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Shadow of the Green Goblin

Flying haunted skies, Willem Dafoe brings a fine madness to Spider-Man's greatest enemy.

~by Ian Spelling

No one handed Willem Dafoe the coveted role of the Green Goblin (a.k.a. Norman Osborn) in Spider-Man. Despite a raft of major credits, regardless of Oscar nominations for Platoon and Shadow of the Vampire, and even though he commands great respect within the film industry, Dafoe had to test for the part.

“It was pretty competitive and, to be perfectly frank, they had someone else in mind,” Dafoe says. “And I don’t feel shy about mentioning that, because the casting process was pretty public. They initially wanted John Malkovich, but I knew he probably was not going to do it, and not because it was a bad role or anything like that. From his perspective, I don’t think it made sense for him to do it. So then the competition was on. They checked out quite a number of people. At the same time that process was happening, I put my hat in the ring. I was in Spain, and they sent someone to tape me. I figured that was the best way to persuade them that I was the right guy for the role. So they gave me a couple of scenes, and the casting director journeyed to Spain and filmed me in the vestibule of my hotel doing them. The they saw those scenes, and that little makeshift screen test was really what made them feel confident that I was the right guy.”

Goblin Gliders
Once he signed on, Dafoe familiarized himself with the Spider-Man Universe. He boned up on the comic-book adventures, and tried to find a way into the warped mind of Osborn/the Green Goblin. For the record, Osborn is the mega-wealthy New York businessman who’s into power, masks and science. He’s also a father figure to his son Harry’s (James Franco) best friend, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), who, after a biting encounter with a genetically engineered spider, finds himself with superpowers—spinning webs, heightened senses, ultrastrength, etc.—and goes about righting wrongs in the Big Apple. Meanwhile, Osborn has gained extreme powers of his own, and emerges as the Green Goblin: a glider-riding menace and Spider-Man’s greatest nemesis.

Even as Spider-Man and the Green Goblin go at it, though, the two adversaries don’t realize each other’s true identities. Complicating matters further, the Green Goblin spends much of his time tormenting Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), Harry’s galpal and the object of Peter’s romantic desire.

“The Green Goblin is just an aspect of the dark side of Norman Osborn,” Dafoe contends. “It’s a classic scenario in which the dark side of a person comes forward and takes over. So, basically, I concentrated on the Osborn part of the character, and that led into the Green Goblin.

“Osborn is a scientist,” Dafoe continues. “His company deals with defense contracts. He’s trying to develop a supersoldier, and rushes the tests on this supersoldier prototype because he doesn’t want to lose the contract to a competitor. His only choice is—because no one else wants to do human tests—is to try it on himself. He uses this body suit and glider—they’re the subjects of his research—and then the Goblin character comes about when this experiment goes wrong. The Goblin seizes on the suit and glider, and they become part of his arsenal. So the psyche of the Goblin comes from Norman. The accoutrements, the weapons and all those other things associated with the Green Goblin are developed by Norman as part of his scientific work in trying to land this defense contract. Whew, that was complicated! I think it’s actually a little simpler than that.”

Spider-Man teams Dafoe with a group of diverse talents, none of whom he has worked with before. First and foremost, there’s director Sam Raimi, whose credits range from the Evil Dead movies to A Simple Plan and The Gift. Then there are Dafoe’s much younger co-stars—Maguire, Franco and Dunst.

“I had seen most of Sam’s films,” Dafoe notes. “I vividly remember seeing The Evil Dead in a theatre on 42nd Street in New York City. It was a midnight show and people were screaming at the screen. Sam was really good to work with. He’s loads of fun and very encouraging. He creates a very fun and loose atmosphere. He indulges actors. He lets them play around and try stuff. Tobey described Sam as being like a kid in a candy shop, with the technical chops to back it up, and that’s who he is. He’s very sweet and supportive and fun. He set me up to act up, and he was my first audience—and he was a good one. He would laugh at my jokes and encourage me to fool around. Hopefully, you’ll see the results of that on the screen.”

“Tobey, James and Kirsten are all different and all good. The thing I remember most about Tobey is that, when we were working on the script, he was very good at motivations and storytelling. He was very good at imagining what the audience would be seeing. I don’t have that particular talent, so I admired that. He doesn’t have a preconceived idea about how a scene has to go, though. He’s flexible, so he’s good to work with. Kirsten I mostly brutalized. I didn’t have many traditional acting scenes with her. But she’s really good in the movie. She was very practical, and didn’t get worn down by the repetitiousness of some of the technical stuff. She was pretty gusty, and threw herself into some difficult stunt situations. And Franco is a very intense guy. I knew him mostly as my son. We didn’t do anything special to get the father-son relationship across. It just came pretty quickly. His emotions are very available to him.”

Green Masks
Back when Dafoe was doing the publicity rounds for Shadow of the Vampire, he spoke of Spider-Man in the abstract. At the time, he had just signed on to portray Osborn, and was quick to admit that he did not know if he would take the character as seriously as he might a straight dramatic role. Dafoe was open to the possibility of just having some fun. His comment at the time was more or less: “Get back to me after I’ve shot Spider-Man.”

So what’s his opinion now that he has played the part? “Well, I’m afraid I’m at the same place,” Dafoe jokes. “No, I actually fooled around quite a bit. Look, my job it to be serious about fooling around. Even in dramatic roles. It’s all pretend. There’s a certain amount of play in everything I do. It’s all play. You have to stay loose. You’ve got to keep your imagination active. You can’t bear down and get too serious. I don’t mean to say you can get less serious—that’s not it—it’s just that play can be deadly serious.”

When asked last issue to describe Dafoe, Maguire said of his Spider-Man co-star: “I think Willem had fun, but he took the role very seriously. He was a really nice, funny guy who was gung-ho about the action and very committed to the acting.” Dafoe laughs when he hears Maguire’s comments read back to him. “That’s pretty good,” he says. “Gung-ho about the action? Hmm. As we’re starting to do press, Tobey keeps on complaining about me beating him up. I wasn’t trying to beat him up, but I do like to get in there and mix it up.”

Sticking with the issue of physicality, Dafoe acknowledges that mixing it up—dealing with CGI, stunts, the costume and the Goblin’s mask—challenged his 46-year old body. On the other hand, he notes, it’s one of the reasons he fought for the role. “I love doing that stuff!” Dafoe exclaims. “The truth is that as I get older, there are fewer and fewer roles that actually have meat-and-potatoes action in them. So this was nice. I liked its athleticism, and the game of dancing with the camera and flying on the Glider and doing the stage-fighting stuff.

“To do the flying sequences, they had to [computer-] sample me a number of times,” he points out. “I then became the model for some of the CGI stuff. So some of what you see of me is CGI. It had to be. But other times it’s me on the Glider, where I was high up on a gimbal. And because the costume wasn’t exactly comfortable and there wasn’t much visibility in the mask, that made the Glider scenes pretty bizarre to do. I liken them to a cross between riding a mechanical bull and a surfboard. It was all about balance. When it zigs, you’ve got to zig, and when it zags, you’ve got to zag. So it was really about balance, presentation and trying to look as graceful as possible—like I was part of the thing.

“The Glider was also connected to a computer, so I would get a sequence in my head—I had to memorize it after practicing it, and get warnings as to when the Glider would zig and when it would zag—and try to make it look easy. I needed to appear comfortable up there, but it was difficult. The hardest thing about it was that my feet were clamped onto the Glider, so all of my leaning and all of my weight shifts had to come from above my knees. From the knees down, it was pretty rigid. I haven’t seen the finished film, so I don’t know how it all looks yet, but I hope it’s convincing.

“I hadn’t done much CGI work before, but it was fun,” Dafoe continues. “I’ve been working in the theater for 25 years, and we deal with repetition quite often. Rehearsals sometimes can be very tedious. You can spend a lot of time trying to perfect a move or an action. That’s pretty much what CGI involves, so I was use to it, and I kind of enjoyed taking a simple action in a simple sequence and trying to perfect it. The difference is that after I was done with a scene on the Glider, other people had to go off and make it seem real and convincing. On the stage, what I do is what people see.”

Regarding the costume, Dafoe had plenty of say in it. That came from a practical place: He had to be comfortable in it. “There was a whole research-and-development process that went on before I even got there, and once I did get there, there were revisions and scrambling and lots of adjustments as they saw the costume on my body,” he explains. “They wanted a certain strength, but they didn’t want me to look massive because I had to look graceful on the Glider. There were so many considerations, and not just for comfort. I had to be able to move in it. I had to be able to fight in it. It was just a long process of adjustments, fittings, trying different materials and simplifying. It was very, very involved. But I must say that when I saw [costume designer] Jim Acheson’s renderings of the character, I thought they were beautiful.

“They sort of departed from the comic books. There was something very soft about the Goblin in the comic. He’s almost wearing a dress, and he has a little stocking cap. There’s a rubberiness to him, and I think they wanted to go more sleek and a little harder with the film version. They wanted the Goblin to be a little scarier, a little less silly. And when Jim sent me those designs, I remember thinking, ‘God they’re beautiful, but they could never accomplish this,’ He had a plated look that reminded me of a H.R. Giger drawing. I thought, ‘I get the flavor, but I wonder what it’s really going to look like.’ Then through the process, process, process, process, what we arrived at was pretty much like that design.

“Once we got on the set, the costume wasn’t too big of a deal,” he adds. “The suit was designed and very functional, and I had to wear the mask. It was a hard mask, and some people even referred to it as a helmet. I could put the mask on and take it off, and there’s a good tie-in to the mask in the film. You see Norman Osborn in his study, and it’s clear that he collects masks. You also see the suit and the mask being developed in his laboratory. So they don’t come out of nowhere. In the same way that Peter designs his Spider-Man costume, Norman inadvertently designs his Green Goblin costume.”

Pumpkin Bombs
Spider-Man isn’t Dafoe’s first genre film—far from it, actually. Previous entries date back to 1983, when he appeared as the Second Phone Booth Youth in The Hunger. He subsequently turned up in Streets of Fire, New Rose Hotel (which he co-produced), eXistenZ and American Pyscho, and –as noted earlier—received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his creepy, and funny performance as Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire.

“It was fun making it,” he notes of Vampire. “It was a really fun character. I’m glad that we got some attention for a little movie like that. It helps get people to see the film, and that’s why we make them. But I haven’t seen it since I finished it. I know people will ask me—because they already are—if I’m concerned about playing too many monsters, but the fact is that between Shadow of the Vampire and Spider-Man, I made other movies [including Pavilion of Women, The Reckoning, Edges of the Lord and Bullfighter] that were very different. And I’ve already made some movies after Spider-Man [including Once A Upon A Time In Mexico with director Robert Rodriguez and the Bob Crane biopic Auto Focus]. I don’t want the average man on the street to think I’m just doing monster movies, but I don’t really worry about it. I feel like I’ve done lots of other stuff. I don’t feel like I’m working the same material over and over again.”

Interestingly enough, Dafoe—along with Robin Williams—was also considered for the Joker role in Tim Burton’s Batman. Jack Nicholson ended up playing that comic-book arch-villain, but later—when Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher was looking for the right Riddler—Dafoe and Williams were once again bandied about as possible Batman bad guys. Jim Carrey ultimately essayed the character in the film.

“People talk a lot of stuff,” Dafoe explains. “In neither case did the filmmakers really speak to me directly. In the case of the Joker, I remember that some pointed out that [Batman screenwriter] Sam Hamm had said [in Comics Scene Vol.2,#3] I would be a good choice for the Joker. I remember hearing that and being kind of interested and flattered, but no one ever talked to me about it. And as far as the Riddler, I don’t recall that at all. That may have been a consideration, but they never contacted me. And I’ve never imagined what my performances might have been like [had he done either film]. Never. I don’t waste my time on that kind of speculation. And I never spoke to John [Malkovich] about the Green Goblin. I had just finished working with him [on Shadow of the Vampire], and we were both shooting something else in Spain. So I did talk to him, but never very directly about [the Green Goblin]. I had some inside information that he wasn’t going to do it, and I knew he wanted to direct his film [The Dancer Upstairs], and I also—I also can’t imagine him doing the role. Actually, I’m talking out of school here. I don’t even know how he felt about it. I’m projecting. I think it probably wasn’t of interest because John had other things to do.

“I don’t know how agile he is, either, but as I was flying around on that Glider, I used to torment [Raimi and the cast and crew],” Willem Dafoe laughs. “ ’So, you wanted John Malkovich up here, huh?’ I just could not see him being able to fly that thing.”

~fin

Captions:

= MTV would have a blast documenting the life of this Osborn, but Norman probably wouldn't appreciate the camera catching him changing into his Goblin costume.

= Peter Parker isn't the only man behind a mask in Spider-Man. Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) assumes the evil alter-ego of the Green Goblin after a science experiment goes wrong.

= Dafoe focused on the human element of his duplicitous role, believing that the Goblin was only one aspect of Osborn's complicated character.

= "Tobey [Maguire] keeps on complaining about me beating him up," Dafoe notes. "I wasn't trying to, but I do like to mix it up."

= Playing Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, Dafoe didn't have to show the monster's good side -- his bloodsucker was all evil.

= The actor wasn't shattered to learn he might not be Goblin material. A screen test in Spain proved he was right for the part.

= Although audiences know who the Green Goblin is (especially if they read the original comic), Spidey is surprised to discover it's his best friend's father.

source: Starlog Magazine, Issue #299, June 2002

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