HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 15, 2000 — Watching “Shadow of the Vampire,” one quickly senses that Willem Dafoe has the toughest and, by far, the most fun role in the entire film, playing the grumpy and id-driven vampire turned unwitting actor Max Schreck.
“I wasn’t sure [how to play Schreck]. But I knew that there was a model of the original, so that gave me something,” Dafoe said. “And I knew I am going to be wearing makeup that will make me look like the Max Schreck in the film as much as possible. And I knew what my costume was going to be. I had lots of information.”
“I never quite know where something is going to take me, but I knew the starting point.”
The starting point here is the fictional re-imagination of the making of “Nosferatu,” circa early ’20s, by German director F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich). The story duly unfolds after the filmmaker brings in an eccentric actor by the name of Max Schreck (Dafoe) to tackle the part of the vampire Count Orlock/Nosferatu. But unbeknownst to the rest of his crew is that the so-called actor is actually a bona-fide bloodsucker.
“Shadow of the Vampire” took a little more than 10 years to bring to the big screen. And how the film came to light is curiously bound up once more to the ghost of the film that serves as its inspiration.
The screenplay, which was completed in 1989 by writer Steven Katz, was brought to the attention of actor and sometimes producer Nicolas Cage through their mutual agent at the time the “Wild At Heart” actor launched his Saturn Films.
The story goes that Cage is such a huge fan of “Nosferatu” that he decided to produce the film with experimental filmmaker Elias Merhige (“Begotten”) at the helm. The story also goes that Schreck’s performance had actually inspired Cage to take up acting, and also that the actor-producer had originally wanted to star in the picture but decided otherwise.
But right from the get-go, Katz knew that he wanted Dafoe to play the spotlight-stealing role, specifically after he had caught glimpses of the actor’s work with the theater outfit Wooster Group in New York during the early ’90s.
“With Willem, he is very tactile and very physical,” Merhige added. “He has a great deal of trust and faith in his own talent, and he is highly intuitive. What becomes important is not sitting there and rehearsing and talking so much as it is to get him into the teeth, the makeup, the corset.”
The 45-year-old actor has made an indelible impression playing a spate of unusual characters — from Jesus Christ in the controversial “The Last Temptation of Christ” to a mad lunatic in the mainstream bomb “Speed 2: Cruise Control.” And the actor is about to suit up for another role that flirts with the dark side — the resident villain Green Goblin in “Spider-Man,” a film that has yet to go into production.
“I don’t think of them so much as dark characters as they are conflicted characters and characters that are sometimes marginal people, and those are sometimes the most interesting stories because they have less to protect,” Dafoe said. “They don’t live in the mainstream world so they can be a little more reckless in their perspective on things.
“One of the pleasures of going to the movies for me is quite simply to see new ways, to think about broader ways or to challenge something as a given. It’s usually people from outside, from the margins, that have the voice that inspires me.”
“Shadow of the Vampire” opens in Los Angeles and New York on Dec. 29.
