There is a particular irony in the fact that Willem Dafoe Late Fame arrives in British cinemas on 4 September, adapting a fin-de-siècle novella about rediscovery and creative stagnation, at the very moment Dafoe has become one of the most prolifically meme-able faces on the internet. The 71-year-old actor (appearing on screen for the 159th time) plays Ed Saxberger, a New York postman whose old poetry is suddenly, unexpectedly popular with a group of young artists who call themselves the Enthusiasm Society. It is a story about what happens when the world notices you too late, or perhaps exactly on time.
From Schnitzler to smartphones: how Late Fame found Willem Dafoe
The film originates in an 1895-written novella by Arthur Schnitzler, who also wrote Dream Story, the source Kubrick drew on for Eyes Wide Shut, about a 69-year-old Austrian civil servant whose forgotten verse finds a new audience. Director Kent Jones, the former director of the New York Film Festival, and screenwriter Samy Burch (whose credits include May December) updated Schnitzler’s story to the present day, relocating its protagonist from Habsburg Vienna to contemporary New York. Film at Lincoln Center, where the film has screened, lists the runtime at 96 minutes, lean and precise, like the novella it honours.
Dafoe’s involvement predates Burch’s screenplay. He had already read Schnitzler’s Late Fame and approached Abel Ferrara about a possible adaptation. His investment in the project runs deeper still: a line in the finished film was written by Dafoe himself, drawn from his own experience of ageing inside a profession that prizes youth. ‘I used to be the youngest in every group,’ he says, ‘and then one day (it’s not a gradual thing) I woke up and I was the oldest one. I’m dealing with that.’
The result, he suggests, has a quality that good films sometimes acquire when the production’s atmosphere bleeds into the work itself. ‘Between shots, we take shelter in restaurants and coffee shops. They ask me to tell war stories of making films; stories of when I was young, poor, and idealistic; stories of who I knew. You get sucked in.’ The parallel between Ed Saxberger’s situation and Dafoe’s own is not accidental, it is the engine of the performance.
Willem Dafoe, Late Fame and the meme-industrial complex
It would be easy to read the film’s premise (elderly poet, admiring young disciples) as a flattering fantasy, were it not for the slyness Kent Jones brings to the material. The Enthusiasm Society are defiantly anti-technology in a story partly about cultural rediscovery via the internet, and Meyers (Edmund Donovan), the wealthy young man who brings Ed’s poetry back into circulation, turns out to be more invested in the romantic idea of rediscovered genius than in the work itself. When Meyers offers feedback, Ed refuses to take it seriously. The film understands that being championed and being understood are not the same thing.
That distinction matters because it speaks directly to Dafoe’s own unusual position in contemporary culture. KnowYourMeme.com maintains a dedicated index page for Dafoe’s online afterlife, cataloguing entries from ‘I’m Something of a Scientist Myself’ (drawn from Spider-Man 2) to the more surreal ‘Willem Dafoe Smoking Cigarette with Two Oranges One of Them Mouldy’. A GIF of Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, staring skyward in distress, has become the standard visual shorthand for sitting too near the front of a cinema screen, its most recent wide circulation coinciding with the IMAX release of The Odyssey.
Dafoe himself is candid about his limited relationship with the devices that distribute his image. ‘I’m not good with devices,’ he says. ‘I still type on the phone with my index finger.’ He avoids social media, though the culture reaches him anyway: ‘People send me weird stuff, yeah. I enjoy it sometimes.’ He attributes his meme-ability, at least in part, to an approach to performance that has never been strictly naturalistic. ‘I’m not bound by just naturalism. I sometimes do very abstract, theatrical performances. I like doing photoshoots. You have to find shapes and perform.’
That restlessness connects directly to what draws him, at 71, to younger collaborators. A co-founder of the Wooster Group in 1975, Dafoe spent subsequent decades working with Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders, John Waters, Spike Lee, Kathryn Bigelow and Lars von Trier before becoming a regular presence in films by Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos and Robert Eggers. The appetite has not narrowed. ‘I’m always trying to figure out what young people are up to,’ he says, ‘because they have an energy I respect and want to tap into.’ He recalls Gene Hackman once advising him never to work with a first-time director. ‘I obviously didn’t follow his advice.’
The question of whether he would take direction from someone as young as 21 brings a characteristically direct response. ‘I would if there was something for me to contribute. When you need to make something, and the world drops away, and you have this single purpose, that’s attractive to me. What I want to avoid is people who are stuck and don’t have that desire. Sometimes people lose that over time. I haven’t lost it.‘ He calls himself, without apparent irony, ‘a little bit of a bloodsucker’ who turns to the younger generation to put him in places where he is not comfortable. His final word on the subject is brief: ‘My identity is that I’m a young guy. I’m a kid.’
Late Fame is in UK cinemas from 4 September.
