Willem Dafoe takes us inside Inside : The making of 2023's craziest heist movie
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A few years back, Willem Dafoe starred alongside Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse, a two-hander film from director Robert Eggers. Now, Dafoe is going one better, or maybe that should be one lesser, by essentially appearing solo in the heist movie Inside (out March 17).
"The next one I do there won't be any actors!" says Dafoe, with a laugh, over Zoom.
The film stars Dafoe as an art thief named Nemo who breaks into a spacious, swanky New York apartment to steal three pieces by expressionist painter Egon Schiele only to become trapped by the residence's security system.
"He's getting ready to leave, and the alarm system goes wacky and closes him in," says Dafoe. "After a little while, it's clear no one's coming; no one's been alerted, the owner's not coming back. There's very little in the house. He's trapped there. He doesn't know what to do. He's got to find food; he's got to find water. There's not much there. Nobody's been there for a while. There's all this priceless art on the walls, and he has to figure out a way to survive, and he doesn't quite know how long this will go on. So that's the basic setup."
Wolfgang Ennenbach/Focus Features Willem Dafoe in 'Inside'
The movie is written by British writer-director Ben Hopkins (Simon Magus) based on an idea that struck Inside director Vasilis Katsoupis during one of the filmmaker's first trips to New York.
"I was looking at all these huge buildings," says Katsoupis. "It came to me that what would be the situation if I get stuck in a top floor of these buildings. I started working to make it more of a survival film [like] Robinson Crusoe. I found it very interesting that my hero will be lonely in the middle of a metropolis. He can actually see life, the busy streets, people around him, but nobody can reach him, and nobody can help him."
Inside producer Giorgos Karnavas had met Dafoe at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and reached out to see if the Platoon and Spider-Man franchise star would be interested in taking the part of Nemo.
"We usually try to cast our films very early on. Usually, it's not going to casting directors but trying to find the direct contact," says Karnavas, whose company Heretic also helped bring the Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness to the screen. "It feels more organic, and if this moves forward, it becomes a relationship that is very strong and very creative because they become part of it. This was the case with Willem. He reacted very quickly. He gave us his trust. I think he took a very big artistic risk because it's one of these films that it's execution-based. I mean, the level of production design, production value, all that, if you don't do it right, it can be ridiculous."
Wolfgang Ennenbach/Focus Features Willem Dafoe in 'Inside'
In the film, the apartment is full of art, from paintings to sculptures to a video installation, with which Dafoe's thief interacts and, in some cases, damages. Italian art curator Leonardo Bigazzi was tasked with choosing the pieces on display, mixing old and new works, to help give hints about the character of the collector whom Nemo is attempting to steal from. Bigazzi describes the results as "the physical manifestation of the antagonist. So, as [with] every art collection, it should be the response to the passion, the obsessions, the love that a collector has in his life. But at the same time, [there] was this idea of how each work would provoke reactions from Willem on set."
Katsoupis shot Inside in Cologne, filming the script chronologically, allowing Dafoe to depict his character's physical deterioration more realistically.
"I just kind of let myself go," says the actor. "I did wash! But let my hair go, let my beard go, didn't do my normal physical exercise, so I started to get a little wasted. Because working 12 hours a day, when you're the only guy in a dark room, it takes a toll on you. Doing physical things, dragging things, banging things, screaming. [Laughs] It will start to show after a while if you want it to." The already slender actor even dropped a few pounds during the shoot. "I didn't lose too much weight," he says, "but I'd see a couple of shots toward the end, and I'd think, 'Oh, boy, put on a little beef!"
Focus Features
While Katsoupis' film is a serious meditation on art and loneliness, there are moments of levity, several of them provided by the apartment's high-tech fridge, which blasts out the '90s novelty hit "Macarena" when the appliance's door is left open for too long.
"Everybody thought it was pretty funny," says Dafoe. "It's goofy, but that was important too, to find the humor and not get too dour about what we were doing. Even when people are in a terrible situation, they find time to step back and try to have a good laugh about it."
As it happens, there will be actors aplenty in Dafoe's next project, Nosferatu, which the actor is about to start shooting and for which he has grown a generous amount of facial hair. Directed by Eggers, this new version of the vampire costars Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, among others.
"Right now, this glorious Joseph Stalin mustache and these silly sideburns are to shoot Nosferatu with Robert Eggers," says Dafoe. "I don't know what he wants me to say, it's just his version of the classic story, and I play a character called Von Franz. I'm not the creature, but I'm after the creature, and I'm something of an occultist."
Watch the trailer for Inside below.
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