Willem Dafoe: To paint like van Gogh was creepy as hell

People ask me all the time who it is who painted the pictures in the film and whose hands it is you see. I just want to strangle them! "says the 63-year-old Willem Dafoe, who tells her that he has cheated with the oil paintings since the eighties but had the chance to learn a lot more techniques when he got the role as the tormented konstnärssjälen Vincent van Gogh in Julian Schnabels film. A real dream character, which gave him his fourth oscar Nomination in the winter.

" For me it was absolutely crucial, it was a key to understand van Gogh and his way of looking at life and art. Of course, it was scary as hell in the beginning. But Julian, who is an artist himself, was very clever when he got me to challenge myself. Take the painting of the shoes for example. You see it emerge, first there is the ruffigt and rough, but so you can see suddenly how the colors begin to speak with each other. The whole scene is a kind of crash course to van Gogh's oeuvre.

– Julian Schnabel is a great director, but hardly conventional. The whole of the filmmaking was as a research project with a lot of improvisations, especially the scenes set in the outdoors. Nothing was clear when I came on board, so I had to contribute to the script with your own notes and feelings which I really appreciated.

Willem Dafoe in the role of Vincent van Gogh. Photo: Scanbox

– Amsterdam was my first big destination when I came to Europe in the seventies. I remember the van Gogh museum made a very big impression on me, especially as I was so young when I saw the paintings first few times. I saw of course the Kirk Douglas film about van Gogh, ”He loved life”, as a young man also. I remember it as a solid but very melodramatic. The film ”Vincent and Theo” with Tim Roth touched me much more, but perhaps mostly because it is a fellow I really like.

" we try to be as comfortable in yourself as possible, and of course, avoiding to look at the camera. I'm thinking that I'm not going to show something, just do it. The most important thing is to not be self-conscious. It is the worst thing that can happen to an actor. This is why I would never have pictures of myself at home. Julian has painted my portrait several times, but I can't even bring myself to hang up the pictures at home.

When I was young I used to pray that it would happen some bad things, to get the exciting experience, ha ha.

" When I was young I used to pray that it would happen some bad things, to get the exciting experience, ha ha. The older you get the more you realize that the truth will come out of it enlightened in life rather than out of the darkness. It was interesting to go into a character such as Vincent van Gogh, he was in his artistic life in any way annulled the dualism between good and evil, between light and darkness.

" He had it very tough as a human, but he also came in contact with something very powerful. His view of nature is very telling, he picks up both the beautiful and the ugly. He talked about it, paradoxically, can be no healing of the disease, and he quoted, I believe Paul in the Bible, when he described himself as ”a sad but also joyous”.

" I hate the word happy, it is too convenient. Right now I get quite a lot of interesting roles that I can keep the feeling of each film is the first. It may sound jättelöjligt, but as long as it is so I am...okay then...happy. It is in this way you can maintain the feeling of always being on the way somewhere. But there may not be any kind of finish. When you die, and I don't want to die yet.

movie review: ”At eternity's gate” makes the poetic reality of van Gogh's hard life