At eternity’s gate
AT ETERNITY’S GATE I Julian Schnabel’s Vincent van Gogh bio paints it black…
Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh. Time to brush up that Oscar speech?
Am I crazy?” asks Julian Schnabel. “I don’t know if I’m crazy or not. I’m sure I have erratic behaviour. Maybe even irrational sometimes! But I don’t think you need to be crazy to be an artist.” True, the painter-filmmaker behind The Diving Bell And The Butterfly is lounging on a sofa, mid-afternoon, in his robe and purple pyjamas, but Teasers will give his sanity the benefit of the doubt.
Mind you, madness is a key theme in his new film At Eternity’s Gate, a raw sketch of Vincent van Gogh, starring Willem Dafoe as the Dutch artist towards the end of his life. “I think Vincent van Gogh was quite sane,” adds Schnabel. “Everything he says was very lucid. He was troubled because he felt things in such an intense way, he was so sensitive and he wasn’t so good at being around other people.”
Casting Dafoe as van Gogh was a no-brainer; Schnabel’s known him 30 years and he pitched up in the director’s 1996 debut, Basquiat. “I thought he really needed to have something to sink his teeth into.” With Dafoe gaining a fourth Oscar nod for this portrait of the artist, as well as Best Actor in Venice, Schnabel believes he’s far better here than in his last Academy-nom’d project, The Florida Project. “He was good but he didn’t deserve an Oscar for that!”
The opinionated director also isn’t keen on other movies about van Gogh. “I don’t like any of them!” Not even the recent Loving Vincent? “Turned it off. I thought it was terrible!” Featuring Oscar Isaac as fellow artist Paul Gauguin and Rupert Friend as Vincent’s brother Theo, Schnabel’s approach differs from his predecessors. “I wanted to record his relationship with nature.”
Retracing van Gogh’s steps across the often-bleak Arles, the director even shot in the Saint-Paul asylum where the painter was interned, casting some of the current inhabitants as extras. “The director of the facility thought it was a healthy [thing] for them to participate [in]. And they loved it! They were so happy to do that. Some of them were really, really crazy!”