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"I like them all," Dafoe tells The Sun about the variety of characters he has played in a rich career, ranging from Streets Of Fire through Platoon and The Last Temptation Of Christ to more recent fare such as American Psycho.
"You want to find all sides," Dafoe says of the actor's credo. "You don't want to divide things up into good and bad behaviour. We're all too obsessed with the morality of good and bad behaviour, when we've got to deal more with what is (good or bad)."
As for Schreck, Dafoe has special feelings. "Do I like Max?" Dafoe repeats, a sly smile taking over his gaunt, eerily haunted face. "Yes, I like Max. He is a tragic figure."
The Max Schreck whom Dafoe plays is the obscure German character actor who starred as the vampire Count Orlok (or Orlock in some reference books) in the 1922 German expressionist film Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror, one of the most influential classics of the silent era. With his long bony fingers and death-like face, Schreck -- the vampire or Nosferatu -- created an enduring image of sheer terror.
Even though Shadow Of The Vampire uses real names, such as Schreck and director F.W. Murnau (who died scandal-ridden with his 14-year-old Filipino boy-valet in a car accident in Hollywood in 1931), the new film is a work of surrealistic fantasy. It pretends to be a chronicle of the making of Nosferatu, but turns into a cerebral horror film itself because of an audacious conceit: That Schreck was a real vampire who was hired to play himself in the movie Nosferatu.
"The character that I am playing is a total invention of the screenplay," Dafoe says with emphasis.
So he did no research on the real Schreck, who died in 1936 after a career in which he distinguished himself in no other film besides Nosferatu.
"The only loyalty and the only need to learn anything about Max Schreck was totally restricted to his performance in the movie Nosferatu," Dafoe says. "It became necessary to copy him, and only as a starting place."
The point of the exercise, says Shadow Of The Vampire director E. Elias Merhige, was to explore the primal myths and to examine the pioneering spirit of the early filmmakers, who turned to myths to create the best films of the time.
The primal stuff was crucial, just as it is in all vampire mythology, Merhige says.
Vampires generate feelings of longing, lust and fear of disease and death. Vampires can be an allegory for the black plague or, in contemporary times, for the AIDS epidemic. They also can conjure terror over sexual depravity. They can even be used as a metaphor for explaining how a tyrant such as Hitler corrupted German culture, Merhige says.
"That is exactly what I struggled to invigorate this story with," Merhige tells The Sun.
Merhige, an intellectual as much as he is a theatre and film director, says the cinema itself is "a form of vampirism." He means that the camera can suck the lifeblood out of the subjects it examines.
"This is something that I've thought about for years and I've always been fascinated with working with these ideas."
At the same time, in recreating the making of Nosferatu and turning it into a stylized fiction, Merhige used wit and humour. In one scene, Dafoe plucks a flying bat out of the air and eagerly gobbles it down as a snack. People standing with him are horrified. They don't know Max Schreck is a real vampire.
"I didn't want to get too academic about it, or too linear," Merhige says. "It was very important to get visceral with it, too. The humour was a very careful balancing act because you didn't want it to get silly, either.
"The idea was to make a film that is both deeply serious and, in a way, horrifying, too. The only way to make that work is to use humour."
Nosferatu is one of the most powerful horror films ever made. It was profoundly influential on generations of filmmakers who copied its use of shadows and light, admired Murnau's evocation of 19th-century romantic landscape artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, and marvelled at the way Murnau used the new technology like a scientist working on a lab experiment.
"I really wanted to invoke the pioneering spirit of that time," Merhige says, "and show just how amazing and creative these artists and scientists were (in) making this film."
Merhige does not limit his praise to Murnau, and includes collaborators such as Albin Grau, the artist and producer who founded Prana-Film, the ambitious company behind Nosferatu (although it promptly went bankrupt as soon as it made the vampire flick).
Grau's drawings became the inspiration for creating Max Schreck's look as Count Orlok.
Merhige says Dafoe was first choice for playing Schreck in Shadow, but not just because his gaunt face lends itself to Schreck. "That was not the reason I chose him. I could turn you into Max Schreck. I count turn myself into Max Schreck. I could turn my wife into Max Schreck, with the right prosthetics. There is no problem with that.
"But, in Willem, there is a burning fire that is irrational and beautiful, and he is not afraid to take these leaps that most people would be terrified to take. John Malkovich (who plays Murnau in Shadow) has the same spirit.
"Once I had them both on board, I knew I had these two rare and vibrant and beautiful colours. I liken it to a painter who could choose either not to use them creatively or to expand and broaden and deepen the landscape of my painting."