Versatile Dafoe continues hunting for unique roles
Actor has starred in blockbusters, art films, theatre
Willem Dafoe flew back from Tasmania not too long ago, and boy, are his arms tired; you know, from swatting the insects.
“Some of that landscape is really brutal,” Dafoe says. “There’s something called button grass, which is these little tufts of grass, and it looks sweet and nice, but around all the tufts is this swamp filled with leeches and bugs, and after about five minutes you’re pulling leeches off and you’re getting eaten alive. Brutal.”
Brutal, but he loves it. The actor was playing Martin David, the hero in an Australian film called The Hunter about a mercenary sent by a shadowy biotech company to find and kill what may be the last Tasmanian tiger. The tiger may be extinct, but if there’s one around, the company can use its genetic material.
It was exactly the kind of thing Dafoe looks for: exotic, remote, different.
“I love it when a location takes you so far away you’re not aware of where you are,” he says.
Indeed, Tasmania is pretty well the co-star of The Hunter. The film also stars Frances O’connor as the wife of a man who has gone missing in the wilderness, and Sam Neill as a family friend caught in a battle between logging companies and environmentalists. But much of the film just shows David alone in the wilds of the Australian island looking for an extinct animal.
The setup is heavy on symbolism, but Dafoe — a busy actor who is also currently fighting wars on Mars (John Carter) and preparing for the apocalypse (4:44 Last Day On Earth) — is a physical performer who is willing to let the audience decide on whatever metaphors are taking place in the woods.
“Most good films let the audience participate,” Dafoe says. They will come away from the film with their particular interpretation. . . . The best you can do is create something that is resonant and is a living, breathing thing and comes from a place of investigation or wonder or curiosity. Sometimes you won’t make the most commercial movies, but you’ll make movies that aren’t bulls..t, superficial exercises to just make a movie.”
There aren’t many bulls..t, superficial exercises in Dafoe’s filmography. The 56-year-old actor goes easily from art films (Shadow of the Vampire, for which he was nominated for an Oscar) to intense drama (Platoon, for which he was nominated for another one) to blockbusters (the Green Goblin in SpiderMan) to experimental theatre (the Wooster Group, a New York City company of which he is a founding member.) His unusual look — threatening on screen, but handsomely Bohemian in person — has made him one of the most versatile actors working today.
Dafoe was speaking at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival, where The Hunter had its premiere. It is based on a bestselling novel by Australian writer Julia Leigh who, coincidentally, directed the erotic drama Sleeping Beauty, which also showed in Toronto.
Dafoe didn’t read the novel until after he had begun shooting the film (“I was afraid that if I read the book, I’d have allegiance to too many things”), but he responded to the screenplay and the passion of Australian director Daniel Nettheim, who had been working on a film adaptation for years.
“It had such a specific sense of place,” Dafoe says. “I liked the combination of this personal story at the centre of this huge canvas, and I like the idea of the adventure to inform what I was doing.”
The adventure was all about being in the wilds of Tasmania.
“You can make someone up to look like they’ve been in the woods all day, but it’s only being in the woods that’s going to give you a certain kind of look,” he says.
Then there was the weather, which can turn quickly. There’s a scene where it begins snowing in the mountains, and Dafoe said the film crew rescued several French and Japanese tourists that day.
Although Dafoe said he likes the physical challenge, he’s not really much of an outdoorsman.
“I’m kind of an urban guy,” he says, even though grew up in Wisconsin, and he and his father would fly into a Canadian fishing camp in the wilderness.