Loving Vincent's diary - 6th 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 - 6th week

So on Saturday I walked for 14 hours. I made a new years resolution to do a 100km run on 11^th May. I have something of an extremists mindset, so I need something extreme to aim for. Having done 4 marathons I don’t see any point just running them faster, and I had vaguely said to myself that I would do a 100km run before I am 40. That is two years away, but I thought, ‘well why wait, why not do it now?’ So since the start of the year I have been running into work three times a week, which is 15km, thankfully it is along the beautiful snowy Baltic coastline of the Three Cities (Gdynia, Sopot and Gdansk), where I live and work. However each marathon has virtually sent me to A&E, so I know there is a big difference between 15km and a distance equivalent to two and a half marathons. So on Saturday I thought I would kill three birds with one stone: see how far I can actually walk in a day; walk to Hel and back; and listen to the read-through to our present draft of Loving Vincent.

I should explain that Hel is a real place, and ironically it is idyllic and every summer there are pretty much non-stop traffic jams of people wanting to get into Hel. Hel is a 35km peninsula, as narrow as 500m in places, that juts out into the Baltic to the north of the three cities. It is a continuous strip of sandy beaches, fringed with sand dunes, around a spine of coniferous forests, stunted by the blustering Baltic winds. Needless to say at this time of year it is deserted. At 07:20 Michal, our co-head of painting, dropped me off at Wladyslawowo, and I started up the un-interrupted 40km of beach that would lead me up to and past, and then back to, Hel. 

The landscape was eerily calm for a sandbar in the middle of a winter sea. Mist hemmed me in on all sides: the twisted dark green of the forest barely visible beyond the dunes; with the sea to my left, and beach in front of me, gradually petering off into a greyish white. There was no wind, and the gentle lapping of the waves was more akin to that of a large lake than a sea. Nothing stirred save a few ducks.

So I listened to our read thru of Loving Vincent as I walked in complete isolation. Vincent was a formidable walker; he walked everywhere, sometimes covering up to 20km in a day. There is an account of a 50km walk that he did between Kent and Berkshire, but it seems he slept a night on a church step, so probably he did the walk in two days.  He was proud of the km’s he trod, and heavily invested in the symbol of his worn out boots, that reflected his relentless toil and journeying for the cause of his art.

It struck me after listening to the read through that we don’t really make the popular case of his insanity, and we don’t make the case to defend him against the accusation of being insane. For us it is very clear that Vincent was not insane…

yes he committed himself to a mental asylum,

yes he is documented as to having fits and drinking paint and having hallucinations, and …

yes he did cut his ear off and give it, nicely wrapped up as a present the day before Christmas, to a prostitute…

but I don’t think this necessarily means he is mad.

Last week I had been forced to remember the end of production of Peter and the Wolf, and its immediate aftermath. I had a meeting with shareholders of the company that owns the project that meant going through some history that lay forgotten in the recesses of my mind.  The end of Peter and the Wolf was a nightmare; the film should have collapsed and never should have been finished. I went into a crazed state of mind, where all that seemed to matter in the world was Peter and the Wolf. Family, relationship, best friendships were all warped by and sucked up into my mania for that project. I charmed, bullied, bribed, screamed, despaired… By night, night after night, I took key people from the crew out to drink, made speeches, threw parties, slept rarely, and woke at dawn making new sales, argued a lot. All through this I lived in a communist bloc of flats in central Lodz, just above where the garbage trucks came every morning at 5am.

The film arrived at the Royal Albert Hall 1 hour before the start time, and if it hadn’t have arrived I would have had to refund 6,000 people their tickets, about $150,000, which of course I couldn’t so it would have spelt the certain end of my company, and maybe the end of my career as a producer.

Well I had to read through some of the emails flying about at that time, which stirred up memories of what went on, most of which I don’t particularly want to

local branch manager, received to feed a family of five. But as a spendthrift, and because he felt emasculated by being supported, his perceived financial stress was very great. In terms of sleep he would often be found by his mother when she came down for the day still working, having worked all through the night. And at the same time as working long days toiling over drawing the same exercises again and again, or working all day under the Mediterranean summer sun, he would read voraciously- all of Dickens, all of Shakespeare, all of Zola, etc. 

Vincent went from not being particularly good at drawing, really his natural aptitude was mediocre, and paled in comparison to the artists around him, to making himself a visionary of art, in the space of eight years…. Wow, that is some force of will, the focus that requires, for someone who probably has as little aptitude for drawing and painting as me, probably less than all the 30 painters we will work with on making this film, worked with such fierce focus that he made himself a genius. You are not even meant to be able to make yourself a genius! It is meant to be innate, like with Mozart or Leonardo Da Vinci… but he did it.

Is it any wonder that his mind cracked? Add to this the constant rejection of his work, ridicule even, at the hands of everyone around him. Add to that the pressure cooker of working under the Mediterranean sun, and then being cooped up by the Mistral in the yellow house alongside the highly competitive and mercurially monomaniacal Gauguin. Oh… and living off bread and coffee and cheap alcohol to save money for materials and prints. Most people would have cracked long before he actually did. If I can see madness in myself from the pressure-cooker of Peter and the Wolf, which was child’s play compared to what he put himself through, and then I think it is easy to explain his breakdown.

And the hallucinations? Well with a whirlwind of images and ideas swilling endlessly through his brain; intense thinking about symbolic meanings and colours and looking more keenly than any of us ever look, it seems logical that if he worked himself to the point of breakdown, that in this breakdown images would stream and burble through his worn-out brain. Very often artists are in a fragile state after performances- they throw fits, they party euphorically- well Vincent was performing masterpieces which now fetch the sunny side of $100m  twice-a-day every-day just before he cracked. I think anyone who ever put themselves through a regime of focus and work like that, without even the nutritional deprivations, without even the stroke inducing sun exposure, without even the absinth and cheap wine, would crack.

  

The story shouldn’t be about his madness, it should be sheer bewildering shock at the journey he went on, what he accomplished in 8 short years. But we do have to deal with the widely held perception that he was some tortured mad suffering artist. He is far from the archetypal suffering artist- he wasn’t poor… he wasn’t even an artist! He is exceptional and utterly unique- please someone tell me of a comparable story: of someone who goes from not lifting a pencil, a pen, or an instrument; to became one of the towering artists of all time? Is there anyone else who has done it?

By the time I finished thinking this I had reached Hel, and was only 4 hours into 15 hours of walking, and I was wondering what possessed me to think that I can run for 100km in a day in 3 months time. I am, at this present moment, about as well suited to long distance running as Vincent was to drawing and painting. I am 90 kilos and 1m 86cm, much bulkier than any ultra-runner I have ever met. For the rest of the 15 hours I resorted to listening to audio books, and when I could no longer concentrate on this – rage music from my teenage years: prodigy, new model army, that kind of thing, it turned out to be the most helpful music in distracting me from the pain of putting one foot in front of the other. It also distracted me from reading the sign: Military Zone, Keep Out! The guy in the gate-house was obviously engrossed in some activity on his computer or some TV show, as he missed the foreigner in bright blue rain gear hobbling past the gate! When I came up against a high barbed wire fence in the middle of a twilight forest I finally woke up to the fact that I was no longer where I should be. The pain in my legs magically disappeared as I walked increasingly frantically through the darkness, and repeatedly came up against high fences that weren’t marked on Google maps. I was starting to think I had been cursed by a Leszy or an Ognik or a Bled (Slavic forest demons that get travellers lost in the woods) as I experienced déjà vu with another barbed wire fence across a track. 

However I realised that this one was actually the first barbed wire fence I had come across, and from there I was able to retrace my steps to Hel. From Hel I walked the forest path south alongside the road, my mind a little affected from cold, fatigue and dehydration. The fact is if you put yourself through extreme things it affects your mind, and this is what happened to Vincent. Yes he experienced mental breakdown, but not because he was innately mad, or because he was some mad genius just instinctively able to see the world differently. He worked tirelessly at being able to see the world differently, and a side effect of this driven work, was breaking down.

Feeling fairly broken down myself I hobbled past a hotel that thankfully, unlike the rest of the peninsula, was open out of season, and called Michal. I had walked 55km in 14 hours… hmmmm three months to get myself where I can do twice that in the same amount of time. Not sure about that. Just have to wear out some of my own pairs of shoes over the next 3 months, and then, just maybe, I’ll be able to do it. My whole family is coming to support me for the race… think I will warn them to leave me in a room for a day after, and just push food and water

across the threshold, as I might need to regain my mind as well as my body after such a trial!

by Hugh Welchman