Willem Dafoe on the portrait of the Greek billionaire in “the birthday party”

Although long celebrated as one of our most versatile screen stars, the quintuple nominated from the Oscars, Willem Dafoe, may not seem to be the obvious choice of portraying a boastful billionaire of Playboy on the Greek magnate of the Aristotle ONASSIS onassotle expedition.

Just ask Willem Dafoe.

“Me? Playing a Greek expedition magnate? ”Said the actor Variety During a recent visit to Athens. “I don’t think.”

Dafoe may be sold short. But for her latest film, “The Birthday Party”, which will be presented on August 7 at Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival, the star born in Wisconsin is taking up a new challenge, entering the exquisites of moccasins of an auto-fabricated Greek billionaire planning a birthday party developed for her daughter.

Adapted from the novel by the Greek author based in the United Kingdom Panos Karnezis, the film is directed by Spain Miguel ángel Jimenez (“Ori”, “Chaika”) and produced by Greece’s Palme d’Or Winning Outfit Heretic (“Trianggle of Sadness”), in co-production with foot films (Spain Images (United Kingdom). Bankside are global sales.

Dafoe runs a star casting that includes the Spanish actor acclaimed Emma Suárez (“Julieta”), the star of “Peaky Boungers” Joe Cole and the Danish Breakout Vic Carmen rings, coming out of his sparkling performance in the best international film by Magnus von Horn, Oscar Nominee, “The Girl with the Needle”.

At the helm is DAFOE as Marcos Timoleon, an expedition magnate and more life that decides to launch a sumptuous birthday celebration for Sofia, her daughter and the only heiress, played by ring. Located in the 1970s, “The Birthday Party” takes place over 24 hours on the private island of the billionaire, the celebration offering a perfect excuse for many associates and hangers of Timoleon to approach it with their own agendas.

The magnate, which is used to mercilessly controlling everything and everyone around him at all costs, also secretly plots a major decision on behalf of his daughter. Over the night and that the party becomes more branching and more decadent, the duo takes place on a collision trajectory which will inevitably lead to a shocking conclusion.

Call tribute to the memorable star towers of Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” and Burt Lancaster in “The Leopard” by Luchino Visconti, Dafoe says that he was taken by the “Rich Portrait” of the expedition magnate to the heart of “The Birthday Party” and the film of the film “”Examination of the toxicity of the type of power, the kind of patriarchy “which he embodies.

“Although I do not normally respond to family dramas, that’s more than that. It’s really a family issue, but … it bites a little, “says Dafoe. “It is [about] Ambition, inheritance. And what makes the guy is also the thing that will make him fall, which is a story so realized and attractive and true that I could never have enough. “”

“The Birthday Party” marks the actor’s second collaboration with heretical, after his representation of a cheeky art thief who is trapped in a sumptuous penthouse during a work that went wrong in the selection of Berlinale by Vasilis Katsoupis “Inside”. He also brings together Jiménéz with the production company based in Athens, a co -producer of his San Sebastian player “Window to the Sea”, which featured Suárez.

For the Spanish director, “the enormous distance between my own life and the Timoleon universe was a really attractive challenge for me,” explains Jiménéz. Although his own “convictions completely reject this rich, brutal, frivolous, false and selfish caste” characterized by the billionaire and his family, the director was determined to “represent them in the most human and most intimate way”, residing at the temptation “to ridicule or judge them from the start”.

“Being able to represent Marcos Timoleon of Karnezis’s novel, with all its charm and cruelty, to feel it in its silences and doubts, to see it entertain its audience while governing them and using its love to justify its insatiable thirst for power-which, for me, was the heart of the whole project,” he adds.

It is a complicated portrait – of a man, a family, the corrupt influence of wealth and the way he affects everyone on the orbit of the billionaire, including those he likes most.

“This film talks about power. Corruption. The Self. The family. The vulnerability too, ”explains Suárez, who plays in front of Dafoe as a Timoleon wife. “Olivia is a woman who loves unconditional. She is a strong woman. She knows what she wants. She knows him – she see him. She can feel her vulnerability and she wants to save him. »»

The events of the film take place during a single day “with a perfect intensity for our film”, explains Cole, who depicts a journalist from the working class who inadvertently has a relationship with the daughter of the billionaire while writing his biography. This intensity was equaled by Dafoe – “one of the heavyweights of Hollywood and cinema”, according to Cole – an actor rented by his colleague member of the distribution sounds for “request[ing] A certain honesty in all its roles. From the quadruple nominated to the Oscars, producer Karnavas says: “I cannot imagine that someone else cheek Marcos Timoleon.”

Largely filmed on the Greek island of Corfu, where the “world of opulence” of the billionaire is supervised by the “soaked sea of the sun”, according to Cole, “The Birthday Party” offers viewers a chance “to take a look behind the actor.

At a time when technological billionaires and real estate magnates have become potentials shamelessly display their richness with little respect for the lives they ruin, we could very well not like what we see. But as Dafoe notes, “the birthday party” is partly a story of caution on the times we live.

“People build things that don’t pay attention, if they don’t have a kind of discrimination and they don’t look at each other, if they don’t keep balance … They forget the intention and create a nightmare,” he said. “I think that’s what is at stake here.”