Willem Dafoe Rewatches Spider-Man, The Lighthouse, Platoon & More

I don't think about my face ever.

My face does its own thing.

And if you think about your face,

you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot

because I don't work my face, my face is an extension

of my body and my body does its thing.

Hello, I'm Willem Dafoe and I'm gonna be reviewing

some scenes from films I've made.

[upbeat music]

Okay, here we go.

[upbeat techno music]

[explosions booming]

This is Platoon, it's a scene where Elias,

who is presumed dead, actually is wounded,

but he's not gonna make it and he's been followed by a lot

of soldiers and they're just shooting the hell out of him.

The combination of the music and how it's shot,

I'm moved by, it touches me.

[sad music]

It was crazy to shoot because I'm on the ground.

There's cameras in the ground, there's explosions

in the ground, and there's all these extras behind me.

I'm communicating on a walkie-talkie.

Everybody else is up in the air.

Nobody's even near me because you see one of the shots

is very, very big, so they don't want anybody around.

I'm detonating my own charges on my body

and I know basically where all the explosions

are in the ground, so I've gotta do a little dance.

You're totally involved because you're pretending

and you're really thinking what it would be like

to have all these guys coming after you

and have these other guys abandon you.

But I've got all these technical obligations

at the same time. [sad music]

But I'm a trained actor. I'm a theater actor. [laughs]

I can do this.

I think we did it a couple of times. That ground was hard.

[sad music]

That movie is all scrapes and cuts and you're happy for it

because that's the stuff that gives you contact, you know?

And if you don't do it, if you're worried about yourself

outside of the movie, then you never quite make contact.

[upbeat techno music]

You're fond of me lobster.

Say it.

Say it.

Say it.

This is from The Lighthouse, a movie I really enjoyed doing,

directed by the great Robert Eggers.

It is Rob Pattinson and myself. We're lighthouse keepers.

I'm the old hand, he's the new guy

and I'm a little upset with him.

What? What?

What? What?

What? What?

What? What?

[both yelling at the same time]

One of the beauties of Rob Eggers

is he understands language, the language of this speech

is so beautiful, it has a rhythm, it has a sound,

it has a music, it was a pleasure to do.

I don't have to say nothing. Damn ye!

Let Neptune strike ye dead, Winslow!

Hark!

Hark!

The whole idea was that we weren't bonding.

Those are the characters, but it was so cold

and so brutal that we're always setting up for shots,

that there was no hanging out.

Rob, I liked him a great deal and it was fun to work

with him, but we didn't know each other

because we were always either getting warm

or doing the scene, not that much hanging out

and outside of the scenes, that was our relationship.

Send the souls of dead sailors to pick

and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up

and swallowed by the infinite waters.

Sometimes you don't want to blink because when you blink,

it cuts contact off for a little while.

If you're really trying to drill down on someone,

you don't wanna lose their attention.

You don't wanna lose that contact. It's like electricity.

You don't want to keep your hand off the switch,

so you keep your eyes open, so I was very conscious

that I wanted to keep my eyes open that whole speech.

I don't think about my face but I was thinking

about my eyes, so I kept those eyes open

and I did not want to blink.

Even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more.

It has a period feel, the ratio that they chose.

That has to do with how they want you to receive the film,

but when it's black and white, of course,

you can really light it in a spectacular way

that can be very dramatic and very bold,

but still seem naturalistic.

[upbeat techno music]

That's some neat trick,

that sense of yours. Norman?

Norman's on sabbatical, honey.

That's from Spider-Man: No Way Home.

I was returning to a role that I had done 20 years before,

the Norman Osborne slash Green Goblin role.

And there's a really good action sequence

with Tom Holland, who's excellent partner, really physical,

really great with the stunt stuff.

I did the fighting. They also have stunt guys do it.

They tend to do both and sometimes, you're working over here

and they're resetting and they'll have a stunt guy do it,

and then you'll come over later, so there's a lot

of leapfrogging.

Strong enough to have it all.

[glass breaking]

Too weak to take it.

Choreography, you slowly learn it, they slowly refine it,

and then when you get there, you practice it a lot

and really shoot it quite a bit

because action sequences usually depend

on pretty good cutting, I love doing that stuff,

just because it's athletic and if you don't do it,

it's really hard to connect the dramatic scenes

if you don't do the action stuff

because you gotta do that stuff to get dirty,

to connect the dramatic pieces, otherwise,

you don't deserve to do the dramatic pieces.

[Norman laughing]

The laugh, you don't even think about it.

It's like music, you know?

It's like making a noise, that's all.

I don't think about the quality of it.

Something like that is just natural.

[upbeat techno music]

Gotta leave the ID right there with me in the office.

You can't just not let me have guests,

what gives you the authority?

What? The authority? My job title, manager.

The scenes with this fabulous actress, Bria,

who I adored working with, she was really good in the movie,

I think because some people thought she was a bad mother,

they didn't appreciate her enough.

The character was a bad mother, not Bria.

This shot is interesting because it was a steady cam shot.

Steady cam shots are normal

but it's always tricky when you're doing a steady cam shot

and the operator's walking backwards

and you're going downstairs too

and you're trying not to cut.

So the shot is very tricky. We had a fantastic DP.

We're kind of vamping some of the time

because the shot is just so long and you don't want

the shot to die and we're having a fight,

so we gotta keep it coming.

Often improvisation falls flat 'cause you can feel

the actors writing, but here's a case of,

we're having a pretty good fight.

I didn't notice any glitches there, but we're covering

that long walk, so we get down to that office on time.

[helicopter whirring] Just 'cause they're not

your rules doesn't mean anything.

There was a helicopter, like a helicopter

for tourists to take helicopter rides,

right next to this hotel and we had a low-budget movie.

We couldn't pay these guys to stop giving these rides.

So we begged them, we said some times, Hey,

can you guys just stop while we're shooting?

They're like, Man, we're running a business.

I'm sorry for you but that's the way it is.

So we just let it go. So it's a funky thing.

You kinda wonder where it's coming from, but I think you see

it in the movie, you just accept it,

it's part of the fabric.

Motel's rules. That's the way it is.

The fuck you looking at, Tina?

There's a lot of people that actually lived

in this motel, they participated and it's really,

they taught us how to tell the story

because we tried to fold into their lives.

That was the way to touch down with what we were doing,

not to make it a bullshit Hollywood film that, you know,

was talking about people that we didn't know.

My biggest task was not to be an actor.

I had to be a hotel manager because any stink

of actor that I had in this or any kind of showing this

in the performance, that would not work, it would stick out

like a sore thumb, I wouldn't be with the people, so here,

I'm just trying to be with the people, help 'em out.

[both yelling over each other]

I've had it, I've had it, that's it. That's it.

In selection of things like costume articles or props,

things like that, the glasses are a little thing

that I learned from a guy that I was interviewing that,

for research, that does basically this kind of job.

So those are a direct thing where I saw, yeah, okay,

cool, that seems right for the character.

But things like the walk, that's not particularly studied,

that's just, you're trying to be that guy and the little kid

in you that's pretending just wants to walk differently

than you normally walk so you can feel like that guy.

[upbeat techno music]

They exited out the front door.

They had no idea what they were in for.

This is Boondock Saints, I play a detective

that's tracking down these kind of, vigilante killers.

Yeah, killers, he has a special gift, a foresight,

where he sees things, he's also very fond

of classical music, you see that moment

where he's almost directing the orchestra

in this heavenly chorus as all this violence is happening.

[operatic choir music]

I read a lot of scripts and I think I'm pretty bad

when I read action sequences, it's hard to visualize.

You really gotta be in the place.

So I couldn't imagine this, but when you get there

and you start to sketch it out, it falls into place.

'Cause they gotta come out of the house,

I gotta be telling the story in the middle

and then Il Duce has to be in the background.

So, I couldn't anticipate what it would look like

and I don't really care, I don't need to do that

until I get there.

There was a fire fight! [operatic choir music]

[gunshots echoing] When you've got

that kind of shooting going on, you get pretty heated up.

You're just doing, you're just doing,

you're not thinking, you're doing.

I want it presented to the heavens, you know?

That's all I'm thinking. [upbeat techno music]

Go to Tompkins Square Park

and look for a guy named Danny C.

He's usually near the basketball courts.

I'm basically the only performer,

there's one little sequence where there are other actors,

but it's basically me because I play a art thief

that goes to steal some paintings in a penthouse

in New York City, this is just a little improvised scene.

It's a movie that doesn't do well in clips

because there are very few conventional scenes.

Any dialogue that's in that film is basically improvised,

there was a script that is very strong

and there's a very strong narrative of actions,

but we had to find the connecting pieces

'cause there are events and obstacles that are very clear.

But we had to connect the dots, really.

Nobody here but us pigeons.

Right?

Right?

Right?

We knew the pigeon was out there.

So it's like, get out there and play a scene with this bird.

That actor pigeon was pretty good.

He stood still and he listened to me.

He was really listening. [laughs] It was great.

We inhabited the place, we shot in chronological order.

If you see the movie, you can understand why.

[upbeat music]

Thanks for watching. [laughs]

[upbeat music ends]