The creators of one Academy Award-nominated movie tell they believe they’ve developed the slowest film-making process in 120 years, but say they wouldn’t have done it any other way.
James Croot
In the decade since it was conceived, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s look at the life and death of Vincent van Gogh has transformed from a one-woman project into a US$5.5 million major motion picture.
Loving Vincent was an audacious idea, the world’s first ‘‘fully-painted’’ animated feature, but one that seems to have paid off handsomely. It has already made back its budget fivetimes over (with the movie particularly popular in South Korea, China and Italy), and has been nominated for best animated feature at this year’s Golden Globes, Baftas and Academy Awards.
Set one year after van Gogh’s death in 1890, Loving Vincent focuses on the Dutch painter’s postman’s son Armand’s attempt to personally deliver the artist’s last letter to his brother Theo. Along the way, Armand encounters a variety of people who claimed to know him and what happened in those final days.
Speaking from his studio in Gdansk, Poland, co-director Welchman says it was the mystery and conflicting accounts surrounding van Gogh’s death that provided them with the narrative key to telling a compelling story.
‘‘The original concept was to tell his story by bringing his paintings to life. However, once we started looking into the people in his life that he painted portraits of – friends, acquaintances, the people delivering his letters, serving his food – we discovered what they had said in the historical records about him contradicted each other and what was written in Vincent’s letters.
‘‘From the beginning, we had to try to be detectives and work out who was telling the truth and who was maybe misremembering because they were talking about it many years after van Gogh’s death. I’m sure there was a bit of people rewriting history to make themselves seem more important.
‘‘We were also trying to find out what was in his mind in his final weeks because, on the surface, things were going much better for Vincent in the last 10 weeks of his life. He’d just sold his first painting and been included in two exhibitions of what we now call the ‘post-impressionists’.
‘‘[Claude] Monet [the painter], had described him as the best new talent coming through, he’d just had a nephew named after him, he was closer to his brother [Theo] than he’d been for years, and he was also physically much better – he’d stopped drinking heavily and was producing a great new work every day.
‘‘He was absolutely at the height of his powers as a painter, so why would he commit suicide just when he seemed to be achieving things he had been working so hard for for the previous decade?
‘‘We also discovered there were holes in the events of his final days – where he was, how he shot himself, how he lost his gun and the placement of the bullet wound.’’
While Welchman and Kobiela were trying to nut out all of that, the publication of a 2011 book – Steven Naifeh’s and Gregory White Smith’s Van Gogh: A Life – offered a different take on how the artist died.
‘‘It revived a rumour from early 20th-century journalists and art collectors – that he didn’t commit suicide, he was shot by teenage boys,’’ says Welchman.
‘‘That confirmed our belief that the mystery around his death was a good way of looking into his life, and reflective of the contradictory views people had of him – one person said he was bad, another that he was quiet and never drank, yet another that they used to hang out all the time with him and get drunk. We want people to make up their own minds about what kind of person he was and what happened to him.’’
Welchman says they always knew there would be an audience for a van Gogh movie. ‘‘People are just incredibly passionate about his work. We travelled to all these museums during pre-production and in all of them where they have van Gogh’s [works] there are massive crowds around them, compared to anywhere else in the museum.’’
That’s also why Kobiela was determined for it to be an animated movie, bringing his paintings to life to tell his story.
‘‘Initially, about a decade ago, it was going to be a short film that she was entirely going to paint herself,’’ says Welchman. ‘‘Then, she met me somewhere along the line, got married and took a break from working on it. Then, when we both started working on it again, we decided we want to make it as a feature.’’
To upscale, that meant enlisting support, finding a group of artists who