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>> >> Willem Dafoe sinks his teeth into Shadow of the Vampire

by MATTHEW HAYS

Willem Dafoe is a wonder to behold in Shadow of the Vampire, his latest film. The actor led the pack at September's Toronto International Film Festival, delivering what was arguably the performance of the entire event.

The film's premise is an hilarious play on a striking bit of film history. In the early '20s, legendary filmmaker F.W. Murnau went about making a landmark horror movie, Nosferatu. In Shadow of the Vampire screenwriter Steven Katz's twisted imagination, Murnau (played by John Malkovich) is so dedicated to his movie, he decides to hire a genuine vampire to fill the role. Those familiar with Murnau's definitive 1922 masterpiece will recall that the actor, Max Schreck, was made up to look pretty darn hideous. In the fictional making-of Shadow, Dafoe sinks his teeth into the role with relish, as a real vampire struggling to get through a film shoot run by mere mortals.

Equally brilliant is Malkovich as Murnau, explaining away his lead actor's quirks. The crew wonders: Why can they only shoot at night? Why does Schreck never remove his makeup, or those several-inch-long nails? Why is he so anti-social? Murnau declares that Schreck is a perfectionist, a Method actor who's studied with the Russian acting teacher Stanislavski and that's why he's acting so much like a real vampire. But then crew and cast members begin to disappear mysteriously, with everyone succumbing to paranoia that Schreck is the real thing.

Hideous transformations

Dafoe's principle challenge for the role came with the extensive transformation he had to go through prior to each day's shooting schedule. Like John Chambers' Oscar-winning makeup for Planet of the Apes, applying Max Schreck's face required three hours every morning and an additional hour every evening for removal. The finger nails, reports Dafoe, simply stayed on throughout the entire shoot, as they were too much trouble to put on and take off daily.

But Dafoe says the trials and tribulations of all that makeup actually made his job as an actor easier. "Beneath all that makeup, you feel protected and you also forget about yourself. In a sense, it becomes easier to lose yourself in that character."

And Dafoe is unrecognizable in the role. The handsome actor, his face given added character by the lines and wrinkles that come with 45 years of age, goes through one awesome transformation to become the rather hideous bloodsucker Schreck.

"In a sense, I was lucky, because we had the original footage of Nosferatu from which I could work. Those were a touchstone and a place to start out from. I had the looks from the beginning, I had a good disguise to start out with. The most challenging role is one you don't click with. And that wasn't the case here. I felt very connected with this. I had the help from external things. Some actors find those external things restrictive, but I love them. To me, they seem like tools.

"The only thing that was curious about it was just that: there really wasn't much I could prepare before I got into the makeup. Basically, I could study the film footage, I could work on the accent, and I had to find a voice because the film was silent. That was it, which shows how intrinsic the makeup was to the character."

Strangling Dracula

Oddly enough, though Dafoe is starring as a vampire in the horror/comedy hybrid of the year, he says he doesn't feel a huge connection to the genre as a whole. "But looking back on it, some of my first movies ever were horrors--like the Hammer Horrors. There were also these 10-minute versions of various movies they would sell, like Frankenstein and Dracula. My father would buy these versions and we had a Bell and Howell projector and I'd watch them over and over and over. Also, back in Wisconsin, I'd go and see Saturday afternoon matinées. Of course, most of that stuff was horror. Really cheesy horror."

Shadow of the Vampire allowed Dafoe to interact with an icon of horror satire. Udo Kier, star of the ultra-strange spoof of horror films, Andy Warhol's Dracula, appears as someone working on the film within the film. "I got special pleasure out of that," says Dafoe. "I've always liked him, from the Fassbinder and that Dracula movie he made. This was a sweet part of movie history for me--I get to strangle Dracula!"

And despite reports to the contrary, Dafoe says cult figure Kier is actually quite down to earth. "He's not strange, Udo. He was a leading man in Germany for a long time. He became identified with Fassbinder, so he's become associated with things other than the mainstream. But he's very sweet." Dafoe has become famous for a series of offbeat roles in a variety of films. He's often remembered as the actor who brought Jesus Christ to such controversial life in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. A great admirer of Scorsese ("He's always struggling between the sacred and the profane--I identify with that," Dafoe says), the actor nonetheless can't choose a favourite among his own work.

"It's funny, because a cinema in L.A. is planning a retrospective and they asked me to choose. I can't decide--I just can't think in terms of favourites. Some are more difficult, some are more successful. It really is like having children. Sometimes your heart goes out to the stupid, ugly ones, because they need more help. There is that impulse to show the films that are least seen, warts and all. But the bottom line is, I can't really have favourites."

Dafoe does report having least-favourite aspects of the industry, however. "You always struggle with art vs. commerce. Right now it seems the bottom's dropped out. There's really big films and really small ones. That's a concern for me because I live in the middle. That's where the really interesting stories are told. When the middle drops out it's like when the middle class drops out of society. There's a greater separation between the very rich and the very poor. There's a volatility there and there's not a range in richness. I feel it's getting too top-heavy."

Shadow of the Vampire opens Friday, Jan. 26