Anytime an actor like Willem Dafoe signs on to play the villain in a superhero movie or lend his voice to a fish for Pixar, my knee-jerk reaction is that he’s doing it for the paycheck. I mean, how could these roles possibly challenge a man who’s played Jesus and countless other memorable characters from movies like Platoon, American Psycho and Antichrist?
I didn’t feel much different when I heard he’d be providing performance capture for a Martian warrior in Disney’s John Carter. Let’s face it, aliens aren’t always depicted as the most complex creatures in film. But Dafoe’s character, Tars Tarkas, is an entirely different breed, he’s a character audiences will identify with just as much as any of the film’s human characters, perhaps more so in some cases.
“It’s pretty clear that because of how he looks and how he functions at the beginning, you think he’s going to be a bad guy. You think he’s going to do terrible things to Taylor [Kitsch, who plays John Carter],” Dafoe says of the character. “That’s the set-up. And you find out there’s another man behind the public face. That’s a huge part of the story. His kind of inner/outer conflict.”
Tars Tarkas is the King of the Tharks, a tribe of 9-foot tall, four-armed green warriors and the first person to find Earthling John Carter after he mysteriously surfaces on Mars. While he maintains a tough exterior, his inner compassion has kept the Tharks from declining into a more primitive existence. But now, on the brink of war with several other Martian tribes, the younger, more savage Tal Hajus (Thomas Haden Church) challenges to take over the throne.
“There’s a parallel between the characters of Tars Tarkas and John Carter because they’re both conflicted. They’re both reluctant. They’re both people that are a little shut off at the beginning and then they come to feeling and caring for others,” Dafoe said. “Tars Tarkas has to keep his position in the world by maintaining that kind of brutal Thark mentality, but you know that he has other feelings and thinks they’re heading in the wrong direction.”
It also helps that Tarkas has a sense of humor. The comedic moments between Tarkas and Carter, even if they aren’t eluded to in the film’s trailers, got great reactions from the audience at the screening I attended. It particularly helps the audience get behind a character who’s rather gruesome looking exterior might otherwise be off-putting.
But first, in order to inhabit this character, Dafoe had to undergo some rather unique physical challenges. He and the other actors playing the Tharks performed on 3-foot tall stilts (see video to the right) in order to get the correct eye-line for the dialogue.
Dafoe, a consummate professional, relished in the opportunity to work with this new skill. “Always as an actor you’re looking for things to jump off from, to find new ways of thinking, new ways of looking, to be turned on in a different way. The stilts were part of that,” he explains. But that’s not to say there weren’t some bumps along the way. Dafoe recalls one scene in particular where working with the stilts was a bit of an obstacle. Turns out it’s harder to stand than it is to walk.
“When John Carter sees Tars and he’s kind of broken and he’s in this dungeon, Tars goes from laying down on the ground to standing up. I’ve got stilts on. It was really difficult to work that out, and I had to really practice it. And eventually, just because of the proportions, it was impossible to get up by myself with the heavy stilts on. The physics were wrong. So they had to put a wire on me and we had to work that out. It’s that kind of thing that is just maybe five seconds in the movie, but we worked on that, on and off, for days.”
Dafoe also had to learn the Tharkian language, which was developed for the film by Dr. Paul Frommer, the same linguistics expert who create the Na’vi language for James Cameron’s Avatar. “I think the Thark language, though it’s used pretty minimally, I think it’s important to set up the characters and it’s really through the Thark language that you find the voice,” Dafoe said.
Despite all the obvious effects work that went into turning Dafoe into Tars Tarkas, I was surprised to hear how insistent director Andrew Stanton was on realizing each scene before the computers came into play. “He really felt like he had to have the movie, so when we started these scenes, there was no ‘oh, the CGI will do that’ or ‘they’ll do that in post,'” to which Dafoe credits with keeping the film grounded and character-driven.
“Films are so collaborative that you can’t control how they’re going to turn out, but what you can control, somewhat, is the company you keep.”
Dafoe does things very much on his own terms at this point in his career. So while he doesn’t often work on big studio blockbusters — a decision he tells me is “half conscious and half kind of natural” — what attracted him to John Carter was the same thing that usually attracts him to a project: a great filmmaker with a personal vision who needs him to do something difficult or special. “Films are so collaborative that you can’t control how they’re going to turn out, but what you can control, somewhat, is the company you keep,” he says.
Stanton, whom Dafoe worked with previously on Finding Nemo, is one of those directors. And playing Tars Tarkas is definitely something difficult and special. But his journey has only begun (most of what happens in John Carter was adapted from A Princess of Mars, the first in Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ series of 12 books), so something tells me Dafoe won’t have any reservations about strapping the stilts back on and taking a refresher course on the Thark language, of which he admits he’s already forgotten, if the opportunity to film a sequel presents itself.
