SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ed Saxberger sorts mail at a New York post office and trudges between work, his apartment and a bar where everybody knows his name without drawing much notice. Till one night, a young man waits for him.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LATE FAME")
EDMUND DONOVAN: (As Wilson Meyers) You're Ed Saxberger.
WILLEM DAFOE: (As Ed Saxberger) What is this about?
DONOVAN: (As Wilson Meyers) My name is Wilson Meyers. Meyers, everyone calls me.
DAFOE: (As Ed Saxberger) OK?
DONOVAN: (As Wilson Meyers) Stopped writing poetry?
DAFOE: (As Ed Saxberger) Years ago. I worked at the post office for years now. So?
DONOVAN: (As Wilson Meyers) A man of letters.
DAFOE: (As Ed Saxberger) I guess you could say that.
SIMON: "Late Fame" is a new film starring Willem Dafoe as the poet who may have been overlooked by time, Greta Lee and Edmund Donovan. It's directed by Kent Jones. And Willem Dafoe joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
DAFOE: My pleasure.
SIMON: Help us understand Ed Saxberger. He's not unhappy when we meet him. But what does it...
DAFOE: No.
SIMON: ...Do to have a young person track him down about poems he wrote back in the day?
DAFOE: Yeah. I think that's part of his life that he's left behind. Things change. People change. Cities change. And when he was young, he was a particular person that pursued this love for poetry. And then I think he found it difficult to sustain himself. And he took a job in the post office and then kind of recalibrated his life socially and all that. And this young poet invites him to hang out with a group of poets that admire him a great deal. And he slowly gets seduced and flattered into hanging out with them and kind of enjoys their energy and their ambitions, and he starts to reconsider going back to writing poetry again.
SIMON: Yeah. And tell us about this group that call themselves the Enthusiasm Society.
DAFOE: Yes. And they're a bunch of well-educated young men. And they also have one female participant who's not really an official member, but she's hanging out. And she's an actress that's played by Greta Lee. She's kind of important in the story because she is not exactly like them. She's an actress that is having a hard time sustaining herself and is at that point where she has to figure out what to do. And she pushes and pushes and pushes and has a different strategy than Ed did. The boys are all ambitious. They have a great nostalgia for another time, for a kind of classicism. They pooh-pooh the people around them that are on their devices all the time, and they embrace Ed and say he's their North Star.
SIMON: The story's adapted from an unpublished 1895 novella by Arthur Schnitzler?
DAFOE: Yes. And a friend of mine, a New York writer and performer by the name of Danny Zippi, gave me this novella and said, you should see this. I think this is a movie for you. And I read it, and I liked it very much. And I was kind of toying with the idea of reaching out to see who had the rights. Little did I know there was already a script, and Killer Films was planning to make this film with Kent Jones.
And then the really kinky part is I ran into Kent Jones, who I know basically through the New York Film Festival. And we sat next to each other. And we talked the whole flight, catching up on things, but we never talked about Schnitzler or this novella. And then two days later, he calls me up and asks me to do the role. I think it's called kismet.
SIMON: I - exactly (laughter). I'm flabbergasted by that. You came to New York yourself in the '70s, didn't you?
DAFOE: Yes, I did. I did. And so I had skin in this game a little bit because there was a lot I related to, even though it's not my story. We're imagining and hearkening back to that time, so it was personal.
SIMON: Was it a place, as Saxberger recalls, like living on the moon - everyone was young, an artist and poor?
DAFOE: A little bit. I'm very careful 'cause I don't want to get too nostalgic about that time. But the truth is, you know, I was a middle-class kid from the Midwest, and I came to New York to have an adventure. I wasn't interested in career. I wasn't interested in fame because the truth is that what I was interested didn't have a career path. I was working in kind of avant-garde theater. But around me was a lot of energy and a lot of people like me who weren't trained in performing arts or in visual arts, but they were doing it.
SIMON: What's it like for Saxberger to pick up the pen again?
DAFOE: Probably torturous because he's out of practice and he's not connected to it. He doesn't have the same kind of support. And, you know, it's a horrible thing for these people to tell you that - it's flattering, but it's a horrible thing. You know, flattery can ruin you. Flattery can make you believe you are who other people say you are rather than who you are. He's just out of practice. He's out of touch with putting these feelings onto paper and playing with words or whatever poetry is. And I think he doesn't know whether it's a natural evolution that he's gone away from it or whether it's a kind of surrender to a different life.
SIMON: Gloria exclaims to Ed Saxberger at one point, I'm an artist, and I belong to no one - just my art. And I wonder. As an artist yourself, an actor, what do you think about that?
DAFOE: I don't - you know, I try to leave myself out of it (laughter) - what I do. And obviously, it comes from myself because I use my body. I use my mind. I use my heart doing what I do. But I always feel like I'm most comfortable - and I've said this before, but it's really true - when I disappear into the action. So who I belong to, I don't care. What I belong to is to find my place in the order of things, and that's where real freedom is.
And you can say that on a grand scale, but you can also say that in any context of a collaborative art form. You've got to find your place in that. Work in that collaboration. And you've got to find the space where you can contribute something. And if you can do that without being totally egoistic or self-serving, it can be a real liberation.
SIMON: May I ask? Are there young aspiring actors who approach you and ask for advice?
DAFOE: Of course. I mean, I shouldn't say, of course. There's not - but yes. In fact, in this movie, these young actors that are in the Enthusiasm Society are fantastic. They're really good. They were really well cast, and I really enjoyed working with them. And that's not just polite showbiz talk. I really like these guys.
And they were sort of beginning. So we had this kind of meta thing going on, this mirror of - we shot in winter in New York City and partly in New Jersey, and it was cold. And this wasn't a big production, so we didn't have trailers. So we'd often have to huddle between takes, you know, in little holding areas. And so we were hanging out and eating together and all that sort of thing. And with time, after they got over initial nerves, they would start to ask me, oh, what was it like on this movie? What was so and so like? How do you do this? You know?
So they were kind - it was kind of an echo of what was happening in the movie. It was pretty crazy, but I enjoyed it. And also, I felt the seduction of that kind of attention and that kind of need to hear and treat you like an elder, which - as I go about this, I think it's always useful to say that it's strange for me because I was always - in fact, I use this line...
SIMON: This line's in the - yeah.
DAFOE: ...In the movie. I was always the youngest in every group. And then one day, all of a sudden, I looked around, and I was the oldest one.
SIMON: Willem Dafoe stars in the new film "Late Fame," in theaters now. And thank you so much for being with us.
DAFOE: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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