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| Willem Dafoe in Locarno, on the character he plays: 'My life is very far away from his but that's one of the pleasures of being an actor' Photo: Courtesy of Locarno/Ti Press |
Power and control lie at the heart of Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s tense Seventies-set drama, The Birthday Party, which sees megalomaniac businessman Marcos Timoleon (Willem Dafoe, on top form) putting plans in place for his daughter’s 25th birthday celebrations, many of which she doesn’t expect. His daughter Sofia (Vic Carmen Stone) also has plans for her trip to his sun-drenched island, with a wannabe biographer (Joe Cole) and Timoleon’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Olivia (Emma Suárez) also thrown into the mix. The film premiered in Locarno, where the director and some of the cast, including Dafoe and Stone, spoke to a packed press conference.
Jiménez, who co-wrote the screenplay with Giorgos Karnavas and Nikos Panayotopoulos, described the novel it is based on as “wonderful”. He adds: “The atmosphere of this huge and somehow horrible father overtaking the destiny of the daughter with a hard agenda is an exercise in showing how parents can sometimes suffocate you.”
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| Willem Dafoe, Miguel Ángel Jiménez and Emma Suárez in Locarno Photo: Courtesy of Locarno Film Festival/Ti Press |
At the start of the film, we see that Timoleon is carrying the weight of grief over the sudden loss of his son some years before but that doesn’t make him any less of a monster when it comes to manipulating those around him.
Dafoe says: “I’m not going to describe him because I ‘do’ him. He has certain obligations and he has a certain kind of belief system and he follows them, like a lot of people, the very thing that he thinks is necessary is the thing that’s going to destroy him. I think that’s a mechanism we see in people of power and we see it in families.”
Speaking about the grief that underpins Timoleon’s life, he adds: “I think it’s clear in the story that it haunts him. He’s a man who is very obsessed with what he is going to leave behind, with his legacy so his son was the natural continuation, the natural heir, to satisfy that and when that gets taken away it becomes like something out of a Greek tragedy, it becomes the fatal thing that pushes him to try to control his life so and the lives of others so this sort of thing doesn’t happen.”
In terms of the character, he adds: “My life is very far away from his but that’s one of the pleasures of being an actor. Sometimes I think it’s very important to go towards something and in that going towards it there’s an understanding that is sometimes more interesting than if you’ve lived it. I had enough to work with and enough to engage me that I didn’t feel the need to go and read about Onassis or a figure that was similar.”
Suárez’s Olivia is savvy enough to know exactly what Timoleon is like and yet there is something that still draws her to him. The Spanish star says: “Sometimes it happens like this. It’s very difficult to be in that position as a woman. She is trying to get something from this man who is always wanting something from everyone. So there is a deal. The film talks about the corruption of power and the difficulty of being a woman in that situation in the 1970s.”
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| Willem Dafoe as Timoleon in The Birthday Party Photo: Heretic |
“I think it was very important that Miguel really cared about the characters. Yes, you care about the setting, the locations but it’s a very human film. You stay close to the characters and you try to understand what their motivations are because it’s a very choreographed film.”
