Loving Vincent's diary - 2nd week (1/2)

BreakThru's producer Hugh Welchman (Oscar Winner for producing BreakThru's Peter and the Wolf) and painter/director Dorota Kobiela (director of BreakThru's Little Postman and Chopin's Drawings) are co-writing BreakThru's latest film, Loving Vincent, the world's first feature length painting animation film. The film is a mystery thriller looking into the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh, and is told through bringing over 120 of Vincent's masterpieces to animated life...

The script is on its fourth, and final, draft, and wth production scheduled for spring 2013, the pressure is mounting. This weekly diary will candidly record their process of writing the elusive final draft.

Loving Vincent's diary - 2nd week (1/2)

 

The idea was to have a trip to shake things up, get us out of our internimable renovation. Go and accept an award, and hopefully have a night celebrating past films, and then go and see a lot of Vincent paintings in the flesh to inspire us for the present film. 

A day into our trip it was clear we had fallen out of our traveller mentality. In 2010/11 I was on a trip virtually every, week, we lived out of suitcases, at one point I had meetings in India, China, Los Angeles, New York and London on consequtive days… well this time we set out from Warsaw to Liege at 9pm without checking the weather, or really comprehending the distance. We were greeted blizzards, sleet, hale and driving rain. 21 hours later (with 6 hours stop-over for sleep) we arrived in moody Liege. On the way Dorota read to me about Vincent's time in Wallonia, west of Liege in the Borinage- the 'black country', where he had the blackest of times.

Vincent from 23 to 27 was falling rapidly. Spoon fed a position when he was 16 at his childless Uncle's art dealership, and whom Vincent had been strategically named after, it was expected of Vincent that he would in time succeed his Uncle… but, by 23 he had, despite his famous name and connection, been demoted repeatedly until he found himself tucked away on the periphery of the firm, in a storehouse in London. He increasingly lost himself in evangelical religion, and decided to dedicate himself to religion. A couple of other career dead ends later, his family supported him to became a pastor like his father and grandfather, but Vincent didn't have the aptitude for the rigorous academic training it required. So again he slipped down the options of religious academia, and all that he could find was a post as an evangelical preacher in the mining district of the Borinage in Southern Belgium, an area that had the worst mines in Europe. Vincent had no talent for preaching, his sermons were convoluted and overlong, and barely comprehensible in his accented French. He was ostricised by the tightly knit mining community, which drove him to express his devotion symbolically, giving away all the church's possessions to the poor, sleeping in a barn, and eventually walking around in winter naked, having given away his clothes. Neither the miners nor his church appreciated this and he was locked out of his parish. So at 27 he suffered the indignity of having his father come and retrieve him and take him home, exactly 10 years after he set off in his dapper suit to follow in his Uncle Vincent's footsteps and become a great Art dealer.

It was here in the despondant depth's of depression that he started drawing. His mother and sisters dabbled in drawing in a purely recreational way, and they encouraged this in him, as a way to distract him from his black slumber…. and it started to work. Out of the blackness Vincent started to see a flicker of a future as a draftsman, an illustrator. Vincent was prone to herculean obsessive work. And where religion had resided, art took root… and he would draw through the night each night every night. The first drawings were …. awful, here is one of the few surviving drawings from this time, but he thought with single minded dedication he could conquer drawing, he could find through art a way to expressive this thing…

 (source: wikipaintings.org)

... to express 'it'… the truth and beauty that he had always felt he was able to feel and see in the world, and wanted to express to the world. If he couldn't do it through words as a preacher, then he would do it through images as an artist.

And with that chapter concluded we arrived in Liege, got booted and suited and headed to the Liege 3D Film Festival award ceremony.  The ceremony was much glitzier than I had expected. Set in the recently rennovated and luscious Liege Opera House,  and a whole array of awards sparkled under the lights. I knew we were picking up three awards, half way through the ceremony Little Postman won the award for Best 3D Animation. I winced when they called my name instead of Dorota's, as Dorota, having travelled around to many events with me was looking forward to having her moment at this one. We both went on stage I was handed the mic, and stated that as the director Dorota should really talk on behalf of the film. I handed her the mic, and then immediately wished I hadn't… We were at Europe's, if not the world's, premiere 3D festival, and she opened with "I wanted to make this film in 2D, as I don't really care for 3D…"

However I didn't need to be nervous, she went on to make a charming speech. She stated that it was only because her producer (me), who is also her husband (still me), told her to do it in 3D, and as she always does what her husband tells her (that was made up), that she made it that way, but she was very glad that she had, as the technology opened new artistic possibilities. She raised more laughter and applause than any other speaker of the night. She sparkled in the attention and I felt glad we had trekked across all of Europe to pick up the prize. I was told we were getting 3 prizes, but I thought there must have been some mistake as the night went on and there were only two awards left on stage. But to my surprise, the last two awards, the most prestigious, Best Stereography (Best 3D) and Best Film went to Magic Piano. Dorota came up with me, and we continued the double act speech.

Ceremony over, attention turned to partying. Things started tame in the exquisite ball-room at the Opera house, from there a whole group of the awardees were taken to a shiny club by the organisers.

(source: crowneplazaliege.be)

We were tired after the 20 hour drive, and were in two minds as whether to stay, but then someone made the one-way decision of multiple bottles of Vodka and red-bull… it'd been a while since I had ventured near this drink, as last time I had a night on it I felt wired for 3 days, but I'd been living off caffine to get across Europe anyhow, so… why not? We plunged into a night of dancing and drinking, that spilled on into a seedy club when the shiny one closed. We were hustled in through a hoarde of street drunks that hung out on the margins of a night, rather like the patrons of Vincent's night bar. In the bustle a young man got cut below his eye by the wing of one of the awards I was carrying. I bought the guy a drink and apologised for the accident. For the rest of the night he was always hanging at the margins of the group. At each place we all left our awards behind the bar for safety, but the last place turned out not to be very safe. When we left at 4am two awards were missing… both the Magic Piano awards. Dorota's was there, all the other people's prizes were there, it was just the Magic Piano awards. Our hosts got into a heated exchange with the bar owners, shirts were ripped, tempers were frayed. It was a sleezy last refuge, and I thought the young man that had been hovering in the corner of my view was probably the culprit. It was just the kind of place Vincent in his drinking insomniac phase would have ended up:

"It’s what they call a night café here (they’re quite common here), that stay open all night. This way the night prowlers can find a refuge when they don’t have the price of a lodging, or if they’re too drunk to be admitted."

I tried to get everyone to step back, but with that much red-bull and with the young bar staff as drunk or high on some drug or other, it took time to fizzle out. I reassured our hosts that this theft in no way coloured our night. It was a very special night, full of excitement and glamour, appropriately descending into the seedy backstreets of Liege, but instead of us observing the "little hooligans and night prowlers" as Vincent did in one of his truly amazing paintings, The Night Cafe, we were the ones being closely observed by the night prowlers and little hooligans. So….

...we headed to bed at 4am in possession of one instead of three exceedingly heavy golden winged statues, and with 6 hours before we had to set out for Van Gogh museum.

 by Hugh Welchman