Willem Dafoe Quotes - Page 3

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.

I wish to Christ I could make up a really great lie. Sometimes, after an interview, I say to myself, 'Man, you were so honest - can't you have some fun? Can't you do some really down and dirty lying?' But the puritan in me thinks that if I tell a lie, I'll be punished.

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.

I'm a task-oriented actor. A pretender. And I try to invent my process anew each time I make a new project. So I frown on any method.

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.

I have some sort of affinity for compulsive behavior. The most interesting stories come up from the people on the outside.

Any actor who tells you that he makes choices, absolutely, is wrong. You find work and work finds you.

The Midwest isn't somewhere you mix with those from the performing arts. But my mum and dad would go off to Chicago every so often to see shows. They would bring back the albums and the movies, those little eight metres, and we would all watch. I think that was when I fell in love with acting.

A lot of critics are lazy. They don't want to look closely and analyze something for what it is. They take a quick first impression and then rush to compare it to something they've seen before.

I prefer shooting on location, just because it always helps you. You go some place, you put your life on hold even more than when you've settled in some place. You can make a new life so it opens yourself up to the make-believe and the imagination in a way when you aren't burdened by things that remind you of your life all the time.

I pride myself on being fairly polite on a set so it's kind of a guilty pleasure to poke others on the set.

With theatre, you have to be ready for anything.

I don't worry so much about the audience. I want them very much to be involved and enjoy the movie, but I try to just inhabit the character in a full way, where I can create a personal stake.

It's too easy to trivialize people. The Internet does it all the time.

Central to being an actor is pretending, and the adventure of it all. That's why you become a junkie for different kinds of situations.

Truth is, generally I like film festivals; somewhere at some level there's an exchange of ideas.

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.

Plenty of bad movies are very successful, and plenty of good movies are not. And distribution is so crazy, some films won't even get their day in court.

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.

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.

I love doing action and stuff; the problem is usually action movies are not that interesting. Also as I get older I feel like there's less opportunities for me.

The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth - it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.

I'm an optimist. I hope if a movie's good that it will be a success, but as we know, that's not always true, just because of popular taste, advertising, distribution patterns - there's lots of reasons.

Usually when you meet with a director, just meeting them after you've seen something you're interested in, they say, "Oh I'd love to work together," and sometimes you never hear from them again.

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.