The Moment I Fell For... Willem Dafoe

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The Film Experience's wonderful October series "Oscar Horrors" has been going strong for a couple of weeks now - it's where Nat & Co. take a look at Oscar nominations that went to the scarier things... and by "scary" I mean "The Exorcist" and not "Renee Zellweger." Anyway last night I wrote up some thoughts on Willem Dafoe's Supporting-Actor-nominated performance as the Nosferatu in E. Elias Merhige's wonderful 2000 flick Shadow of the Vampire (at the time I wrote it I didn't know it would be posted on Klaus Kinski's birthday - otherwise I would've mentioned that, for sure!) 

So I rewatched the movie and I really do think it's a brilliant performance for the ages in a brilliant film for the ages, and what sealed the deal was a scene I'd completely forgotten about. Dafoe's character, the "actor Max Schreck," has just fought with his director FW Murnau (John Malkovich) by trying to eat the cinematographer again, and so he storms off with the cast and crew, leaving Shreck alone on the set. What he does...

... is astounding. Earlier in the film while having trouble acting, Max is having his motivation explained to him by the writer, who asks him, "What is it that inspires the most longing in you? That is most desirable, and yet most unattainable?"

"The light... of the sun," is his reply.

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And a few minutes later, in just a few seconds of screen-time, Merhige and Dafoe manage to give him his unattainable, and in the meanwhile visually encapsulate so much about the vampire myth, the cinematic take on the vampire myth, on cinema itself - the ability of movies to transport us to our deepest most forbidden desires from a safe distance... it's an astonishing moment.

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