Curating Willem Dafoe’s Canvas Co-Stars

“Working on this film, we weren’t just building a set but building a character,” the curator Leonardo Bi­gazzi said the other day. He was at a downtown gallery to attend the opening of a show by Francesco Clemente, and the film he was talking about was “Inside,” which stars Willem Dafoe as an art thief who gets trapped, mid-heist, in a New York City penthouse when its security system malfunctions. A few years ago, Bigazzi, a forty-one-year-old Florentine, was approached by a producer to help with the details. Would Bigazzi pick out the art works that become the thief’s only companions?

All alone in the Manhattan high-­rise, the burglar, Nemo (that’s Nobody, in Latin), begins to go mad. (He’s not so different from the Green Goblin, the character Dafoe played in “Spider-­Man.”) Nemo’s mark, a Pritzker-­winning architect, is in Kazakhstan, apparently working on something called the Tulip Tower. “The antagonist is never there, apart from in Nemo’s dreams or hallucinations,” Bigazzi said. “But a collection is the physical manifestation of the obsessions, the passions, the loves, the encounters of a collector.”

Bigazzi retired to a back room and sat on a blue velvet couch. Vasilis Katsoupis, the film’s director, joined him. A large pinkish painting hung on the wall behind them. Bigazzi, who is tall, with wavy hair, wore Gucci brogues; Katsoupis, a kindly-looking man with a beard, was in sensible oxfords. “This idea came to me when I first visited New York, in 2010,” Katsoupis, who is forty-six, said. “I was very impressed by how high the buildings were, and I thought, What if someone is trapped on the top floor?” He developed the idea of an urban Robinson Crusoe, marooned in the sky. “You can see people walking by, cars, helicopters, but nobody can see you,” he said. “It becomes torturous, because you have a voice, but nobody can hear you.”

Like any good castaway, Nemo—who is perhaps more Friday than Crusoe—splits his time between planning an escape and surviving. The plumbing has been shut off, so he collects water from an automated houseplant-irrigation system. He works his way through the owner’s supplies of foie gras and caviar, and tries not to look at the cans of dog food in the pantry. As he searches for exits, certain art works draw his eye. Katsoupis had initially thought that “Christina’s World,” by Andrew Wyeth, would represent Nemo’s longing for escape, but he and Bigazzi realized that it was implausible to have the picture be part of someone’s private collection: everyone knows it’s at MOMA. Instead, they commissioned a similarly evocative watercolor from Clemente, and chose thirty-seven other pieces, by such artists as Maurizio Cattelan and Joanna Piotrowska. Nemo variously ignores or defaces many of them, but he cherishes a few, including the Clemente.

Once the collection was assembled, reproductions—or, in a few cases, the real things—were placed around the set. So that Dafoe wouldn’t have to act in front of a green screen, Katsoupis had oligarch’s-eye-view footage of New York, shot at different times of day, projected onto the walls, mimicking floor-to-ceiling windows.

Dafoe, who is sixty-seven, came in and sat down next to Bigazzi. Although he lived in SoHo for years, he isn’t too bothered about the glass-clad towers that have sprung up in the area. “I try not to get too sentimental,” he said. “What goes up must come down!” As for the art works, he had enjoyed playing against them. “They’re good partners,” he said. “When Nemo gets closed in, he can admire the pieces for a while, but they’re worthless to him, because all he wants to do is eat and drink.” He stretched a leg in the air and flexed his foot, so that his heel pointed at the ceiling; with his long mustache, he looked like a circus acrobat. “Then he sits with them, which is the proper way to see art, I suppose. That’s where all the questions come in: What is our feeling about art, you know? How useless is it? How useful is it, how decadent is it?”

The owner of the gallery, Vito Schna­bel, whose father, Julian, directed Dafoe in his van Gogh bio-pic, a few years back, poked his head in to say hello. “Big crowd, baby,” Dafoe said. Cle­mente came in, too.

“I’m the painter!” he said. “It’s all on the wall.”

In “Inside,” Nemo eventually starts drawing on the walls. Dafoe learned to paint for his role as a counterfeiter in the 1985 movie “To Live and Die in L.A.” He gave his first painting, a demonic figure in oils, to Kathryn Bigelow, who had directed him in his first leading role, in “The Loveless,” in 1981, but the canvases kept piling up.

“I used to repaint them, paint over them, rework stuff all the time,” he said. “But it got to a point where it really felt like they were done. And what do I do? I’m not going to give them to friends!” He laughed. “I love the act of it. But, when it’s sitting there, it’s like: Dilettante! Burn ’em all!”