He's been burnt to cinders, cut to pieces, riddled with bullets, jailed, beaten, and crucified, but Willem Dafoe comes back from the dead more often than Count Orlock, the twisted creature of the night he plays with ferocious panache in Shadow of the Vampire. First-time feature director Elias Merhige's mischievous homage to F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu was the toast of Cannes last spring, and Dafoe's inspired performance has generated talk of an Oscar ever since. "That's good," the actor remarks with his trademark grin. "Anything that helps me keep on doing what I do."

The ubiquitous Dafoe is not one for sitting on his laurels. He's been on a hot streak in recent months, set-hopping the globe as if it were an Olympic event. From Yim Ho's Pavilion of Women in China he traveled to Poland for Yurek Bogayevicz's (Anna) WWII drama Edges of the Lord, then wrapped Paul McGuigan's (The Acid House) period whoddunit Morality Play in Spain while his gritty performance in Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory electrified moviegoers in the states. He seems energized possibly because the fruit of this creative surge is starting to pay off. At least three of the movies he recently starred in are about to be released, and people are definitely talking about Willem Dafoe again.

"I'll finish with Morality Play and then get on the case with Spiderman," says Dafoe, who landed the plum part of the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi's upcoming Columbia Pictures flick. Dafoe talks about the work enthusiastically, even though he admits he wasn't much of a comic book fan while growing up. "It's a double role. There's this Norman Osborn character and his evil alter ego, the Green Goblin. And he has actual scenes with himself, which for an actor is fun to do."

Dafoe is an actor's actor. He doesn't mind telling you that he is not an actor-director, he is not an actor-producer, he is an actor. He enjoys the uniquely thespian freedom of being someone else's instrument.

"Some people mistake it for passivity, but it's just the opposite," he says. "If you defer to someone else as an exercise it frees you up and in fact allows you to be even more passionate sometimes about what you're doing. You're not protecting anything, and you can be more open to all kinds of impulses. You're not just serving your own expectations." It may well be Dafoe's own brand of dispassionate commitment that has made him, over his 20-odd-year film career, the "instrument" of choice of such provocative high-caliber directors as Oliver Stone (Platoon), Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ), Paul Schrader (Light Sleeper), William Friedkin (To Live and Die in LA), Alan Parker (Mississippi Burning), Abel Ferrara (New Rose Hotel) and David Lynch (Wild at Heart).

Dafoe's love for acting doesn't even begin and end with the cinema. Although it seems as if he's constantly on movie sets in far-flung locales, he is home often enough to maintain his 22-year membership in the experimental theater company, The Wooster Group. "The Wooster Group is the best game in town," he says. "Even though there's no money in the theater. That's not what I'm about," he says.

What is he about? He grins the famous grin. "That remains to be seen." In person his eyes are a startling baby blue something you'd never guess from watching his movies. Once in a while a give-away Midwestern twang slips in. The seventh of eight children of a surgeon and a nurse, Dafoe spent a "kinda short on drama" childhood in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he occasionally worked maintenance in his parents' medical building.

"I spent my youth fishing through bloody dressings and stool specimens in the trash," he says. "You'd think in a place like Appleton you'd have those nice Midwestern 'Beaver Cleaver' rituals and family dinners. The truth is there was also the chaos of growing up in a large family. I remember being a fairly dutiful, conscientious, square, narrow-experienced kid. And there's comfort in that, but I always felt there was another world and I ran toward that other world.

I felt the narrowness of my own experience was oppressive and I didn't believe that's all there was."

Trying to find his place in a large family is how it all started: "I was the practical joker, the performer. Then you get reinforcement and it becomes something you do. I never really decided," he says. "I still haven't decided. I've always been ambitious and driven, but I didn't choose a traditional path. I gravitated toward situations and groups of people. With most professions, you usually train. I had very little formal training."

After high school and a stint in college, Dafoe dropped out and acted with Milwaukee's Theater X troupe, then moved to New York, where he joined the Wooster Group. In 1980, he was hired as an extra for Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.

He landed his first real role in The Loveless in 1982. A couple of years later came his first studio flick, the rock 'n' roll fable Streets of Fire, which led to a break in Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA, and a year later to his Oscar-nominated role as Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone's Vietnam parable, Platoon.

"It was so rooted in the details of doing the tasks," he says commenting about the weeks of combat training he endured in preparation for the film. "That's a kind of mask. You don't give in to your egotism because you're doing very specific things and that gets you away from yourself."

It was in Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ that Dafoe emerged as arguably one of the more important actors of our time with his cathartic, otherworldly portrayal of Jesus Christ, the chosen one desperately enamored of the ordinariness of life. "I love moral crises," says Dafoe. "I love the heroism of people even when they fail."

He's not as cavalier when it comes to run-ins with the press, and no longer reads reviews: "If they're good they just give me an idea of myself that I have to protect.

If they're bad, they just hurt me and I feel paranoid."

His relationship to his own notoriety is ambivalent.

"In some situations people can make you feel like you're the cat's meow or like you're a piece of shit. And that can happen within minutes of each other. So, yeah, I'm deeply affected by it. It's a thing that's always shifting. Sometimes I feel famous; sometimes I don't at all." He cites an occasion when a critic for Time Out New York pointed out, while reviewing a performance of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape at the Wooster Group, that Dafoe's "choice of a Brooklyn accent was unfortunate." "It's written in a Brooklyn accent!" says Dafoe. "And it's written phonetically." Another interviewer recently scolded him for taking on the small role of the detective in Mary Harron's American Psycho.

"It just shows that people really want you to crystallize a persona." Apparently, though, he has yet to raise objections about the response to his performance in Shadow of the Vampire, which has received unanimous raves.

Built on the conceit that the great German director F. W. Murnau cast a bona fide vampire in Nosferatu, his 1920 trail-blazing horror film, Shadow is a fictionalized account of the making of the picture. While the original Nosferatu was played by Max Schreck, "an actor of no distinction," according to Murnau, in Shadow, Dafoe's Schreck is an actual vampire posing as a Stanislavski-trained method actor. Murnau (John Malkovich) instructs his crew that Schreck will only appear on set at night, in character, and shall only be addressed as Count Orlock. Prosthetic makeup designed by Animated Extras' Pauline Fowler in London accounted for the three-hour daily ordeal in the make-up chair for Dafoe. His uncanny resemblance to the original Nosferatu was achieved with four prosthetic pieces: a bull-cap, head-piece, nose, teeth and pax-paint (acrylic paint and prosthetic adhesive) over his face because "the film stock was quite warm and he needed to look cold," says make-up artist Amber Sibley. The restrictions of costume and makeup had a liberating effect on Dafoe and colored his performance with alarming humor and eerie poignancy, as in the scene where Schreck is hanging out by the bonfire with two crew members and starts talking about the book, Dracula. From feral monster he turns into a vulnerable outsider whose rueful longings make him suddenly human until he snatches a bat from mid-air and sucks it dry between his teeth.

Willem Dafoe talked with MovieMaker recently about his craft and career, about practicing Yoga and aspiring to be an artist.

MovieMaker (MM): What attracted you to the role of Schreck?

Willem Dafoe (WD): I liked the script a lot. It was one of those times when you know exactly where you're going to start with something. Because you have a model that's given to you by the film within the film structure the fact that you have to really mimic Schreck's performance in Nosferatu, that's the beginning. But I think, deeply, my interest was in working with such a big literal mask which I'm always interested in. I was interested in that process and the whole conceit of him being a real vampire. And the joke of being a method actor is just really delicious. Even in conventional movies sometimes I seek out a mask because it frees me up; I let go of my ego agenda. It makes me feel like someone else and invites different impulses than I normally have. This was so extreme and I had such a great model with the Max Schreck role, that I couldn't really begin my work except maybe some superficial reading on Murnau, and of course seeing Murnau's films, until I got in the make up. I looked in the mirror and I wasn't there anymore, so who was? This guy is not really a human being. He's like a mythological character. If you've got this wonderful filter that you're playing through, it allows you to find the eye rolls, the clicking of fingernails. Those are not ideas, they come out of necessity. The first time you have lunch and you reach for the salt and your nails click together and you hear that, you simply find a way to express yourself.

MM: You seem to be a very physical actor and I think that in general physicality is something you develop on stage not so much in cinema.

WD: I don't approach things psychologically I approach them physically and rhythmically. I think that's where you find the psychology and the behavior, it's a weird approach. I'm not attracted to psychology, I find that really deadening to your imagination. It's a technical science that everybody plugs into but it's kind of bullshit because it's "agreed reality" that robs you of the power of seeing in new ways. There's a natural dumbing down when you're trying to tell a story, you try to find the buttons that other people can relate to and so much is expressed in psychological terms now that's kind of what makes movies moronic.

MM: You think psychology in general is something that takes away from the spirit and imagination?

WD: I do. I go to movies to be surprised and have a shift of perspective and I like to be able to empathize with people that I have no relationship to, to be reminded of the connection, to get a broader view. Not only do I like that for myself because it's comforting, because it makes me feel like I get a fresh take on life and the world, I get exhilarated by that. Psychology tends to reinforce what we already understand, that way of telling stories.

MM: You practice yoga. That's both a spiritual and physical discipline, do you draw on it when you work on a character?

WD: I don't like to talk about it, because it doesn't help your practice to talk about your practice. But yeah, I do draw on it. I find that when you have a physical discipline like that we won't even talk about the spiritual but a physical discipline like that, your body gets a different kind of sensitivity and a different sense of itself. And yes, I do feel the language I can access is different than it used to be. My awareness of my body is different than it used to be, too, but it's not purely a physical thing. It also leads you to a whole way of approaching impulse and trying to develop the observer, which is a huge part of performing finding that balance between letting go and control, awareness and abandon.

Always when performing you're dealing with two minds: the one that's watching and controlling and sending something forward and making sure you're in the shot and you're hitting the mark and you're not blocking that person's light. And the other part that's trying to just be in touch with what's really going on, the stuff that you can't control. You're always fighting between those two things because they're dependent on each other but they're absolute contradictions of each other and you get an opportunity to plot the battle out of the science of yoga.

Let's not talk any more about it. You get prideful, too, and you start to identify in a way that separates you from other people. I try not to think about it, I just do it.

MM: Do you get a kick out going from characters like Jesus Christ to Nosferatu?

WD: No, I'm not aware of that. Then people tell me and of course I'm titillated, but I'm not aware of that.

MM: What did you discover playing the Schreck/ Nosferatu character?

WD: He's like an animal.

MM: Do you believe in vampires?

WD: You mean people that suck on other people's energy or take their life away from them? Of course.

MM: Was that a concept you worked with?

WD: I worked with all kinds of things. What occurred to me is you're essentially gone because you don't feel like yourself and you don't look like yourself. Your sense of self is gone and you're this thing, this larger than life figure, and you have very simple desires and longings. I only related to him as an animal as far as his needs and conflicts. Get the girl, drink the blood, do the makeup.

MM: What draws you to a project?

WD: So many things that probably have to do with the people involved. I don't totally trust scripts because scripts change and what looks good on paper you still need the people to get it on its feet. There's a part of me that is an adventurer. I look for opportunities.

On one hand I have to have some sort of connection to it so it catches my imagination. On the other hand I can't know it too well, otherwise it kind of completes itself and I don't feel like I got my work cut out for me. I'm not that kind of actor. I'm not being coy, I'm just not good that way. When you get a different perspective I'm talking about work in relationship to life you start to see your world in a different way. Then I don't feel humiliated by what I do. Then I feel like I'm participating in something that could be a good thing.

MM: So ideally, great movies should make better people.

WD: There's something healing about being able to empathize with someone you had written off as a useless human being. I think the very nature of wanting to take a walk in other people's shoes shows a kind of restlessness, a desire to lose or find yourself through other people. Things open up and make more sense. You can see the connections between us a little more clearly and then you're living. You're not just protecting what you know.

I think that's really why we want to go to the movies. It's not to run away, it's not just escapism, it's to get us away from ourselves and connect us to each other.

MM: Tell me about your new project, Morality Play. You play a theater actor in it, right?

WD: Right. It kind of marries my two loves, theater and film.

MM: How did you find working with Paul McGuigan, who's a relatively new director?

WD: Well, I'm still working with him, I like him very much. I think the fact that he comes from documentaries really colors how he works. He feels his way through instinctively. He doesn't get ahead of himself in the respect that he doesn't make a rigid plan for a day and then march on and make the day. He sort of reacts to the material as we're working on it which makes sense coming from documentary because suspect that making a documentary is much about gathering material. And your point of view, the thrust of the documentary, is usually formed after the fact. So I think there's some degree of that in the making of this film which is interesting. It's a good way of working because it sort of supports the actor's journey.

MM: Was there ever a time a time during your career when you considered quitting?

WD: You think about it all the time.

MM: You once said that you still do theater because you aspire to be an artist. What does being an artist mean to you?

WD: It's really a stance, just a definition that helps me. It's a choice because most people think it's a dirty word. In the craziest moments I'm interested in useless behavior. Most art is useless it's valuable, but we have to approach it as useless activity. Everything is so easily exploited these days. It's all about power and all about its value and sometimes it's good to go against that a little bit. Because in art, in my lifetime, I've seen a significance that I can't quite articulate, but it has something to do with things that used to being motivated by a kind of religiousness. If you look at art painting, for example many issues/41/images come from religion. Then it kind of switched to advertising somewhere along the line. You know what I'm talking about? I just need to draw a line in the sand, maybe because I'm a little bit insane. I'm a goofball, a clown, show-trash. That's the low part, but there's also the high part that I think I'm very serious about. Performing is my way. Somewhere, deeply, it's about developing empathy, which leads you to a broader view of the world and encourages you to develop compassion. That's why we tell stories so we can recognize how we are connected; so we can comfort each other and not be so brutal with each other. It's a real calling at its highest, but then you've got to deal with the lowest, too. And I also do that. MM