Dafoe pours art and soul into portrait of Van Gogh

WILLEM DAFOE wore very little make-up for his exquisite portrait of Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, a new movie by the artist turned film-maker Julian Schnabel.

Dafoe, below in the film, told me his hair was made a little redder but his face mostly left alone for his ‘role of a lifetime’.

Instead, Schnabel and cinematographer Benoit Delhomme use Dafoe’s face as a canvas. The camera zooms in and not a wrinkle is spared. But those lines draw you in, and suddenly you have no trouble accepting that the actor is Vincent, seeking ‘new light to paint paintings in sunlight’ in Arles, France.

‘I will forever be changed by the experience,’ Dafoe said of the picture. ‘It has stayed with me.’ It stays with us, too.

He said he always liked to draw but acknowledged that he wasn’t ‘especially gifted’. He painted in preparation for a character in William Friedkin’s 1984 film To Live And Die In LA, but learning to paint under Schnabel’s teaching ‘was much deeper and more intense’.

In the film, the actor is credited — along with Schnabel and artist Edith Baudrand — with the recreation of Van Gogh’s work.

The painter was prolific, and unsold paintings littered his rented rooms. Baudrand and Schnabel headed a workshop making copies of Van Gough works for set dressing. Some pieces were partially prepared, and Dafoe would complete them on film. But for the famous Pair Of Shoes painting, he worked from a blank canvas — a particularly beautiful moment in the movie.

For some landscape scenes Delhomme would just follow the actor with his camera. ‘We were extensions of each other,’ Dafoe said of the French cinematographer. ‘We were dancing partners and sometimes it was hard to know who was leading.’

Dafoe was speaking to me from Maranhao in Brazil, where he’d spent Christmas with his film-maker wife Giada Colagrande, who was scouting locations for her next project.

He said the Van Gogh film could never have been shot in Burbank, Hollywood. He commented that the ‘landscape of the locations hasn’t changed much since Van Gogh’s time’.

‘I had the feeling that what I saw, he saw. In my imagination that sky, that ground, those rocks, those trees welcomed us both, and that became a very real bond.’

I’ve watched the film twice and, fanciful as it sounds, it was almost as though the camera captured Van Gogh’s ghost. Perhaps that’s because I was so struck by Dafoe’s outstanding performance. It’s no surprise he’s up for a Golden Globes award at Sunday’s ceremony.

He’s such a versatile actor — starring in At Eternity’s Gate, an indie film, and the mammoth Warner Bros hit Aquaman, which has dominated the box office during the Christmas and New Year holidays.

Dafoe told me he liked to vary his projects ‘to challenge and destroy’ the notion that there’s only ‘one way to make a movie’.