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I was born William. My father was William. I came from a big family, I hated being called Billy. Willem's a nickname it's a Dutch name, very common in the Netherlands.
Willem Dafoe
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Willem Dafoe
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: July 22
Film Actor
Film Producer
Model
Performing Artist
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Voice Actor
Appleton
Wisconsin
William J. Willem Dafoe
William James Dafoe
Father
Name
Willem
Called
Netherlands
Came
Nickname
Names
Nicknames
Common
Billy
Family
Dutch
Bigs
William
Born
Hated
More quotes by Willem Dafoe
You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.
Willem Dafoe
My dad was a surgeon, my mom a nurse, and they were always out working. I had five sisters and a brother. They didn't care what I got up to.
Willem Dafoe
It's true in the beginning I started playing villains, and I think that's pretty clear, because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains.
Willem Dafoe
I think, as I've gotten older, I've been able to be more reckless with my choices, because practically speaking, you get less careful. Your choices become more instinctive, and you feel like if you make a mistake, it won't destroy you.
Willem Dafoe
I think on some level, you do your best things when you're a little off-balance, a little scared. You've got to work from mystery, from wonder, from not knowing.
Willem Dafoe
You have to lose yourself to find yourself.
Willem Dafoe
The worst thing is to get involved with people who aren't passionate about what they're doing.
Willem Dafoe
I love theaters. I love the event of going there and seeing a movie with a lot of people. I like the community coming around the story.
Willem Dafoe
I guess they often cast me as the bad guy, because I'm not, er, conventional looking. I look sort of violent. I'm the odd one out, the outsider.
Willem Dafoe
The English Patient' is about the coming together of a French-Canadian nurse, an English patient, a Sikh in a turban and me, Caravaggio, and each of us is seeking a resolution to our own problems.
Willem Dafoe
It's nice to go back with people that you already trust.
Willem Dafoe
I was watching 'Wild at Heart,' and I can honestly say I did nothing for that apart from show up!
Willem Dafoe
In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about.
Willem Dafoe
When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses - which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you're playing a cartoon character.
Willem Dafoe
The real difficulty for smaller films, when they're made independently and it's time to go for a distributor, sometimes if it's a tough film and the people who financed it need their money back right away, it's much easier and lucrative to take a DVD deal.
Willem Dafoe
Film is an editor's medium. You can create very good raw material and they can make it horrible, or you can do not so well and they can make it beautiful. You don't really know.
Willem Dafoe
All the time, as an actor, you want to be asking what's next and where things are going. If you're not asking those questions, you're not growing.
Willem Dafoe
Film is fragmented and gets into lots of other people's hands. There are a lot of pleasures that theatre gives me. You get to perform uninterrupted.
Willem Dafoe
I have some sort of affinity for compulsive behavior. The most interesting stories come up from the people on the outside.
Willem Dafoe
I was doing community theater, and I was always interested in acting, but I was also interested in sports. I was interested in a lot of things. I was a pretty normal guy. I wasn't like a guy who grew up in a dark theater watching movies.
Willem Dafoe
