Willem Dafoe: 'I flirted with Van Gogh's ghost'

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When Willem Dafoe was limbering up to play Vincent Van Gogh in a new film about the famously tormented painter, he did something that will give museum curators nightmares for years to come.

He was leafing through a "lost" sketchbook of the artist's from his time in Arles, when the film's director - the flamboyant American painter Julian Schnabel - looked at him like a man possessed.

"We had the white gloves on and everything," Dafoe told AFP, "and we were gently going through it looking at the drawings. Then at one point Julian grabbed my hand and slammed it down on one of the sketches.

"It was like something out of 'The Exorcist'," the actor said.

Willem Dafoe visits Build to discuss his drama movie 'The Florida Project' at Build Studio in New York City on October 2, 2017. /VCG Photo

"He was forcing a transmission - a connection between me and Van Gogh - and I think it worked."

Critics at the Venice film festival agree, with Dafoe an early favorite for the best actor prize after "At Eternity's Gate" was premiered here on Monday.

While the authenticity of the sketchbook is disputed - the Van Gogh Museum and two major experts on the artist are at war over the issue - Dafoe believes it is genuine.

Both he and the mercurial Schnabel - a famed neo-expressionist artist best known for his huge broken plate paintings - are on familiar territory tackling the furies that drive and sometimes dog great artists.

Dafoe had to grapple with the demons of the great Italian director Paolo Pasolini in Abel Ferrara's 2014 film "Pasolini".

Schnabel also brought the tortured life of his old friend on the New York art scene, Jean Michel Basquiat, to the big screen in "Basquiat".

(FILE) Oil Painting of Van Gogh at The Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. /VCG Photo

Dafoe, who first learned to paint three decades ago for "To Live and Die in L.A.", when he played an art forger, said shooting in the fields around Arles and in the asylum at Saint-Remy where Van Gogh wrote that "one continually hears shouts and terrible howls as of animals in a menagerie", gave him goosebumps.

"I felt close to him," said the actor, who looks spookily like the painter on screen.

Unlike other films about Van Gogh such as the 1956 classic "Lust for Life" starring Kirk Douglas, Defoe said the new movie avoids "the greatest hits" like the "Sunflowers" or depicting him hacking off his ear when he fell out with Gauguin.

"But for part of the movie he has no ear. We do not shy away from what he did to himself."

"It focuses on the end of Van Gogh's life and starts right before he meets Gauguin and he goes to Arles," he said.

Source(s): AFP