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I aspire to be an instrument of the director. I'm happiest like that. The stronger the director, the more I'm willing to give them.

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
Give
Happiest
Giving
Aspire
Like
Instrument
Director
Instruments
Directors
Stronger
Willing

More quotes by Willem Dafoe

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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
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Weirdness is not my game. I'm just a square boy from Wisconsin.
Willem Dafoe
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I don't want people to know anything about me, because that's not important. I'm more interested in the me that takes shape through the characters.
Willem Dafoe
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Mounting those red stairs [in Cannes] is something I've done with a very different intention many times. So it's interesting any time you witness those shifts of perspective. The beach scenes were also fun. It felt very strange and very theatrical to kind of commandeer it and have La Mer booming over the speakers.
Willem Dafoe
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I feel like it's important to be flexible, particularly when I'm coming in late in the game and I'm connective tissue in the story. I'm not at the very center. It's important for me to have a certain kind of flexibility and try to help people do what they need to do.
Willem Dafoe
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There's a real wisdom to not saying a thing.
Willem Dafoe
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It's fair to say that if you have a lot of experience, your power is greater. You have more of an opportunity to roll up your sleeves with younger directors.
Willem Dafoe
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I'm learning in my old age that the only thing you can do to keep your sanity is to stay in the moment.
Willem Dafoe
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Any actor who tells you that he makes choices, absolutely, is wrong. You find work and work finds you.
Willem Dafoe
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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
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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
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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
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That's a frustration sometimes, that certain directors that I'd like to work with, they just aren't doing stories that I'm sort of castable in. Not always, but sometimes I have that frustration.
Willem Dafoe
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Sometimes you feel like you have to do research to make something, other times you know you don't feel it so much.
Willem Dafoe
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It makes me laugh when I hear a guy talking about being in touch with his feminine side. But I gravitate towards women, I identify with them. And I do cry very easily, more and more as I get older.
Willem Dafoe
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I'm never in Hollywood! I'm a theatre actor that lives in New York. I'm very seldom in Los Angeles. I don't dislike LA, I just don't think it's a very healthy place for me to be all the time. When I'm shooting a movie there and am working I'm perfectly happy. But when I'm not working or engaged in something it's a place that I wouldn't live.
Willem Dafoe
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I never act. I simply bring out the real animal that's in me.
Willem Dafoe
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You have to lose yourself to find yourself.
Willem Dafoe
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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
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Socially, I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people.
Willem Dafoe