Sometimes, making great art is an exercise in disappointing your heroes.
“I remember Gene Hackman, one of his advices to me when I worked with him was, ‘Never work with a first-time director,’” Willem Dafoe told IndieWire while discussing his new film “The Legend of Ochi,” which hails from first-time director Isaiah Saxon. “Obviously, I didn’t follow his advice, but may he rest in peace.” (Dafoe and the late Hackman starred together in 1988’s “Mississippi Burning.”)
Dafoe currently has his pick of coveted roles from elite auteurs — in 2024 alone, he starred in films from Robert Eggers, Yorgos Lanthimos, Tim Burton, and Jason Reitman. So it takes a lot for a new filmmaker to dazzle him. But Saxon and his directorial debut “The Legend of Ochi” were something special. A throwback to fantasy epics like “The NeverEnding Story,” the film immerses viewers in an ocean of matte paintings and puppets to depict the fictional town of Carpathia, where villagers live in fear of an adorable species called Ochi. Nobody loathes the creatures more than Dafoe’s Maxim, who blames them for his wife’s death and assembles an army of young boys to exterminate the magical beings from the Carpathian forests.
What convinced Dafoe to don World War I armor and chase after a cute Gremlin-like creature with a bunch of kids? The actor said it was a combination of Saxon’s animation pedigree — the director has spent decades applying his distinct stop-motion approach to music videos through his studio Encyclopedia Pictura — and the director’s visceral passion for the material that proved to be irresistible.
“When they have a certain passion and their approach is very personal, I think this is something that I don’t know for a fact, that Isaiah has been living with for a long time,” Dafoe said. “It had a strong impulse behind it; it wasn’t just another film. You like to get people when they’re trying to make something that they’ll die if they don’t make it.”
Dafoe has always been an actor who embraces a new challenge, so he delighted in the opportunity to use a puppet as one of his primary scene partners. He explained that the petite Ochi puppets were actually part of a large rig operated by six people — a phenomenon that only accentuated his character’s perception that these tiny creatures were actually monsters that deserved to be feared.
“Physical is where I live. Acting is all about doing things if you ask me,” Dafoe said. “And because it’s kind of this low-tech stuff, like with the puppets, for example, it’s interesting when you’re doing a scene with the Ochi, you’re doing the scene with, basically, six people rolled into one. It’s fun when you’re playing across to see all that’s going behind animating this creature. And of course, you’re not concentrating on that, but you get that energy of this very distinct, very concentrated six people or whatever it is, operating this puppet that’s reacting to you. So it’s a very engaging place to be. It sounds strange. You’d think it would be otherwise that maybe you’d fall out, but in fact, it sucks you in.”
In some ways, acting alongside a team of puppeteers brought Dafoe back to his days doing experimental theater with companies like The Wooster Group, in which he performed in the 1980s. While the actor never worked with puppets on stage in such a large capacity, his background in experimental performance gave him a comfort level with projecting human emotions in response to actions that were not necessarily cued by other human characters.
“Sometimes, we’d be working in very unconventional performance modes. Sometimes, we do our cueing or have some kind of reference offstage that we’d have to follow,” he said. “So that has a similar kind of concentration, where you have an outside reference, and you’re going to that, and that kind of gives you a super concentration. That’s a very good thing to have when you are performing because the world drops away and you’re doing what you’re doing. There’s no flourish, there’s no extra, there’s almost no ego. You are really giving up… It’s like an athlete. You are concentrating on following that thing, and that’s where everything in your body is going. And that way you get a real pure presence.”
An A24 release, “The Legend of Ochi” opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, April 18, before expanding nationwide on April 25.
