Three-time Academy Award-nominated actor Willem Dafoe spoke with College of Fine Arts Dean Harvey Young on Monday night about his 38-year-long film career, including his most recent film, “The Florida Project.”
Dafoe, 62, spoke to a tightly-packed Tsai Performance Center to discuss his life as an award-winning actor, brother to seven siblings and Wisconsin native. The event was organized by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
“We pursued Willem Dafoe for his papers because of the many diverse roles he has played, and continues to play, both in the theater and on film,” said Vita Paladino, director of the center. “His archive lends itself to the study of the profession of acting on stage and on the screen.”
Dafoe has played roles in more than 100 films, including “Platoon,” “The English Patient,” “Shadow of the Vampire” and “Spider-Man.” He said he worked with several first-time actors and children on “The Florida Project,” and those co-stars inspired him to perform more freely.
“There’s a purity about [the children’s] performing that’s really valuable and that I always try to go back to when I’m performing,” Dafoe told The Daily Free Press. “The naturalness of animals — not that I’m comparing children to animals — is that they don’t have a self-consciousness about performing — that is, until they develop a conscious. I want to be like an animal.”
Sean Baker, director of the film, has only worked on independent films with small budgets. “The Florida Project” was Baker’s first movie since his award-winning 2015 film “Tangerine,” which was shot on three iPhone 5s cameras. The film had budget of just $2 million and mostly showed at festivals. It earned Dafoe an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
“To watch [‘The Florida Project’] star a legend like Willem Dafoe … took my respect for him to another level,” said Olivia Gordon, a sophomore at UMass Boston who attended the talk on Monday. “Not a lot of movie stars would’ve agreed to star in something so risky with so little budget. But [Dafoe] did, and he was able to make something really moving and substantial.”
Dafoe said that he wished more people had seen the “The Florida Project” in order to raise awareness about impoverished families.
“It was a very modest budget, mixing new actors, children, regular people and a very small crew,” Dafoe told The Daily Free Press. “It was basically a neorealist approach, and … it was a film that was talking about an underclass in a way that was neither specifically hermetic or sentimental or melodramatic.”
Roya Ostovar, a staff psychologist at McLean Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School, praised the film for its brutally honest portrayal of struggling American families.
“As a psychologist, I’m very familiar with the types of people that were portrayed in [‘The Florida Project’],” Ostovar said following the talk. “It’s not an easy life for anyone to live, especially a child. Thankfully, when you’re that young, it’s easy to escape into your imagination. In some ways, this film could have been a documentary.”
During the question and answer portion of the event, Dafoe described his lifestyle as “very nomadic,” and said he remembers his life through the movies he’s made. Despite his transient lifestyle, he said that certain aspects of filmmaking can feel suffocating.
“The truth is, the hardest thing of all is just when you feel tight, when you feel like you can’t get engaged. When you don’t have a relationship. When that trigger isn’t on. You feel dead,” Dafoe said. “When you feel like you’re filming, not being, that usually comes from a deep self-consciousness, or industriousness, where you feel like you’re haunted by where you have to land with what you’re doing.”
One audience member asked how he is able to find happiness in the unstable field of acting. The lines on Dafoe’s face grew deeper as his features crumpled into his signature gap-tooth smile.
“I find happiness in work [and] in life in the same way … [by] disappearing in a certain kind of being, where … you melt into something bigger and really feel the wonder of life, and I feel that in performing sometimes … it has a lot to do with being present,” he said. “When you’re hanging on to who you think you are, that … blocks you from really living.”
