WILLEM DAFOE

A lot of critics are lazy. They don't want to look closely and analyze something for what it is. They take a quick first impression and then rush to compare it to something they've seen before.

The Midwest isn't somewhere you mix with those from the performing arts. But my mum and dad would go off to Chicago every so often to see shows. They would bring back the albums and the movies, those little eight metres, and we would all watch. I think that was when I fell in love with acting.

I'm an optimist. I hope if a movie's good that it will be a success, but as we know, that's not always true, just because of popular taste, advertising, distribution patterns - there's lots of reasons.

I have no doubt that if I met Bob Dylan, it would be disappointing - and annoying to him. But that's why I like Bob Dylan.

I knew very little about 'Spider-Man'. I grew up more in the 'Superman' generation. 'Spider-Man' - I didn't know so much. But it is a really successful franchise, and I'm happy to be involved with it.

I'll never be able to really see a film that I'm in.

Celebrity is okay as long as you know it's not about you.

I think back story can help guide your choices, but when you're playing a scene, you're not making choices; you're just intuitive.

I do want to be in mainstream movies that are going to be seen. I suppose it satisfies the showbiz side of me.

In my experience, sometimes a movie just hits at the wrong time, gets the wrong press, or gets the wrong representation, and it gets misunderstood.

I've never had any close male friends. The most important relationships in my life have always been with women.

With theatre, you have to be ready for anything.

That's a frustration sometimes, that certain directors that I'd like to work with, they just aren't doing stories that I'm sort of castable in. Not always, but sometimes I have that frustration.

Sometimes I think women are lucky because they can develop in ways men can't. The old-boy network may be oppressive to women, but it actually stunts men in terms of personal growth.

When I give over to somebody's vision rather than have an idea of what I need to do, it takes me to places I wouldn't have got to by myself. I'm always attracted to a strong director.

My dad was a surgeon, my mom a nurse, and they were always out working. I had five sisters and a brother. They didn't care what I got up to.

I love theaters. I love the event of going there and seeing a movie with a lot of people. I like the community coming around the story.

Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to fantasize about a world we aspire to.

I guess they often cast me as the bad guy, because I'm not, er, conventional looking. I look sort of violent. I'm the odd one out, the outsider.

It's true in the beginning I started playing villains, and I think that's pretty clear, because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains.

I am confident only when I am constantly in motion. Between projects, the doubt creeps in.

There's a real wisdom to not saying a thing.

One of the pleasures of being an actor is quite simply taking a walk in someone else's shoes. And when I look at the roles I've played, I'm kind of amazed at all the wonderful adventures I've had and the different things I've learned.

The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth - it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.

In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about.