In Kent Jones’ acclaimed new drama, the actor plays a former poet whose career could be a sliding-doors echo of his own – he reflects on the film’s pithy exploration of art, ageing and gentrification in Manhattan
Whether a maniacal lighthouse keeper in an offbeat indie (The Lighthouse) or a lime-green villain in a Marvel franchise (Spider-Man), the common denominator in Willem Dafoe’s 150-and-counting roles seems to be their kookiness. In Late Fame, Kent Jones’s pithy, sharp-edged study of aging, arty types and ambition, the midwestern actor plays one of his most ordinary characters to date: an easygoing postman and one-time poet on the verge of retirement. Dafoe says his roles in The Florida Project, Light Sleeper and this latest film feel uniquely personal and “use more of [himself]” because “those are characters that I could be, if my life was different.”
In the film, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s rediscovered novella of the same name, May December screenwriter Samy Burch transplants the 19th-century story to present-day New York and shapes it around the film’s eminent lead. Though their lives have ultimately followed different trajectories, the fictional poet Ed Saxberger and Dafoe share similar beginnings, arriving strapped for cash in SoHo in the 1970s. While Dafoe co-founded the experimental theatre troupe The Wooster Group, Saxberger frequented Beat poetry circles. Now both in their 70s, Dafoe splits his time between Italy and New York, while Ed, with just one poetry collection under his belt, had shelved his poetic ambitions – until a coterie of 20-something aspiring writers and apparent fans, self-dubbed “The Enthusiasm Society”, adopt him as their mentor.
“What these kids are proposing is [for Ed] to return to a place he was before,” says Dafoe when I speak to him via Zoom, the day – appropriately – after his 71st birthday. Seeming somewhat still in character, he remarks on the lack of books on the bookshelf behind me (“I’ll give you some”) and explains that he identified with Ed’s stance on aging, even if his own birthday does not feel especially significant. “If you grow up in the summer, your birthdays don’t get celebrated, and if you come from a big family, your birthdays don’t get celebrated. So, the actual birthday is not a big deal, but definitely when the age piles up, you start to reflect on where is this all going and what does it all mean?
“[For] anyone, as they get older, whether they have success, whether they have failure, whether they’ve had a radical change in their lives, there’s a degree of looking back, and if someone particularly encourages that, it becomes even more potent and seductive.”
With that dynamic reflected between Dafoe and the film’s younger actors – who teased out the Hollywood veteran’s “war stories” on set – the line between reality and fiction became even more porous. The film’s turtlenecked clan of would-be literary stars, who we soon learn are predominantly NYU rich kids, are helmed by a brilliantly wheedling, highly strung Edmund Donovan, who convinces Ed he is a forgotten luminary. “If people set you up and listen to what you’re saying, after a while you start to believe what you have to say is important,” says Dafoe, pointedly. “As you’re doing lots of interviews, as someone is forced to listen to you, all of a sudden it’s very easy to get puffed up.”
Surrounded by this sartorial, eccentric clique of poseurs (styled “like a boy band”, Dafoe chuckles, by costume designer Carisa Kelly), Ed’s unostentatiousness is clear by contrast. Yet he is taken in by the group and begins to fall for their only female member, actor Gloria (Greta Lee), who channels bygone stars like Sally Bowles and Marlene Dietrich. In one memorable scene, she says to Ed cuttingly: “I can tell you were beautiful once.”
“That says as much about her [character] as it does about [mine],” insists Dafoe. Unlike the male portion of the society, Gloria is scraping by, singing at underbooked cabaret events and staying trapped in a compromised living situation for her art. “[Ed] has tried to avoid that kind of tragedy,” adds Dafoe.
Their nascent romance is one segment of Ed’s reckoning with aging and lost possibilities. “It’s not really nostalgia, it’s a flirtation with lost youth,” Dafoe muses. “It’s also a flirtation with [this idea of], can you go back to a lost New York? And of course it isn’t really lost – it’s just changed.”
Does Dafoe believe there is less room for artists in the city today than there was back when he started out? “I’m a little shy about speaking to that,” he cautions. “To my mind, it was a special time. Things happen in waves. Change happens, and then there’s an adjustment. We’re on the other side of the change right now, I think. But I don’t know, because I’m not 22 years old.
“Maybe there’s a scene that I don’t know about, but I think clearly things have shifted where a lot of the talented and energetic people go into other things, other than poetry, other than cinema, other than dance, other than theatre. They go into technological stuff and stuff on the internet and things I barely know about, and I don’t want to play too stupid or like I’m 150 years old,” Dafoe winces. “It certainly [doesn’t] have the same kind of cross-fertilisation of the arts or homemade, direct, very American hands-on approach to making things that was an expression of what was going on. I mean, it’s no accident that New York was on its back financially. It was a violent city. It was a city in trouble when there was an explosion of talent. I’m a little shy about speaking to that, even though I just tried, didn’t I?”
Late Fame is out in UK cinemas on 4 September.