Willem Dafoe and director Nadia Latif spoke with UPI about "The Man in My Basement," in theaters Friday, and the materials that helped get Dafoe into character.

Willem Dafoe, seen at the Venice Film Festival in August, stars in "The Man In My Basement." File Photo by Rune Hellestad/UPI UPI Willem Dafoe, seen at the Los Angeles premiere of "Nosferatu" in December, stars in "The Man In My Basement." File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI UPI Willem Dafoe (L) and Corey Hawkins star in "The Man In My Basement," in theaters Friday and Hulu September 26. Photo courtesy of Andscape UPI Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) is "The Man In My Basement," in theaters Friday and Hulu September 26. Photo courtesy of Andscape UPI Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) is suspicious of "The Man In My Basement," in theaters Friday and Hulu September 26. Photo courtesy of Andscape UPI

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Willem Dafoe says he approached his character in The Man in My Basement, in theaters Friday, much differently than other roles. The actor, 70, plays Anniston Bennet, a man who rents a basement apartment from the financially struggling Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) for two months.

Charles is surprised when Anniston builds a cage in the basement and locks himself in it. As the men talk, Anniston shares his ulterior motives for renting from Charles.

In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Dafoe described how making Basement was different for him than past films. A prolific actor since 1980, with roles in Platoon, The Last Temptation of Christ, Spider-Man and last year's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Dafoe said he normally does not believe in developing character histories that aren't included on screen.

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"Normally, I don't make a backstory or anything like that because I don't think you can play it," Dafoe said. "You start to point if you create too much outside of the scene."

Anniston, however, starts confessing his misdeeds to Charles, acts for which Anniston believes he deserves punishment. Basement is based on the Walter Mosley novel, which director Nadia Latif provided to Dafoe, along with other resources as reference points.

"I could stitch together a history of this man that was credible," Dafoe said. "I could also see what conditioned his worldview."

Without spoiling Anniston's crimes, Latif said some of the material she shared with Dafoe included the 1966 documentary The Laughing Man, which shows Nazi soldier Siegfried Mūller after World War II, and Renzo Marten's Enjoy Poverty, which chronicles the Congo.

"These men who inflict this cruelty live amongst us have children and they have wives and they have friends who they play poker with," Latif said of people like Anniston. "He's also somebody who goes home at the end of every day."

One film both Latif and Dafoe loved was Kaneto Shindô's Onibaba, a 1964 horror drama about a woman who captures a masked samurai.

"We were very interested in masks and the creeping dread, I guess, of sin," Latif said. "Now that we have both watched it, we are changed in this way and we can talk about other things."

Another difference between Basement and other films in Dafoe's career is that Latif had fully scripted it before production. Many Hollywood movies begin filming without completed scripts and rewrite the film daily.

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Latif said she retained some of Mosley's dialogue but can no longer pinpoint which came from the book and which was hers.

"I also don't know anymore where I end and Walter begins," she said.

Dafoe and Hawkins filmed all of the basement scenes in one block of filming, and largely in chronological order.

"It's not often in film where you can play around with something that is so written," Dafoe said. "It's a game. We were restricted a lot physically by the situation so everything goes into the word as action to accomplish what you do. What the character tries to do, tries to achieve is all through the word."

Latif called out one line of dialogue with which Dafoe struggled.

"I still remember the line you found the hardest to say, which is 'legal government representatives,'" she said.

Dafoe called those words "dead words" because "I don't have a hot relationship to them, an emotional relationship to them."

Even before Anniston discloses his ultimate plan, he tells Charles he is well known and wants to be at a place where nobody can find him. The film is set 10 years before the book, but even in a pre-smartphone and internet world, Dafoe and Latif could relate to the desire to disconnect.

"I throw [my] phone in the freezer, leave the country, don't tell anyone you've gone for a week quite regularly," Latif said. "My husband finds it a little distressing."

Dafoe finds a simpler way to disconnect from the modern world.

"I wake up early, before the world is awake," he said. "I get a jump on the world."

The Man in My Basement starts streaming on Hulu Sept. 26.