I was born William. My father was William. I came from a big family, I hated being called Billy. Willem’s a nickname; it’s a Dutch name, very common in the Netherlands.
My dad was a surgeon, my mom a nurse, and they were always out working. I had five sisters and a brother. They didn’t care what I got up to.
I was doing community theater, and I was always interested in acting, but I was also interested in sports. I was interested in a lot of things. I was a pretty normal guy. I wasn’t like a guy who grew up in a dark theater watching movies.
Let’s hope I never end up on a deserted island, because I could never make a decision on which three CDs to take with me.
I set myself challenges every time I work. Ideally, I approach everything as though it’s the first time – with a beginner’s mind and an amateur’s love.
It makes me laugh when I hear a guy talking about being in touch with his feminine side. But I gravitate towards women; I identify with them. And I do cry very easily, more and more as I get older.
The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth – it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.
You can be intuitive when you’ve got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.
There’s a real wisdom to not saying a thing.
I’ve been in very few flat-out comedies. But I feel like I’ve always made comedies.
I’m one of those people who when I go over a bridge, I want to jump. It’s just this intense tickle in the back of my throat. It’s like I’m on the verge the whole time I’m walking over that bridge, and I’m not going to get a release until I jump.
Turn off the sound in a movie, and if you can tell what’s going on, the movie should work.
I don’t think people are interested in my personal life. I’ve never had a Hollywood life. I’ve always been a worker.
Sometimes you make very interesting movies that aren’t meant for everybody. But this is a capitalist society, so everything conspires to put value on whether it sells or not.
The real difficulty for smaller films, when they’re made independently and it’s time to go for a distributor, sometimes if it’s a tough film and the people who financed it need their money back right away, it’s much easier and lucrative to take a DVD deal.
Socially, I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people.
If you get stuck and it feels a little stiff, then you do have to mess it up to find it. But other times it’s really written and you just stick to your guns and do it as elegantly and as concentrated and as committed as you can.
Each of the actors is quite different, but they’re all living in the same world.
Trust is always a factor. You’ve just got to look at the big picture, and you’ve got to look at the small picture – the small picture in the sense that you’ve got to make every scene work and you’ve got to deal with what people are presenting you with, too.
Usually when you meet with a director, just meeting them after you’ve seen something you’re interested in, they say, “Oh I’d love to work together,” and sometimes you never hear from them again.