"Willem Da Who? Willem Da Man!"

Willem Dafoe is best-known for playing villains in movies like To Live And Die In L.A., Streets Of Fire and the Spider-Man films, but he’s also known for playing heroic roles in films like The Last Temptation Of Christ, The Boondock Saints, and American Psycho.

Now the 56 year-old actor hopes to succeed as a hero in a big way as the Martian Warrior Tars Tarkas in the science-fiction adventure John Carter. It is the first live-action film of Pixar animation team member Andrew Stanton, who has written films like the Toy Story series and A Bug’s Life and also directed ones like Finding Nemo and WALL-E. Dafoe talks about how he was convinced to do the film.

“No convincing,” Willem simply replies, “I was there. I was happy to go there. I didn’t know the John Carter stories, the novels. I just knew he was going to do this big live action movie for Disney, and I had worked with him on Finding Nemo, and I, of course, knew his work at Pixar. I really liked him, even though I was doing a voice for Nemo, that work is quite complicated, and you have lots of recording sessions over time. And I really like working with him. It’s like a game. It’s like back and forth, back and forth. He tells you what he needs. He bends, he’s good at approaching things from all different angles.”

“I think it’s partly from working at Pixar with having this huge respect for the process and for research in the development of things, that when you arrive, it pays off,” he continues, “Also, he’s used to gathering lots of information for animators, so he approaches things from many different angles. It’s not just enough to realize the scene. He wants to realize it many different ways. That’s fun. So I wanted to work with him. I knew he was passionate

"Willem Da Who? Willem Da Man!"

about this project, always good to be on a passion project of a smart guy. And then when he said – and then he started showing me designs of the characters and of the spaces, and I thought this is cool. I haven’t done this. Then he described we’re going to learn Thark language. You’re going to wear stilts, head cams, motion capture.”

Willem talks about the gear and the stilts he had to wear to become Tarkus.

“Well, that becomes the work, to forget how confining it is and turn it into a good thing,” he says, “It’s good in the respect that as an actor, you’re always finding ways to – to find new impulses. Physically, my body changes because I’ve got all these things put on me.”

“So I can’t access the impulses that I usually have,” Dafoe continues, “So there’s kind of a transformation there. And when you’re transformed like that, that makes you very game for applying yourself to a character, or to a new story. So you try to make it into a good thing. It’s so based on the movement.”

Dafoe talks about how he brought humanity to essentially a Martian being.

“You know, the truth is Tars Tarkus has human emotions,” Willem says, “That’s why we relate to him. So I’m playing it basically like a human, I think, but it’s filtered physically and visually through these other things. So I mean everything, that’s the only way I can describe it.

Willem was then asked how he did research to convey those human emotions.

“I didn’t feel the need so much,” Dafoe says, “I had so much stuff, bombarded by different things to try to get comfortable with, and also, I just didn’t feel the need. It was on the page.

Dafoe talks about the most challenging scene he did shooting John Carter.

“Well, one thing that just pops into my head is quite early,”

"Willem Da Who? Willem Da Man!"

he says, “John Carter sees Tars and he’s kind of broken and he’s in this dungeon, Tars goes from being – laying down on the ground to standing up. I’ve got stilts on. It was really difficult to work that out, and I had to really practice it.”

“And eventually, just because of the proportions, it was impossible to get up by myself with the heavy stilts on, you know, the three-foot stilts, and being on it, the physics were wrong,” Willem adds, “So they had to put a wire on me and we had to work that out. It’s that kind of thing that is just maybe five seconds in the movie, but we worked on that on and off for days.

The film is based on the first book, A Princess Of Mars, in the pulp fiction serial series written by Tarzan writer Edgar Rice Burroughs known as Barsoom, about a Confederate soldier who ends up on Mars. Willem was asked if he knew the backstory of Barsoom.

“You know, I can’t explain it to you,” he replies, “It didn’t feel necessary. I had to know how he felt about John Carter, and then the principle thing was this secret that he has. But the most important thing was he’s – there are certain parallels to him and John Carter because they’re both – they both move from not feeling to feeling, sort of. I mean John Carter starts out as very misanthropic and kind of cut off, and he doesn’t want to get involved. He’s a classic reluctant hero.”

“Tars Tarkus has not the same thing, but a similar thing where he has all these conflicted emotions about his people,” Dafoe adds, “You have some, the thing that was important to me was his sense of regret of they have moved away and become vulgar. They had become gross. They had lost their culture.

"Willem Da Who? Willem Da Man!"

But he was in this double bind because to keep his power, he has to be strong. And he can’t have any show of emotion. But he feels like they should move – they’re going in the wrong direction. So I don’t know, there were lots of themes that I could relate to and I could get behind that gave me plenty to fuel how I felt about John Carter and how I would play those scenes. “

Dafoe was asked if he had to restrain his performance to for CG effects to come out effectively for the character in post-production.

“There’s no rule and it’s not you,” he replies, “You’re creating material. You’re fielding impulse for something that’s going to become something else. So the sky’s the limit, I think, when you’re with no mask, if you’re with no filter, then no matter how selfless, no matter how good of a performer you are, a little bit of you remains that your conscious is being presented to the audience, so I think being masked always takes the ego away. It doesn’t take the you away, but it takes the sense of – it gives you an opportunity to lose your sense of what you’re presenting to the world, in the form of who you are.”

Dafoe talks about how Stanton’s background in CGI really informed the direction of his performance in John Carter with the effects put in and how much of his perfomance was altered by it in the finished film.

“Andrew is very precise,” Willem says of him, “And he’s really good with stories, so this was a case where he would really say what had to be accomplished in the scene, and you would try to accomplish that for him. So it became a game, like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You’ve got to let it go. But also, I think clearly, the

"Willem Da Who? Willem Da Man!"

philosophy was that they were going, we were making the scenes, and they were going to make them in Martian form, basically. So Andrew wanted the scenes realized with us, and then they were made in the form.”

“I don’t think there were a lot of changes” he continues, “When I watched this movie, it’s arguable, depending on how well you know me, how much you can see me. But I see everything. I say, oh, I remember that. I remember that gesture. I remember that look. I remember that, so they really honor the material that they’re taking. And the only time that they change anything is for purely if there’s some sort of technical hiccup or they’re trying to make something more fluid. So I felt like they were very true to the actors. They honored what the actors gave them. So it was good, yeah.”