Loving Vincent was the brainchild of Polish director and painter Dorota Kobiela. She shares some of her thoughts on making the film below
How did the idea for Loving Vincent originate?
I decided I wanted to combine my two passions - painting and film - and make a painted film. I was 30 when I came up with the idea to do Loving Vincent, around the same age that Vincent was when he started painting. More than his paintings, which I love, it was the example of how Vincent lived his life that inspired me. I have battled with depression all my life, and I was inspired by how strong Vincent was in picking himself up from similarly terrible life setbacks as a young man in his twenties, and finding, through art, a way to bring beauty to the world. His letters helped me at a low point in my life, and inspired me to make this film.
Why did you decide to make a feature instead of the originally planned short?
When Hugh Welchman (co-director/writer and producer on Loving Vincent) had to queue for over 3 hours to get into a Van Gogh exhibition he persuaded me that we should at least look into seeing if the film would work as a feature. I decided it could be possible if it was done as a series of interviews with Vincent’s paintings, alongside some painting animation transitions based on his landscape paintings. So I developed the script in this direction, and put together a concept trailer to work out the production method I had in mind. The reaction we got to the concept trailer gave me the confidence that this would work with audiences: total strangers; film professionals; artists; animators and members of the public all loved our visual approach.
What was it like training and directing 125 painters?
It was going to be a painting animation challenge to bend reality into Vincent’s unique style, and paint fluently with his brush stroke and colour consistency. Being both a painter and an animator I knew we stood a much better chance of training experienced painters in animation, than in training experienced animators to paint like Van Gogh. So while we were still working on the script we embarked upon a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for recruiting and training painters. Some of them took to animation like ducks to water, while others, even though excellent painters, really struggled. The fastest painters could be up to three times faster than the slowest. Working with the painters was pure pleasure, and we had a very interesting and diverse set of extremely talented people.
Dorota and supervisor Marlena Jopyk Misiak during painter training.
After the training I selected 20 painters to work on re-imagining Vincent’s work for film in our Design Painting stage. I tried to get them, under my direction, to paint a coordinated re-imaging of the world through the eyes of a painter dead for 125 years, in the exact technical style of said painter. In painting you can choose a variety of frame sizes, and Vincent did. For cinema you can just use one, so we needed to adapt his paintings to fit in the cinema screen. Also for camera moves we needed to move beyond the bounds of the paintings and for dynamic editing we needed reverse shots, close ups and the full range of film shots that are part of film language. But whatever re-imagining we had to do: changing frame, going outside the frame, changing the time of day, every innovation in every Design Painting had to be directly attributable to and taken from Vincent’s body of work.
How did you find shooting the live-action reference footage?
After reading Vincent’s letters on his portraits, I knew that we couldn’t just have animation, we need to have actors. We needed to have people behind these portraits, real emotion. I loved the process of shooting the actors, to see them bringing to life into these characters, It was incredible and very intense. Working with out cast was the absolute highlight of my life, as was editing their performances. The live action shoot took 5 weeks and the editing 10 weeks, and then it was time to paint, which would take years.
Why did you choose to include the flashback scenes in Black and White style?
There were two main reasons. Firstly we thought that it would be too much for audiences to have Vincent’s intensive colour for ninety minutes. The fact that we structured the film with a lot of flashbacks, meant we had the opportunity to introduce a different style for these sections. Secondly, we didn’t want to make up Vincent paintings that didn’t exist. Most of the flashbacks involve Vincent in life situations that he didn’t paint, so if we did them in Vincent’s style we would be imagining from scratch how Vincent might have painted those scenes, which we felt was straying too far from his work. The reason we chose black and white was because a lot of our research involved sourcing black and white photographs from the era, and these inspired our approach to the painted style of the flashbacks.
Why the title ‘Loving Vincent’?
Vincent didn’t pick up a brush until he was 29. He’d failed at four careers, had no income, no wife, no children, he was the black sheep of his family, in despair, yet he found the belief and the energy to try again. In the space of 8 years, through incredible passion and hard-work he made himself one of the most innovative and influential painters of all time. That’s incredible. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by what other people have achieved and put it down to their natural abilities: put it down to them being geniuses, like Mozart or Da Vinci, but Vincent proves that if you have the focus and the energy you can achieve extraordinary things, and that it is never too late. But you have to be willing to put in the work.
This project has been a labour of love. I’ve worked on it a total of 7 years full time, my love of Vincent’s work, his letters and my respect for his struggle sustained me through those 7 years. And it wasn’t just me that had to love Vincent. Our team of painters were painstakingly painting 65,000 frames of oil painting, spending up to 10 days painting a second of film, moving each brush-stroke frame by frame. That takes a lot of commitment, a lot of respect for his work. The title is also a reference to how he often signs off his letters to his brother ‘Your loving Vincent’. We only decided to take the risk of making the world’s first fully painted feature film because of how much people around the world are already loving Vincent. I hope this film will inspire people to find out more about Vincent, read his letters, see his paintings in the flesh. I hope I will have, in some small way, helped introduce Vincent to more people. I think he deserved that. I want everyone to be Loving Vincent!
