Grand Coffee with… Willem Dafoe: It's paradoxical, but you really work on yourself by building another character

Dafoe held his Masterclass the day before at the Bosnian Cultural Center, where he shared his personal experiences and thoughts on contemporary cinematography, and today the audience had the opportunity to hear him again in the Grand Coffee with… programme.

During this interview, he looked back at his beginnings, explaining how he decided to pursue acting.

"I think that when you grow up in a big family, you always find your place and role. Mine was a clown. I liked to perform, to entertain people, to be physically active and other similar things. When we talk specifically about the decision to become an actor, my entry into that world was not common. I started doing avant-garde theater when I was very young and never had any formal education. It came out somewhat organically," the actor pointed out.

Miguel Angel Jimenez's film THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, whose screening was held last, is based on the book of the same name. Talking about that experience, Willem Dafoe also talked about the difficulties that are often an overwhelming source for preparing the role.

“If you’re too loyal to the source material, it can mess things up, because then you’re thinking about what wasn’t put into the scene, what you can add, what else you can show. Sometimes that source material really helps, but that wasn’t the case here,” Dafoe said, adding that sometimes when he’s playing historical figures, he avoids doing much research for the same reason.

However, the opposite can also happen – as he did, for example, during the development of Van Gogh’s character in the film “At Eternity’s Gate,” when he had access to his letters, paintings, biographies and comments about him:

“It transformed me. Through the process, I learned something that opened up space for me to become a new person. That’s why acting is a gift – you’re constantly learning new things through it,” he said, emphasizing how much of an impact this role had on him and how important it is for him that through that experience he learned to paint and see things with different eyes.

He compared the way he creates his characters to Van Gogh’s way of painting.

“It’s like painting, you make one spot, then another spot, then another, and suddenly the whole picture comes together. It’s the same with acting, you play scenes, and they find their way to each other,” Dafoe explained.

He singled out his collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos as being really special, and then shared something about the film “Werewolf,” which he is filming with Robert Eggers.

“It’s a story set in 13th century England where there’s a wolf problem that the king is trying to solve. That’s where the story begins. The name of the movie is 'Werewolf', so maybe there is a special wolf in the story," he revealed, joking along the way that he hoped he wouldn't get into trouble for this revelation.

Dafoe also emphasized that he always enjoys the process of making and shooting a film, but once it's finished, he doesn't go back and starts thinking about the next project.

"The process of making a film is always better than the film itself," Dafoe concluded at the end of the conversation in the Grand Coffee programme with...