“loving Vincent” is the world’s first fully hand-painted feature film
It’s a very moving story
His struggles to become an artist
And struggles he had in life
Having to overcome loneliness and depression
Dorota (Another director of the film) came up with the idea 10 years ago
Vincent was an artist who had been very close to her heart
From really as a teenager
She first read the letters when she was 15
And in her early 20s
She did a dissertation
On the link between mental illness, depression and creativity
And one of the main subjects was Vincent
We didn’t have experience of writing a feature film
And I think writing this feature film was particularly challenging
Because we wanted to include as much as we could from Vincent’s beautiful letters
We wanted to include as many paintings as we could
We also wanted it to be truthful
We didn’t want there to be anything in the film that contradict the history
Luckily in the case of Vincent
In the last 127 years
有那么多关于文森特的故事版本 There has been so many different theories
You got different people’s opinions
In the years after his death
Or what it’s like or what happened to him
So we could include a lot of those in the film
There were many challenges in bringing Vincent’s paintings to the cinema screen
Vincent used different frame sizes
Whereas in cinema you can only have one frame size
And we chose the “academy ratio”
Which is a cinematic ratio that was most prevalent in the 1940s in Hollywood
It was most similar to the size of the canvas which Vincent used more than any others
In case of “Marguerite Gachet at the Piano”, which is a tall thin painting
When we went to doctor Gachet’s house in Auvers
We realized there was only one place where Vincent could have painted it
Which was looking through the window into the sitting room
So in that case it was obvious at the site we would have the window frame framing her
With “Café Terrace at Night”
Which is one of the most famous paintings
We couldn’t bear to change it at all
So the only way we could cover it was in a camera move
So we tracked down
And therefore we kept the original framing
I think the hardest thing of all is getting rid of some of our favorite paintings
We couldn’t find a way of getting them into the story
Without it feels like we were taking a diversion
Just to see this beautiful picture
Even harder than that was finding the money to do this film
When you go along to financier
And you say, “Oh yes we are making this fantastic film”
“We are new film makers”
“We’ve never directed or written a feature film before”
“And oh also we’re using a technique that no one has ever done in history before”
“And oh it’s the slowest form of film making ever devised ever”
And then I think alarm bell starts going off for the financiers
We were lucky enough to find a few brave individuals and organizations
Out of the hundreds that we approached
There were many times on the journey
That we didn’t know where the money’s gonna be coming from the next month
I mean Dorota she had to move house 21 times
We had to give up our rented house
And go live with relatives for a while
But all the time
That we had these problems
We always knew
That they are nothing compared to the problems that Vincent had
And he managed to create 800 masterpieces
That gave us strength