Willem Dafoe Quotes

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.

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

I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people. With technology now, people are getting more and more isolated. I like the community coming around the story. You don't have that with a DVD. People go home, they're tired from work, they can turn it off. It doesn't make you commit the same way, if you can control the movie. More difficult movies, it's too easy to turn them off. All the time, I see movies I know if I had seen it on DVD, I wouldn't have hung with it. If you see it on the screen, you hang with it and it pays off better than a movie you can easily sit through on DVD.

I've been in very few flat-out comedies. But I feel like I've always made comedies.

Sometimes you feel like you have to do research to make something, other times you know you don't feel it so much.

Performing is about developing empathy, which leads us to a broader view of the world and encourages us to develop compassion; so we can comfort each other and not be so brutal with each other.

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.

As you get older, you suffer fools less easily. That's why there's all those cranky character actors. I'm an exception. I'm a sweetheart.

One of the pleasures of being an actor is quite simply taking a walk in someone else's shoes. And when I look at the roles I've played, I'm kind of amazed at all the wonderful adventures I've had and the different things I've learned.

Sometimes I say I feel more like a dancer than an actor, because there are things implied about being an actor that I don't really like. I feel more comfortable with the word 'performer'. I like being the thing. I like being the doer. There's a factualness to it. And then certain resonances happen out of how you apply yourself physically.

I try to attach myself to people who really inspire me, and directors who are really passionate. That way, I can give myself more fully and trust the impulse behind why the film is being made, and I can be a little more irresponsible in finding out what the character is.

You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

Trust is always a factor. You've just got to look at the big picture, and you've got to look at the small picture - the small picture in the sense that you've got to make every scene work and you've got to deal with what people are presenting you with, too.

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.

I never act. I simply bring out the real animal that's in me.

If you get stuck and it feels a little stiff, then you do have to mess it up to find it. But other times it's really written and you just stick to your guns and do it as elegantly and as concentrated and as committed as you can.

There's a real wisdom to not saying a thing.

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.