Last weekend in Cleveland was shit. Utter. Fucking. Shit. We had snow and 30-degree temperatures in mid-May—the weather here has always been deeply uncooperative, but even by Cleveland standards, that was bizarre. For some reason, a complete baseball game transpired in that freezy, wet weather that couldn’t settle on whether it wanted to rain or hail, and naturally, Cleveland lost that game. Whatever, we’re Cleveland, we’re used to it.

But amid all that, a singularly cool thing happened: on Saturday, Willem Dafoe—the outré-but-still-somehow-mainstream actor who rose to prominence as the murderous counterfeiter in the underrated ‘80s-noir crime drama To Live and Die in L.A., and is probably best known today for his turns as Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, a vigilante-chasing FBI agent in Boondock Saints, and for completely owning one of the only two Spider-Man movies worth discussing—delivered the commencement address to the graduating students of the Cleveland Institute of Art—my alma mater, as it happens.

How did this awesome thing happen?

Dafoe’s first credited film appearance was the lead role in 1981’s The Loveless, an outlaw biker film directed by a young Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, The Hurt Locker) in which Dafoe played the leader of a gang that causes trouble in a small town on its way to Daytona for a race. One of the co-producers of that film was one Grafton Nunes, who since 2010 has served as President of the Cleveland Institute of Art, so perhaps a favor was being returned here.

Dafoe addressed the students about what sustained and inspired him “through 40 years career both above and below ground” and the value of cross-pollination among different art forms, especially with regard to his younger days in avant-garde theater.

…for the most part it was untrained people making homemade shows. It was a time where dancers were making films, actors were painting, visual artists were performing, and everybody was making music. There was an amateur do-it-yourself aesthetic that wasn’t pursuing recognition or acceptance outside of a certain social circle. Often, the works were sloppy, incomprehensible, lazy, obtuse, and truly just bad. These people weren’t careerists—there was no career to be had in these forms. The most they could hope for to parlay their success into was to sleep with more attractive people in the downtown scene. But, there was something there in some of the work that exhibited extraordinary personal commitment, emotion, and abandon I had not seen elsewhere. For me, these qualities trumped all training and technique.

Having been one of the kids in one of those seats years ago, I don’t know if that’s exactly what I would have wanted to hear after spending years of my life and tens of thousands of borrowed dollars learning training and technique, but you can’t deny that point! It’s a great and genuinely inspiring speech about the process of making, and it’s here in its entirety, via cleveland.com.