Willem Dafoe Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Celebrity is okay as long as you know it's not about you.
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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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Basically, when I hear the words 'family drama' I run in the opposite direction.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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The best thing an actor can be is ready. Be flexible, be ready.
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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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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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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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Trust is always a factor. You've just got to look at the big picture, and you've got to look at the small picture - the small picture in the sense that you've got to make every scene work and you've got to deal with what people are presenting you with, too.
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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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I guess they often cast me as the bad guy, because I'm not, er, conventional looking. I look sort of violent. I'm the odd one out, the outsider.
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Weirdness is not my game. I'm just a square boy from Wisconsin.