At the end of our chat about “A Most Wanted Man,” in which he has a wonderfully conflicted, out-of-his-depth banker role, I asked Willem Dafoe about the film he just finished, “Pasolini” with Abel “King of New York” Ferrara.

Here’s a link to Pasolini’s biography on Wikipedia — controversial before he ever exposed a frame of film, famous, a polymath (poet, novelist, filmmaker) and out of the closet before Italy was ready for — his death is still considered, by some, a mystery and potential scandal.

“I remember very specifically that when I worked on ‘Last Tempation,’ one of the few pieces of preparation that Marty Scorsese asked me to do was to watch ‘Gospel According to Matthew.’
I was quite struck by that film. Later, I saw some of his other movies. Later still, when I was working in Italy, I started to read his poetry. As I learned Italian, because I’m married to an Italian, I read all about his life and work. His novels, his journals, his poems.

“I immersed myself in all things Pasolini when I agreed to do this film. He was prolific in all these different fields. He excelled in all these different forms of writing and creating. He was a lot of people, too. He had all this energy for politics and art and life and love.

“Many of the ideas that Pasolini expressed, particularly the political ones, were beautifully written.

“He was deeply restless and curious in challenging himself and the world he lived in — Italy in the ’60s and ’70s. He could see where Italian society and Western society were going.

“The fact that he was an out gay man in 1960s Italy, living a high profile life as a leftist intellectual, meant that he was constantly being hauled into court — laws and lawsuits.
He had a LOT going on.
“I think we have a good take on him, following him through the last 24 hours of his life. We don’t get too obsessed with his murder, which is the subject of a lot of other TV shows and films about him. We deal with it. It happened.

“But what Abel and I were trying for is to paint a portrait of who this man was on the last day of his life — what he was thinking about, who he was meeting, what he was working on. We tried to reconstruct everything from who he had lunch with and what was said, to conversations with his family and friends. A very well-documented life, so we had lots of facts to guide us.

“It’s my fourth film with Abel, and we’re more and more in sync, efficient, as collaborators.”