How a UMass poet ended up with a cameo in the Willem Dafoe-starring ‘Late Fame’ – The Boston Globe

“Late Fame” is less obviously personal, especially since it started with an 1895 Arthur Schnitzler book, adapted by Samy Burch into a screenplay (which replaces sharp-edge commentary with warmth and compassion). The story, moved from Vienna to modern Manhattan, revolves around Saxberger, who published a minor collection of poems back in 1979 but gave up the artist’s life; he works in the post office and lives peacefully alone, occasionally hanging out and shooting pool with other old-timers at a local bar.

Saxberger’s studied serenity is shattered by Meyers (Edmund Donovan), a young poet who’s spearheading an idealistic artists collective, The Enthusiasm Society, whose members believe they can change the world through art (and who only go by their last names, like Meyers).

Meyers, who speaks and dresses as if he’s from an earlier time, idolizes Saxberger and brings him to meet the group, which is composed of mostly youngish men along with a slightly older and enigmatic actress, Gloria (Greta Lee). They thrill to Saxberger’s stories of bohemian Manhattan and inspire him to think about writing new poetry — Meyers even sets Saxberger up with a literary agent (Jake Lacy). Saxberger is, at first, happy to untether himself from his current life, but soon must reckon with who he is and where he belongs.

For Meyers, Donovan, a Wellesley native, drew on specific eccentric and idealistic friends from the theater scene both at Boston University, his alma mater, and in New York, where he and his classmates migrated and formed their own theater companies. Meyers “marches to the beat of his own drum and lacks self-awareness in a way that I find endearing,” he says.

But he does see Meyers as the film’s antagonist. “What he’s after is beautiful, but it’s deluded,” he says. “His desires are genuine, but he harms people, indirectly and unintentionally. It’s hurtful. He’s a reckless driver, who has the vision, but doesn’t have a map to get where he’s going.”

A quick side note about Donovan: Generally, he’s mellower than Meyers … unless you get him talking about the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild’s festival. “Oh my God, I was really hoping you were going to ask me about that,” he says, with Meyers-esque exuberance, launching into the tale of how Wellesley High School had never gotten past the semifinals but in his sophomore year he and his drama friends wrote an “irreverent comedy” that won, and then they won again the next year. “It was huge. It was a really meaningful part of my adolescence and legitimized my interest in acting,” he says. “Sorry, I’m rambling. I just get so excited talking about it.

While Meyers is zealous in his passions, “Late Fame” is ultimately a quiet film, beautifully shot and anchored by Dafoe’s nuanced performance as he opens himself to feeling vulnerable again. “He brings the right attention to each tricky moment,” Jones says.

Oddly, the two first met on a plane and spent five hours talking without ever discussing “Late Fame,” even though Jones had just gotten the screenplay and Dafoe, by sheer coincidence, had Schnitzler’s book in his bag.

And while Jones cites Gizzi as an inspiration, there’s also a touch of his own life there. Like Saxberger, Jones came to New York and fell into a scene, although his was film. He wrote criticism, worked with Martin Scorsese on documentaries (they co-directed “A Letter to Elia”) and became director of the prestigious New York Film Festival before earning minor late fame in his fifties when he made the documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut” and then “Diane.”

Jones made script changes to fit his own life more, like moving Saxberger’s heyday from the ’60s to the late ’70s and early ’80s. But he says the story naturally became more personal along the way: “The script is the starting point but it’s all writing — from the directing through the editing.”

Dafoe, of course, came to New York in the same time period, breaking in with the Wooster Group in downtown theater. “The film expresses some things about curiosities I have and things I experienced in my life,” Dafoe says. While he obviously experienced early fame, with movies like “Platoon” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” he was “part of a scene with all this activity, so I could relate to the movie.”

He and Jones made a few tweaks to the script, “adding a few Madeleines,” to take him back to the specifics of his downtown days. Those are cases where art was imitating life. Meanwhile, on the set, life was imitating art, but also enhancing it.

Donovan says Dafoe sat with the younger actors at lunch and generously shared his wisdom. “God bless his soul, he’s trying to eat his lunch and it would turn into a Q&A with the poor guy, asking him about this movie or that play,” he says. “But he handled it with such grace. I got the sense it wasn’t about him and his ego; he wanted to share these things as a gift to us.”

Not true, Dafoe asserts. “I don’t think I was being a mentor,” he says. “They were flattering me and getting me to tell war stories and I felt myself slipping into that thing like Saxberger, where you get seduced by entertaining this kind of nostalgia.”

The questions weren’t intrusive and the attention actually “gave me a lot of energy,” Dafoe says. “I liked being with them. When my character was warming up to them onscreen, it was because I couldn’t help myself. Those lunches were parallel to what was happening in the movie.”