Willem Dafoe and Hong Chau: ​‘The mean­ing comes in the doing’

One is a vet­er­an of the screen who’s been act­ing for over 40 years, the other’s career began to blos­som after a star­ring role in Alexan­der Payne’s 2017 dram­e­dy, Down­siz­ing – Willem Dafoe and Hong Chau meet on-screen in Kinds of Kind­ness. For Dafoe it was a reunion hav­ing worked with Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos on Poor Things and play­ing the bub­ble-belch­ing God, but for Chau, it was a call that came after her whirl­wind year pro­mot­ing Dar­ren Aronofsky’s The Whale, which cul­mi­nat­ed in an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for Best Sup­port­ing Actress. They play var­i­ous roles across each of the film’s shorts, but it is in the third and final seg­ment, R.M.F. Eats a Sand­wich, in which they play a pair of über chill, free-lov­ing cult lead­ers named Omi and Aka.

LWLies: Do either of you have any per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tions of what this film is about? 

WD: I’m a bat­tered actor. We talked a lot about not inter­pret­ing. You know, there’s no inter­pre­ta­tion. I don’t have the abil­i­ty to express inter­pre­ta­tion because it slides around as I’m watch­ing it. I’m watch­ing these peo­ple, and cer­tain things occur to me, because many things hap­pen that are very evoca­tive, you know. And the two times I’ve seen it, it’s pre­sent­ed dif­fer­ent things to me. So I can’t. I can’t. I could make some­thing up, but it wouldn’t be true.

All of his films are kind of like that, in a way. 

WD: But this is even hard­er to express in those terms, because of the nature of themes that are thread­ed through it. But each movie is very dis­tinct. Which movie are you talk­ing about? Which char­ac­ter? Which sit­u­a­tion? It’s like a kalei­do­scope. There are too many colours.

HC: Yeah, I like to turn my brain off when I enter a movie the­atre and let what­ev­er hap­pens on screen affect me. And I think that’s kind of the approach I took to work­ing on this movie. I didn’t real­ly spend too much time analysing the script or try­ing to con­nect any sort of dots. I think there wasn’t a lot there in terms of spe­cif­ic descrip­tions of things. Some­times there’s a lot of that in scripts. And so the things that we saw on-screen, we found them through test­ing them out.

WD: Yes, tri­al and error. It was just nice to get to watch some­thing and work on some­thing and not know exact­ly what it was before we started.

HC: Ulti­mate­ly, I think it’s a gift to be in that head­space of, ​‘What is this?’ And the ques­tion of, ​‘What is it?’ comes out of a cer­tain kind of plea­sure and curios­i­ty. Because when you have that kind of curios­i­ty, that opens the door to a kind of free­dom of think­ing and imag­i­na­tion. And Yor­gos’ films do that at least to me. And I appre­ci­ate it.

As actors you read a lot of scripts. Is it com­mon for you to sign on to a project and not nec­es­sar­i­ly have a clear sense of what the film is about? 

HC: I think this is the first time where I felt, ​‘Oh, I real­ly don’t have any­thing in my pock­et already to con­tribute in terms of a con­crete idea of this is, how she should look and how she behaves.’ But I haven’t done as many movies as Willem. Is this unusual?

WD: I often don’t know. You’re attract­ed to cer­tain things when you read a script. You’re aware of the things to do and things that are pre­sent­ed. So it’s not like, ​‘I don’t know what this is at all.’ Themes and pos­si­bil­i­ties always spring to mind. But that’s just to guide you, whether you want to try to fig­ure out what it is. But the mean­ing comes in the doing. Some­times I do a movie, and the movie is beau­ti­ful, but I don’t know who the char­ac­ter is because I was him. If I per­formed well and if I was hon­est and I was grace­ful in my approach, I don’t know, because that’s not my job.

That’s real­ly inter­est­ing because there are some actors who say they know exact­ly who their char­ac­ter is from start to fin­ish. I find it so fas­ci­nat­ing that there are so many ways of get­ting there.

HC: Some­times, and cer­tain­ly some­times you use mod­els and some­times you even copy. And to copy is a good place to start cre­ative­ly, strange­ly enough, because you can’t real­ly copy. You can start to mim­ic and then in your lim­i­ta­tions and the par­tic­u­lar flavour of the mim­ic, it leads you some­where else. I find that very use­ful actu­al­ly some­times that you take a mod­el. But that mod­el is just a div­ing board.

I was inter­est­ed to hear from you about Yor­gos’ method of build­ing in rehearsal time and mak­ing sure every­one has the space to play around. How does this impact your own cre­ative process?

HC: I mean it changes every­thing. I think ear­li­er on, I used to real­ly white-knuck­le things where if I had a big scene or a mono­logue, I’d just keep my engine warm the entire day until I get to that point and it’s like, ​‘Oh my god,’ if that scene comes up after lunch, for­get about it. I am a goner. And I had to let that go – the idea of a per­fect take – which real­ly helped me to just be a hap­pi­er actor. Because it’s kind of mis­er­able the oth­er way that I was approach­ing it. So to get a place to play and just hav­ing every­body come togeth­er and do just a fun, sil­ly rehearsal peri­od before we start­ed the film was real­ly nice.

WD: He has a rehearsal peri­od before and that makes the com­pa­ny and we goof off, we humil­i­ate each oth­er. It’s like boot camp. We don’t so much deal with the text or the inter­pret­ing of the text. And for this one, it was quite brief, actu­al­ly. We had a longer one for Poor Things. But as far as space when we’re actu­al­ly doing it, there’s not a lot of rehearsal or any­thing. It’s a very relaxed and very sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment. So you feel free and easy. Because nat­u­ral­ly there’s not a great pres­sure on you to con­vey a par­tic­u­lar point of view. The thing that you’re sup­posed to do, as is my under­stand­ing, is to be engaged. Have a rela­tion­ship with what you’re doing. Be alive in what you’re doing. Not be asleep. That’s all. And when the world is so well built and the things that you have to do are so spe­cif­ic and so con­struct­ed, you don’t have to gild the lily. You’ve got to be there for it and it is what it is. But Yor­gos is very good with actors and gives good prac­ti­cal instruction.

I always find it quite com­i­cal how his films tend to put his char­ac­ters through the ringer, yet he’s so thought­ful and gen­tle when you meet him. 

WD: He’s so sweet. He’s so sweet and so love­ly and just a very calm, very warm pres­ence. Well he’s like that. And also when you fail at some­thing, he’s like, ​‘Well, that was not good.’ And you don’t feel the sting. Because he says, ​‘Let’s do it again,’ or, ​‘What if we do this?’ He’s help­ful. He’s very good with actors. I mean he act­ed him­self. He knows the the­atre; he knows music. He’s a very well-round­ed artist.

In the third act, you play a pair of cult lead­ers. How did you work togeth­er in cre­at­ing those roles? 

HC: Some­thing is pre­pared but it’s pre­pared in cos­tume selec­tion, pre­pared in get­ting to know each oth­er, hang­ing out on the set. We had all these extras around us. The loca­tion is very spe­cif­ic. We aren’t a machine when we’re shoot­ing. We don’t shoot con­ven­tion­al cov­er­age, or there aren’t a mil­lion takes or any­thing. It’s quite relaxed and well-planned. So you get time to hang out. I remem­ber us hang­ing around that pool, just being total­ly chill, being able to for­mu­late those decisions.

WD: They aren’t even deci­sions. You cre­ate an asso­ci­a­tion, and so it’s easy to imag­ine that we’re a cou­ple. But you can’t force those things. They come up, you know, like groundwater.

How did the expe­ri­ence of work­ing on Kinds of Kind­ness dif­fer from Poor Things, if it did dif­fer at all? 

WD: The man is the same, the movies are dif­fer­ent, that’s all. It’s the same guy and his approach is the same. It’s being expressed through a dif­fer­ent kind of fil­ter, like paint­ing with oth­er colours.

And for you Hong, com­ing into this estab­lished group with Willem and Emma and Joe and Mar­garet – how did that feel to kind of be brought into the lit­tle fam­i­ly that Yor­gos is creating? 

HC: I guess because I knew that he was friends with Kel­ly Reichardt for some rea­son, like, that made it feel like, ​“Oh, okay, we’re all on the same wave­length.” Even though I had not actu­al­ly worked with him or any of the oth­er actors before, it felt like, ​“You know a friend of mine, so we’re going to get along.” That was my atti­tude going into it. And actu­al­ly, a lot of our crew was Kelly’s crew.