Loving Vincent's diary - 4th week

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 - 4th week (Christmas and New Year)

Christmas several times precipitated crisis in Vincent’s life. He yearned for the past, a past that may never have really been as he remembered it- in the Zunderst parsonage. Christmas at the parsonage was a very busy time for the Parsonage, with all the parishioners stopping by, his father leading carol singing, present making, present giving. For Vincent, very much a loner even as a boy, who spent many hours on his own on the heath seeking out bird’s nests and collecting insects rather than playing with other children, it must have been a rare time to feel at the heart of the community, enveloped by the warmth of his family...

But as a grown man it so often served to highlight his own inadequacy and failure in his own mind, to show him how alienated he was from his family, and how lonely he was. He even lost his job in the family firm because of Christmas. Already sidelined at his Uncle’s firm, but as his Uncle’s namesake probably hard to actually get fired, Vincent stepped far enough over the line by ignoring his boss’s order to work over Christmas at the Paris store, and went back for family Christmas. This direct insubordination was sufficient that his Uncle Cent washed his hands of Vincent – forever. But even by this point, as a 24 year old man, Christmas could never live up to the billing that it held in his imagination, and thereafter it would throw him into depression, or worse. Indeed it was in the run up to Christmas, on December the 23rd 1888, he cut off part of his ear with a razor, and the following Christmas 1889, his last, he was in Saint Remy Asylum, and relapsed into one of his worst bouts of fits and terrifying waking hallucinations after seeming to be totally recovered. 

Our Christmas felt like it hang precipitously on the edge of throwing us into crisis. Our flat/office renovation sucked us back in as soon as we returned from our road trip to Holland. We finished at 0300 on Christmas Day, and had our Christmas Eve meal at 0500, and then washed our cat, who seemed to have managed to vacuum up his body weight in building dust into his fur. Here he is supervising the builders:

This meant that we actually slept through Christmas, and woke up on Boxing Day! That is one way to advert a Christmas crisis.

One of our tasks while everyone else was on Holiday was to get down to writing the new draft. So far in a month we had had a lot of ideas, read a lot of new material about Vincent’s life, but this just didn’t seem to be coalescing into writing. Instead we planned out our new tests that we wanted to do, in the wake of ideas that we had in Holland. Indeed we were planning out the tests and listening to English radio on New Year’s Eve in our Warsaw office/flat, which meant we actually missed New Year, as we were an hour behind because of listening to radio from another time zone. While we missed Christmas and New Year (have to make up for it next year) it felt good to be working on Loving Vincent through the chimes, and also to actually be awake and wide eyed in the morning on New Years Day. To celebrate we went running through the deserted sunny winter wonderland of Warsaw’s parks.

by Hugh Welchman