I Am A Demented Soul -- Interviews

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Mean, Green Fighting Machine

To Peter Parker he appears to be a benefactor, but Norman Osborn -- played by acclaimed actor Willem Dafoe -- has a secret. Just as Parker is Spider-Man, Osborn has another identity: Spider-Man's arch-nemesis, the Green Goblin!

~ by Abbie Bernstein

Willem Dafoe began acting on stage as a teenager. He still carries on the theatrical tradition as a member of the Wooster Group theatre ensemble, a troupe he helped found 25 years ago with partner Elizabeth LeCompte. He recently appeared with the company off-Broadway in To You, the Birdie!, an adaptation of a Greek tragedy.

Dafoe began moving between the worlds of stage and film in 1982, when he starred in director Kathyrn Bigelow's 1982 motorcycle actioner The Loveless. Since then, Dafoe has appeared in a vast amount of influental fare, including The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ (as Jesus), Born On The Fourth of July, Wild At Heart, Tom and Viv (as T.S. Eliot), The English Patient, eXistenZ and American Psycho. In 1998, Dafoe served as co-producer on The New Rose Hotel and he has twice been nominated for Best Supporting Actor Oscars, first in 1986 for his work as a compassionate sergeant in Platoon and again in 2000 for his very different role as a vampire pretending to be an actor playing a vampire in Shadow of the Vampire. He has three films upcoming this fall: Morality Play, Once Upon A Time In Mexico and Auto Focus. Now Dafoe brings his talents to bear on playing a different kind of monster in Spider-Man -- wealthy industralist Norman Osborn, who becomes the Green Goblin, nemesis of the film's hero.

AB: How did you get involved with the project?

WD: I knew that they were looking for someone to play Norman Osborn/the Green Goblin. I also knew that they were interested in having John Malkovich [who starred opposite Dafoe in Shadow of the Vampire] play the part. I had a pretty good sense that he wasn't going to do it for whatever reasons, but I knew that the role might still be available. Then I had a conversation with Sam Raimi. I was in Spain at the time and he talked to me on the telephone. Normally, when a director tells you what he's interested in doing with a movie, particularly over the phone, long distance, you'd think it would be quite short. Well, I ended up talking to him for three hours, and he did most of the talking, because he told me about all the relationships. He was very much into the psychology of the characters, and that was quite striking. It had a lot to do with the father/son relationship, that Peter Parker was almost like a surrogate son to Norman Osborn, and that set up parallels between their superhero alter egos, because their relationship and their battle with each other in the Green Goblin/Spider-Man mode have certain echoes to their relationship as Norman Osborn and Peter Parker. It's interesting to have an action picture that has that kind of complexity and that kind of rootedness. Although it's elevated and it's fantasy and has special rules of its own, its sources come from very recognizable human struggles with relationship and identity and feelings of responsibility. So I read the script, and then they put me on tape because it was a competitive thing -- they weren't sure who they wanted for the Green Goblin -- and they cast me.

AB: I assume screen-testing is not something you're asked to do much these days.

WD: (laughs) Not often. But I was happy to do it, because my feeling is, I wanted them to feel confident that I was the guy to do it.

AB: Were you attracted to the idea that it's a double role?

WD: Very much. I think it's fun that certain low ironies are set up because the characters are so different, and the dark side of Norman Osborn can be amplified and morphed into these really large emotions. The Green Goblin is pretty much an aspect of Norman that is born through this accident in the lab. Through the movie, in fact, there's a struggle for the soul of Norman Osborn with the Green Goblin, the evil force. The Green Goblin basically is the stronger and takes over.

AB: Was it hard to come up with the Goblin's distinctive laugh?

WD: No. It's what I do in the shower (laughs). The laugh is just the Green Goblin cackle and I knew what it was right away.

AB: Tell us about the Green Goblin's distinctive costume?

WD: The Green Goblin is basically a costume and a mask -- some people even called it 'the Helmet.' It's a molded thing that was fitted to my face. Norman is inside a suit that's basically the Green Goblin. It's not an organic thing. It's something that he was working on in his laboratory. Once this laboratory accident happened, the Green Goblin was born. Then he appropriates some of this stuff that he had been working on to create the Green Goblin, like an exoskeleton.

AB: Did you have concerns about playing the Goblin in a mask?

WD: You can do a certain amount with gesture and language, but yeah, it's always a concern. When you can't use your face and they can't see your eyes sometimes, you have to use other modes [of communciation], that's all. Some of that falls on the actor, and a lot of it falls on the director as well, because he has to frame the action in such a way that [the Goblin has] movement and is expressive. The action sequences are given expressiveness by his mode of transport, which is the glider. Now when he steps off that, he's a pretty conventional fighter, he's a puncher and kicker, so those are [the Goblin's] ways of expressing himself, basically.

AB: How was it working with Tobey Maguire?

WD: When we were working on the script in the beginning, I found he was very astute in his observations. He's quite analytical, and in the scenes, he's a very strong, present actor.

AB: Is there a difference in working on big movies like Spider-Man and smaller-budget independent films?

WD: The stakes are very different. The bigger the movie is, the more people are involved in making decisions. So there's less possibility that you can have a personal film with the really big movies -- which makes sense, because they're trying to reach a very wide audience, so they're reaching a common language that many people will understand, and they fear that if it gets too specific or too personal, it won't have a mass appeal. But, not just because I want to be a cheerleader for Spider-Man, I think somehow Sam Raimi brought a very personal feeling to directing Spider-Man, because he has a great love for it. Usually in genre films, the focus is made on the surface of things, on the look and kinetics of it. They aren't perceived as dramatic movies, so [drama is] not where the attention is placed. But I think Sam knew, for [Spider-Man] not to be just a big action confection, it had to have some roots. This is a man who feels deeply about these characters, and that becomes seductive. He's very good at introducing you to them.

AB: How does Spider-Man relate to your career in general?

WD: It's a point of pride -- most of the time, I'm working with the Wooster Group, and then I make maybe a movie or two a year. It's a mix. I'm proud that we've kept this really vital group together for 25 years and it's just interesting to do a high-profile movie like Spider-Man and be talking to you now, and then in a couple of hours, be off to Brooklyn for our [Wooster Group] performance, where we're going to perform for 300 people tonight.

~fin

Gliding Into Action

~ by Abbie Bernstein

AB: Is the Goblin overall a very physical role?

WD: It was pretty physical. You were always very much in touch with your body, because it was very hard on your body. They talked about [putting ventilation into the suit], but it never bothered me, because I don't mind heat. And [ventilation] would have been bulky. You want the suit to be substantial, but you don't want it to be so substantial that it inhibits movement or that you lose the nice lean figure. They wanted to get the look of it lean, so when he's on the glider, it looks like he can really do some damage.

AB: Did you do much work with the Goblin's glider?

WD: A lot. There's no rulebook with it. We had to find out what the glider could do, so I worked with it almost like a test pilot would. One of the first things I did [in working on the film] was, I got on the glider. It's winged and it's basically on a gimbal, so it curves to the right and curves to the left. The movement a lot of times is done with the camera. The couple of times that it does move, it's been varied, but it doesn't move in a direct line very often. You're wearing shoes that have little clips on them, sort of like ski boots. And you get locked into these flanged footholds. It's quite dangerous. They had to build some customized sort of splints for my ankle. Because if you zig when it zags, it could snap your ankles, and you're way up in the air, so it would be pretty ugly. I got on the thing and it's like getting on a mechanical bull. You know, you try to stay on and you try to make it graceful. Since there was no model [for riding the glider], you develop your own style. I did [most of] my stunts. No one was better at the glider than me, and also, I'm a pretty good fighter. It was quite physical -- it's fun.

AB: Do you do any kind of martial arts or other physical regime?

WD: I do Ashtanga yoga practice. It's hardly a martial art, but it's certainly something that connects you with your breath and is good for concentration and makes you very strong and flexible. It means 'eight-limbed' in Sanskrit.

AB: So it's appropriate for working on a Spider-Man movie!

WD: (laughs) It's true -- I never made that connection.

~fin

source: The Official Spider-Man Movie Magazine, copyright 2002 Titan Publishing Group

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