Willem Dafoe: ​‘I stopped eat­ing lob­ster on this film’

Willem Dafoe is one of those actors who some­how man­ages to be com­pelling even when he’s per­form­ing mun­dane tasks such as paint­ing – which we’ve wit­nessed him do on two sep­a­rate occa­sions in recent years, in Sean Baker’s The Flori­da Project and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate. He’s also one of the most indus­tri­ous stars in the busi­ness, switch­ing seam­less­ly between chal­leng­ing art-house fare and high-con­cept stu­dio pictures.

The Light­house, the Melvil­lian sec­ond fea­ture from Amer­i­can writer/​director Robert Eggers, belongs firm­ly in the for­mer cat­e­go­ry. It’s a briny bro­mance in which a pair of light­house keep­ers slow­ly descend into a liv­ing hell on a remote out­post in 19^th-cen­tu­ry Maine. While his co-star Robert Pat­tin­son has talked about the pun­ish­ing nature of the shoot, you get the sense speak­ing to Dafoe that he took it all in his stride.

LWLies: When you’re work­ing with a direc­tor – whether it’s Abel Fer­rara or Paul Schrad­er or Robert Eggers – how impor­tant is trust?

Dafoe: Very impor­tant. I’ve got this rep­u­ta­tion for work­ing a lot with the same cou­ple of direc­tors: Paul Schrad­er, six times; Abel Fer­rara, six times; Wes Ander­son, four times… So obvi­ous­ly there’s a rea­son I keep return­ing to those guys. If you’re going to give your­self to some­one, if you’re going to be the crea­ture of their vision, then it’s nice to know they’re worth it and it’s nice to know that you don’t have to wor­ry about pro­tect­ing your­self. Trust allows you to be more reck­less and more present and more involved.

If it’s ​‘fam­i­ly’, as it were, that doesn’t mean you hang out with them out­side of the shoot – but when you’re there you’re deeply con­nect­ed. You can work with peo­ple who you aren’t close with, I sup­pose, but then there’s a greater pos­si­bil­i­ty that you’re indi­cat­ing an objec­tive out­side of your­self and then you’re just craft­ing some­thing to go towards that. And that’s bound to hap­pen in a more insti­tu­tion­alised, more prod­uct-ori­ent­ed film.

Does work­ing with Abel and Paul and Wes get eas­i­er each time?

Not nec­es­sar­i­ly. It’s always dif­fer­ent, you know, as each project presents its own set of chal­lenges. You have to re-estab­lish things, get recon­nect­ed. But at least you know you’ve gone to war before with these guys – once you know they can kill you it becomes eas­i­er. But I real­ly believe in auteurs, and I like being a part of the fab­ric of someone’s vision. A real­ly impor­tant part of per­form­ing – iron­i­cal­ly, giv­en that it’s called ​‘show busi­ness’ and actors are noto­ri­ous­ly nar­cis­sis­tic – is find­ing a new self.

‘Auteur’ has become some­thing of a dirty word. Robert has referred to him­self as a ​‘would-be auteur’, which sug­gests he’s wary of the term.

I don’t like it when he says that. I’ve been tempt­ed to tell him not to say that about him­self. Because he is, he is. Deeply, deeply so. He’s young but… It’s in his blood. He’s one of those direc­tors who can’t help them­selves, he has to do this thing. There’s a pas­sion there and there’s a line of intent that’s so strong, which is some­thing I think we lack in cul­ture today.

What did you learn mak­ing this film?

It’s hard to say. What I’ve learned over the course of mak­ing many films is that spon­tane­ity and cre­at­ing things doesn’t depend on inven­tion. It’s like when I did this film about Van Gogh [At Eternity’s Gate], I was read­ing a lot of his let­ters: he used to say, ​‘I don’t invent the pic­ture, the pic­ture is in nature – all I have to do is set it free’. That’s sort of how I feel as an actor. It’s a lit­tle bit more artic­u­late with act­ing because you’ve got some­one talk­ing to you and giv­ing you an idea of what has to be accom­plished. But as far as the soul of it is con­cerned, I like this idea of mak­ing your­self avail­able and dis­ap­pear­ing into it.

How much did you and Robert dis­cuss the themes of the film?

Very lit­tle. I don’t want to be glib but he made this world and cast me and Rob [Pat­tin­son] and just let us loose in it. He’s a very pre­cise film­mak­er in his direc­tion of actions, but he doesn’t talk about the sub­text and the psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect of the sto­ry. The dif­fer­ence with this film was that we didn’t have a lot of rehearsal time. Because the con­di­tions were so harsh where we filmed, they had to pre­pare a lot of things tech­ni­cal­ly ahead of time.

Usu­al­ly the actors will block out the scene with the direc­tor and then you set the cam­era, but in this case the cam­era was set and we were told what the shots were, and we had to sub­mit to that as a struc­ture. It might sound oppres­sive but some­times when you take away cer­tain choic­es it allows you to be present in a dif­fer­ent way; you’re not wor­ried so much about the result because you have less control.

How’s your lobster?

I’ve had a lit­tle place in Maine for many years, and I love seafood, but I’ve grad­u­al­ly become a veg­e­tar­i­an and only occa­sion­al­ly will I eat fish. Dur­ing this movie, because where we were shoot­ing in a fish­ing town, and lob­ster is so abun­dant, I decid­ed to cook one – and it was the first time I ever felt bad about cook­ing lob­ster. I couldn’t eat it. I just had this vision, this epiphany I sup­pose, that this wasn’t right.

You should real­ly cook lob­ster live, and when you’re prepar­ing one, if you turn it upside down and stroke its bel­ly [mimes tick­ling an upturned lob­ster] it relax­es them, they go total­ly soft. And then you plunge them head­first into boil­ing water. So, on this film, I stopped eat­ing lob­ster. It wasn’t in our bud­get anyway.

The Light­house is released 31 Jan­u­ary. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.