Willem Dafoe

“That’s a part of his daily personhood on set. I mean, he’ll just start improvising songs and singing. He’s very physical. He’ll sort of dance in a moment on his own, without having been inspired to do it by anything or anyone. He’s a truly free person.”

“I mean this in such a positive way: He’s very unsentimental. There was never a sense that he was like, ‘You know what, kid? You’re going to be alright,'”

“He’s very relaxed. He has a sort of open-minded but easeful way about him. He’s a livewire too, though. And I don’t think you see that in the movie,”

“There is no precise meaning as the etymology can be vague or evocative,”

“The idea is to think ALTER as in change — NATIVE as your nature. Or ALTER as in other — NATIVE as the culture one is from.”

“Jesus rejects his job and lives as a normal man. He has children, he has sex. That was too scandalous for people, so even without seeing the movie, there were huge protests against it,”

“I like doing things. I like someone to say what they see, and then I like to try to embody it. I like doing things and embodying characters.… It challenges your perceptions, your prejudices.”

“You are not THE Jesus Christ. You are one Jesus Christ,”

“They complained about the idea of it, they hadn’t seen the movie. Jesus rejects his job and lives as a normal man; he has children, he has sex. That was scandalous for them.”

“Put any one of you up on a cross and you’d have an experience.”

“To play Jesus Christ you’ve got to remember you’re not the Jesus Christ, you’re a Jesus Christ.”

“Then it morphed into a strange thing about Jews in Hollywood and it snowballed. The perception was it was the Catholic church – it wasn’t, it was the fundamental right in America. It really did keep it from being wildly distributed.”

“I like doing the action stuff. When the first Spider-Man was made, we were still using wires – it’s very concrete, very tangible.”

“People say, ‘Don’t you want to direct?’ It’s like, Hell no! Because I’m not through with that performance stuff.”

“The job is always different, and you’re always calibrating in relationship to the people, to how you’re feeling. It’s for that reason that I’ll never tire of performing,”