Shadow of the Artist
How many actors do you know who have starred in an underground flick titled The Communists Are Comfortable, narrated a video called What is Yoga?, and painted their genitals green and donned a grass skirt for an off-off-Broadway play called Hula? Narrow your list down to one. Willem Dafoe.
From taking drama courses at the University of Wisconsin to performing at the avant-garde Theater X in Milwaukee, from co-founding the esteemed New York experimental theater company, the Wooster Group, to playing Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), the sinewy Dafoe has always stood a few steps to the left of the norm. That need to challenge himself and others has earned him an Oscar nomination for Platoon (1986) and an Independent Spirit Award nom for Wild at Heart (1990). It also earned him two Razzie noms for being the worst actor of the year: in Body of Evidence (1993) with Madonna and the Keanu-less Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997). When you gamble, you don’t always win.
His next two releases, though, will certainly sidestep the Razzies. In fact, there’s already a resonating Oscar buzz for his performance in E. Elias Merhige’s comic horror flick, Shadow of the Vampire. Here, Dafoe’s an actual vampire hired to portray a celluloid one in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. The problem is, if his character keeps drinking the blood of the unsuspecting cast and crew, no one will be left to complete the film.
Dafoe also splatters some plasma in Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory, an Oz-lite prison drama. Here he plays Earl Coppen, the head honcho inmate in a state penitentiary who’s tough as tacks until cute rich-kid Ron Decker (Edward Furlong) shows up in the cells. The nai?!ve lad’s derriere needs protecting, and Earl’s willing to guard it, although he admits, “I probably wouldn’t help you if you were ugly.”
Back to the unconventional Willem. Has his continued work in the theater throughout his career made him a better actor?
“Umm. Big question,” he intones seriously from his New York digs, having just returned from a film festival in Sarajevo. “Let me think. There are a lot of questions in that one question. I think when you perform in the theater for a long time, it affects how you perform in film, not necessarily for the better. It’s an individual thing. I know plenty of people that are great on stage but just don’t come across on film, and I know plenty of people that are great in film and they wouldn’t know what to do on stage.”
“But in my case,” he continues, “I like to think that the two forms feed each other. It’s all pretending. It’s all performing. They just have different processes. One is mediated by so many hands, and the other one I have more control over. I’m fond of likening it to a musician performing live as opposed to performing in the studio.”
As for Shadow of the Vampire, how did four hours a day of makeup aid his remarkable live performance? “Give me a good costume and a nice makeup job, and I’m there,” he says, smiling fiendishly.
Having the equally idiosyncratic John Malkovich star as Murnau also helped. “You can only do well to work with good people,” he explains with a college professor’s verve. “A strong actor will bring out the strong actor in you. John’s a strong personality and he’s skilled, and to play those things with him is preferable to having someone you could dominate. Sometimes you can control people too much who aren’t real strong performers, so you don’t get surprised. You don’t get to flirt with being a little off-balance.”
In that case, his decision to take on a bunch of neophytes in Animal Factory is a curious one. Dafoe says, “First of all, Steve asked me. Steve is an old friend. A prison movie. I like the genre. It’s a love story. I like that. I also am attracted to movies with a harsh reality where the people in them have to get it together, to extend themselves to another person, where they have to show some sort of generosity or grace. I’m very moved by that. Factory’s not pure escapist entertainment. It has a weird uplifting quality, because in the face of prison reality, someone has to put his concerns aside to help someone else. In this case, Earl Coppen loves this kid and he’d do anything for him. I’m moved by that. It doesn’t pull any punches, yet it’s very understated.”
Maybe too understated at times. Some might be confused as to whether Coppen’s relationship with Furlong’s character is supposed to be homoerotic or a father/son pairing. “They’re the same thing, aren’t they?” Dafoe laughs aloud, before pretending he’s revealed too much to a tape recorder. “Hey, I shouldn’t say that. I have an 18-year-old son. He’s a good-looking boy, too.”
In this unbridled era of in-your-face film, there’s an air of “good taste” about Animal Factory. Even in the shower scenes, you hardly see flesh. “People are so unused to seeing frontal male nudity that it seems to be a distraction more often than not,” Dafoe notes. “If a penis is on screen, your average audience is measuring and looking. A penis has a lot of character to it, so…” he stops himself again. “I’m not particularly into penis gazing, but if Edward Furlong was up on the screen and all of a sudden the camera dropped down to his crotch, I’d fall right out of the scene. That’s all I know.”
Even if all future crotch shots were left to Richard Gere and Kevin Bacon, Dafoe shouldn’t have to worry about finding future film parts, but he does. “Any actor who says he isn’t worried when he finishes one project is a liar. Of course you worry where the next good part is going to come from. Hollywood runs on fear.”
Part of that fear stems from massive changes in the independent film business, according to Dafoe. “The middle has dropped out,” notes the star of such mid-sized indies as Triumph of the Spirit (1989), Tom and Viv (1994) and New Rose Hotel (1998). “I’m only conscious of that because that’s where I live. As the business gets more and more refined, only really big films and really small films are what’s commercially viable now. Why?
“You make a big film, and you protect your investment with huge advertising and with the movie stars of the moment. You create a must-see. You make it such a huge cultural event that whether people are into it or not, they go.” He continues, “Or you take a little movie, for which the distributors pay nothing, and then throw it out there – and relative to what they paid for it, they can make a really good return.”
“But it’s in the middle where they lose their courage. It’s kind of like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and the middle class has gone to the moon.”
Don’t expect Dafoe to be traveling into outer space anytime soon. With all his kvetching, he’s already completed three other projects for next year, the most anticipated being Yurek Bogayevicz’s Edges of the Lord, in which Haley Joel Osment plays a 12-year-old Jewish boy hiding with a family of Catholic peasant farmers to escape the Nazis.
Still, Dafoe is remarkably insecure about his marketability. He’s even said, “Casting people feel that they have to get someone who looks a certain way, and I think that jury is still out whether people find me attractive or not. I’m perceived as an eccentric actor in dark, little films, kind of the boy next door type, if you live next door to a mausoleum.”
I argue that he’s definitely a thinking and/or drinking woman’s sex symbol, and that a whole lot of people out there wouldn’t mind bedding down with him. “If they want to, that’s fine with me,” the reluctant sex symbol sighs, “but I don’t think about it. I just live my life.”
The Eyes of Tammy Faye
IFCRant: The Rise and Eyes of Tammy Faye
The Rise and Eyes of Tammy Faye
Tammy Faye Shares Laughs and Tears With Brandon Judell About Jewelry, Healing, and Entrusting Two Filmmakers With Her Delicate Image.
by Brandon Judell
photo by Robin Holland
Your first glance of the new Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner will take your breath away. Her tresses are now a bright red and classily coifed. Her make-up is firmly yet gently applied. She smells oh-so-good, thanks to Estee Lauder’s Private Collection, and her tasteful three-piece lavender outfit with an ankle-length skirt is accessorized with purple stones galore.
“This is raw amethyst,” she says of her ring. “It was made by a friend, and it’s maybe four inches long. This is an amethyst bracelet. My girlfriend died and her husband gave it to me.” We then move on to the necklace and brooch. “Being four-eleven, I like the biggest jewelry I can find,” Tammy laughs. “I think it makes me feel bigger.”
What’s also making Tammy Faye feel bigger these days is Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s comic yet touching documentary, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and the love it’s eliciting for its subject. A hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film has transformed the woman America once loved to mock into an eccentric but glorious survivor whose moxie you can’t help but admire. The film will be released theatrically at the end of July.
But what was Tammy’s reaction to the movie? “I heard she cried a lot,” noted Bailey, when I caught up with him at the Paramount Hotel in Manhattan. “When she watched it with her son, she said he cried until he threw up. I would say that’s a pretty dramatic reaction.” But besides supplying catharsis, the film has happily jump-started Tammy’s once-dead career. “She’s now become the spokesperson for the National Flea Market Association,” Bailey told me. “Flea markets today — tomorrow, MAC Cosmetics.”
“Please note,” Barbato added, “the reason this film resonates so strongly is because we live in a society where it feels really good to judge people, and to a certain degree we’re all guilty of that. I think everyone has laughed at this woman. But by the end of our film, it’s hard not to feel a little bit of shame for unkindly judging someone you don’t know.”
Co-Directors Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey. Photo by Albert SanchezAnd I do feel a bit guilty about how I’ve treated Tammy. When I bid for her LPs on eBay, it certainly wasn’t for their musical value. But before I can chide myself further, there she stands, with teddy bear under arm, inside the Essex House suite like a slightly malformed Rita Hayworth.
For those who don’t recall the one-time Queen of Mascara’s claim to fame, she once helped rule the interdenominational PTL (Praise The Lord) ministry and its multi-million dollar Christian empire. That reign started moldering when her former spouse, televangelist Jim Bakker, was found to have trifled with a sweet young thing, Jessica Hahn, and paid her off with funds that weren’t his own. This led to other investigations into Bakker’s house of religion and his Heritage USA theme park. The holy man was soon in prison.
Tammy Faye, who was always seen by his side weeping, became the brunt of a million jokes — “Did you hear what happened when they took off all of Tammy Faye’s makeup? They found Jimmy Hoffa.” Relentless media attention and financial ruin caused the Bakker family to fall into major dysfunction. Tammy divorced Jim and wed businessman Roe Messner, who was soon also imprisoned. Then she suffered from colon cancer, sold wigs, wrote books, and had a short-lived talk show that she co-hosted with the openly gay Jim J. Bullock. Somewhere within this fiasco of a time line, a rock group was named after her (Suddenly Tammy) and documentarians Barbato and Bailey, best known for their feature documentary Party Monster, a true disco murder tale, decided to pitch a story on the marred celebrity. Everything’s been uphill since.
“It was very dangerous,” Tammy Faye notes as she arranges herself on the hotel couch with the teddy bear on her right. “I knew the film could go either way. But somehow I trusted Randy and Fenton. I just felt that they were people who were good people. But when they first said, ‘Tam, would you do a documentary for Cinemax?’ I said ‘no,’ because I felt like I hadn’t healed. I didn’t want to break open old wounds and begin to ache again.”
“I think it was a very vulnerable time for Tammy,” Bailey recalls. “She was alone in the desert, and after we really started bonding, she said to us, ‘I think God has sent you.’ We sort of helped fill a space in her life that was empty.”
Tammy agrees: “I needed to be doing something with my life to feel productive. I felt very alone and very sad and very vulnerable. I felt very hurt. I believe in justice, and I feel like there’s been so much injustice where our family was concerned.” Tears begin to flow. “So I think Randy and Fenton were right. They probably caught me at a time when I needed them really badly. They lovingly said, ‘This will be good for you. You can trust us.’ Well, generally if somebody says, ‘Trust me,’ you run the other way. But when Randy and Fenton said, ‘Trust us,’ I said, ‘Okay, guys.'”
After the film was finished, Tammy was afraid to watch it. “I could literally hear my heart pounding in my ears, I was so nervous.” Then, she explains, “All of a sudden the film started, and in the first three minutes, I knew everything was going to be okay.”
“Actually this film, it’s like a bomb is going off,” shares Tammy through sudden tears. “Because my life is so wonderful. It’s like a happy bomb’s gone off.” Now she’s laughing and crying simultaneously. “People are coming up to me everywhere who’ve seen the film, asking me to forgive them. They’re sorry for misjudging me, and it’s so wonderful. Finally, after all of those years of not being believed, it’s like a million pounds have been lifted off my shoulders. Yes, finally somebody believes me,” she admits with a Marilyn Monroe breathiness.
Tammy credits her sudden unexpected acceptance and adoration to prayer: “I really felt God speak to my heart one day. He said, ‘If you will be kind to the people that have hurt you, I will vindicate you.’ People say, ‘How do you know it was God?’ Well, I don’t know, but I knew it wasn’t me saying that. So I have striven to be kind to the people that hurt me so bad. I believe that this is God’s vindication for me. I truly do.”
With that, I get up to say good-bye, a little teary-eyed myself. But before I can exit, Tammy orders, “Now you come over here and hug me.” Who am I to argue with God’s beneficiary? I eagerly obey and receive a first-rate embrace that leaves a little Estee Lauder on my lapels, which I will not be washing out soon.
From IFCRant The Magazine July/August 2000
IFCRant The Magazine is a publication of The Independant Film Channel published bi-monthly in a co-venture with indieWIRE®
