Sometimes doing good art is an exercise when you disappointed your heroes.
“I remember Gene HackmanOne of his advice for me when I worked with him was: “Never work with a first time director”, ” Willem Dafoe told IndieWire as he discussed his new film “The legend of and in“Who comes from the first time director Isaiah Saxon.” Of course, I did not follow his advice, but he may rest in peace. “(Dafoe and the late hackman played together in 1988’s” Mississippi Burning. “)
DAFOE currently has its choice of sought -after roles from Elite AUTEURS – only in 2024 he recorded films from Robert EggersYorgos Lanthimos, Tim Burton and Jason Reitman. So it takes a lot for a new filmmaker to dazzle him. But Saxon and His director’s debut “The Legend of andi” Be something special. A throw to Fantasy -Epics as “The Neverending Story“The film deepens the viewers in a sea of matte paintings and dolls to portray the fictional city of Carpathia, where villagers live in fear of an adorable species called and in. No one detests more than Dafoes maximum, which blames them for their wife’s death and collects a army of young boys to pronounce the magical.
What convinced Dafoe to Don World War in Armor and Chase after a sweet Gremlin -like creature with a bunch of children? The actor said it was a combination of Saxon’s animation trunk director has spent decades using his distinct stop-motion strategy for music videos through his studio encyclopedia Pictura and director’s visceral passion for the material that proved to be irresistible.
“When they have a certain passion and their approach is very personal, I think this is something I do not know for a fact that Isaiah has lived for a long time,” Dafoe said. “It had a strong impulse behind it; it wasn’t just another movie. You like to get people when they try to do something they will die if they can’t.”
Dafoe has always been an actor who embraces a new challenge, so he pleased the opportunity to use a doll as one of his primary stage partners. He explained that the petite and in dolls were actually part of a large rig driven by six people – a phenomenon that only accentuated his character’s view that these little creatures were actually monsters that deserved to be feared.
“Physically, where I live. Acting is about doing things if you ask me,” Dafoe said. “And because it’s cheek of this low-tech stuff, like with the puppets, for exams, it’s interesting when you’re doing a scene with the andi, you doing the scene with, basic, sixte people rolled no. Creature. And of course, you are not concentrating on that, but you get that Energy of this very distinct, very concentrated six or whatever it is, operating this pupet that’s reacting to you.
In some ways led together with a team of dolls Dafoe back to their days with experimental theater with companies that Wooster groupwhere he performed in the 1980s. While the actor never worked with dolls on stage in such a large capacity, his background in experimental performance gave him a comfort level by projecting human emotions in response to actions that are not necessarily cued by other human characters.
“Sometimes we would work in very unconventional performance modes. Sometimes we do our cueing or have some kind of reference distance that we would have to follow,” he said. “So it has a similar type of concentration, where you have an external reference, and you come to it, and that type gives you a super concentration. It is a very good thing to have when you perform because the world falls away and you do what you do. A real pure presence.”
An A24 edition, “The Legend of andi”, opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday 18 April, before expanding all over the country on April 25.
