to roll up your sleeves with younger directors.
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Basically, when I hear the words 'family drama' I run in the opposite direction.
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A lot of critics are lazy. They don't want to look closely and analyze something for what it is. They take a quick first impression and then rush to compare it to something they've seen before.
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When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses - which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you're playing a cartoon character.
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I don't want people to know anything about me, because that's not important. I'm more interested in the me that takes shape through the characters.
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I do want to be in mainstream movies that are going to be seen. I suppose it satisfies the showbiz side of me.
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I have some sort of affinity for compulsive behavior. The most interesting stories come up from the people on the outside.
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In my experience, sometimes a movie just hits at the wrong time, gets the wrong press, or gets the wrong representation, and it gets misunderstood.
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I was born William. My father was William. I came from a big family, I hated being called Billy. Willem's a nickname; it's a Dutch name, very common in the Netherlands.
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I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people. With technology now, people are getting more and more isolated. I like the community coming around the story. You don't have that with a DVD. People go home, they're tired from work, they can turn it off. It doesn't make you commit the same way, if you can control the movie. More difficult movies, it's too easy to turn them off. All the time, I see movies I know if I had seen it on DVD, I wouldn't have hung with it. If you see it on the screen, you hang with it and it pays off better than a movie you can easily sit through on DVD.
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Film is an editor's medium. You can create very good raw material and they can make it horrible, or you can do not so well and they can make it beautiful. You don't really know.
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The best thing an actor can be is ready. Be flexible, be ready.
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The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth - it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.
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It's too easy to trivialize people. The Internet does it all the time.