How Willem Dafoe learned to paint like Vincent Van Gogh

Willem Dafoe has had one of the most eclectic and distinguished careers in film, earning a reputation for versatility and tackling difficult characters, like Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ or the character named only as “He” in the twisted horror film Antichrist.

Dafoe has worked with scores of the most important directors in the industry, collaborating repeatedly with auteurs like Lars Von Trier, Paul Schrader, and Wes Anderson. But he’s no stranger to mainstream fare, too: Dafoe played supervillain Norman Osborne in the 2002 reboot of Spider-Man. He voiced Gill the fish (leader of the “Tank Gang”) in Finding Nemo. And he’s appeared in movies as different as John Wick, The Boondock Saints, and The English Patient. His role as a kindly motel manager in The Florida Project netted him his third Best Supporting Actor nomination at last year’s Oscars.

Now Dafoe has teamed up with the painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Basquiat) to play Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate. The Van Gogh of the film is in his waning years, and disdained by most of his peers — including, to some extent, his buddy Paul Gauguin, played by Oscar Isaac. He’s portrayed as an outsider artist, a man sinking into depression and mania while also becoming more and more prolific — and more and more convinced that painting is his divine calling.

At Eternity’s Gate premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, where Dafoe won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. I interviewed him in Manhattan the morning after the film’s North American premiere, as the closing night selection at the New York Film Festival. We talked mostly about painting — what he had to learn to do to play Vincent Van Gogh, how Schnabel was instrumental in teaching the craft, and how learning to paint like Van Gogh is really learning how to see.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Alissa Wilkinson

So, how do you get inside the head of Vincent Van Gogh?

Willem Dafoe

I got inside his head — well, by painting, painting, painting.

CBS Films

Alissa Wilkinson

Have you painted much before?

Willem Dafoe

I had, but it was many, many years ago, and it was very different. It was a different kind of painting, for a movie called To Live and Die in L.A. I played a counterfeiter who also happened to be a painter. In order to inhabit that character, I learned to paint, but not nearly with the same understanding and the same intensity that I approached this — because obviously, this was different.

And I’ve been around painters all my life.

Alissa Wilkinson

Oh, really?

Willem Dafoe

Yeah. I really came of age in downtown New York, where the [art] worlds were very mixed up. It was a time of a lot of do-it-yourself stuff, and loft living, and a lot of my friends were painters. And Julian [Schnabel], I’ve known for like 30 years, so —

Alissa Wilkinson

I was wondering if you’d known Schnabel before now, back when he was best known as a painter, before he made Basquiat.

Willem Dafoe

I’ve been in the studio with him. He’s painted me. I’ve helped him move paintings. I’ve been there when he makes things.

Alissa Wilkinson

Van Gogh’s style of painting, and his technique, is very specific and very interesting to watch. How did you become able to imitate his style?

Willem Dafoe

Basically, with the help of Julian, I started painting shoes. I started painting cypress trees. We looked at the Van Goghs. He taught me a different way of looking, a different way of seeing.

When you’re not trained, you really leap to identify things in paintings — we’re so ingrained, no matter what our education is, toward thinking about representation. We’re literal about things, not really looking deeply.

But to express something may mean making a painting that doesn’t look like exactly like what it “looks like.” So Julian taught me to paint lights.

CBS Films

He also taught me about making marks. There is no bad mark. Painting is a series of marks, next to each other — putting colors next to each other. When I’m looking at you [he starts gesturing, indicating areas of my face], rather than seeing a woman, I see some black there. I see white there. There’s white there. There’s almost, maybe, there’s a little pink and a little orange, maybe? There may even be green there. You don’t have green on your face, but I’m seeing green.

And if I bring those things to a painting, I may be able to express something in you that really gets to who you are, or gets to a truth or a union with the nature of who you are, rather than a representation. It’s that kind of thinking, understanding of the origin of things and where things are going, that is a way of seeing. So I’m not just talking about the visual — I’m talking a certain kind of psychology of experience.

Alissa Wilkinson

And of knowing too, right? Of perception?

Willem Dafoe

Seeing things clearly. It’s very instructive when [Van Gogh] says, “I don’t invent these paintings. They already exist in nature, and I just have to free them.” That’s profound to me.

To be able to express that in a movie, in a non-didactic way, through action, through a narrative that’s constructed in a way that you just get swept up, is a beautiful thing.

My friend [the playwright] Richard Foreman quotes ... I forget who he quotes when he says this ... but he says, “Stories hide the truth.” I think there’s some truth to that. Van Gogh talked about that too — about The Sower, Jean-François Millet’s painting that he admired so much, he said, “There’s more power, there’s more truth, there’s more soul in that than any sower in the field.”

For me, that’s inspiring.

What I hope is that this movie gets seen, and wherever people respond to it, it’s for them, no matter what they do, even if they aren’t artists. It’s about ways of seeing and reconciling ecstatic states with what life is.

Alissa Wilkinson

A lot of what I loved about the film is that it’s a story about a man learning to see himself differently, through a framework of eternity.

Willem Dafoe

So much of the text —some of it’s inventive, some of it comes from his letters. But it was very good food for me. And then of course, I was painting. And I had beautiful conversations with actors who made themselves very available. That’s a beautiful place to be: to have a good conversation, and to be out in nature, and to paint.

Those were my activities on this movie. So I’m not thinking about interpreting, or expressing, or deciding, or saying who Van Gogh was. I’m not even thinking about Van Gogh. But I’m borrowing certain things from his life, to inhabit, to create something, to make something. To express a work of art, another work of art has to be made.

Alissa Wilkinson

A lot of this film was shot outdoors, in France. Some of it looked like it might not have been totally comfortable to shoot!

Willem Dafoe

Not comfortable for your body, but totally comfortable, because it guides you. But yeah, I can complain about who cold Arles was. How miserable.

We shot in all the places Van Gogh was. Saint-Rémy, that’s the actual place where he was. I’m not saying that to claim bragging rights — it just connects you. It was amazing to be in Auvers-sur-Oise, which isn’t so far from Paris. It blew my mind.

CBS Films

Here in New York City, we can go upstate, and sometimes I’m amazed. I say, “Wow, it’s so green.” And, “Wow, it’s so close to the city.” Well, there are still landscapes, in Auvers-sur-Oise, that are recognizable from Van Gogh’s paintings. Particularly in Europe, land management and usage doesn’t change as radically as it does here, because it stays in the family, or it’s protected.

I was in those landscapes, and they’re his landscapes. He was seeing many of the same things. That does connect you. It’s why we go to historic places and have a sigh, and pretend we’re those people sometimes. To imagine events, and ways of being.

Alissa Wilkinson

I’ve spent some time in the south of France, and it’s always amazing to —

Willem Dafoe

But in the warm time?

Alissa Wilkinson

Yes, for Cannes [Film Festival].

Willem Dafoe

Ah, it’s completely transformed. Arles in the winter is quite severe, and there aren’t any tourists around, and restaurants are open like one or two days a week. It’s really a different thing. And because of that solitude, and that roughness but also coziness, it felt like another time.

I would walk from the little hotel room where I was staying out to where Julian was staying, and we’d paint. It had the feel of a village. It’s hard to imagine, but it was our little village.

Alissa Wilkinson

So were you painting things of your own, during the production?

Willem Dafoe

No, I was painting — I was practicing — the things that I would paint in the movie.

Alissa Wilkinson

Which are very recognizable.

Willem Dafoe

They’re done not always for exact likeness, and many paintings were made for set dressing, because Van Gogh was living amongst his paintings. It was a beautiful thing to see. There was a whole workshop of people making, basically, forgeries for the set.

And then Julian would see them and he’d say, “Ah, that’s pretty good.” It would be a good likeness. It would look like a Van Gogh. It was a good copy. But he’d say, “It’s dead.” And then he’d get out the paint, and he’d start making marks, and the painting would come alive. It may have been less exactly like a copy of the Van Gogh, but it was more alive.

That was evidence of not only Julian’s power as an artist. But also in doing that, I could often see how marks mattered. Strategies, abandoning strategies, going toward technique and abandoning technique, all those things. It was a very concrete way to come to a better understanding of also what I was painting.

We’d start simple. He was a freak about how to hold the brush, how many brushes you could have in your hand and how to mix the colors, and keeping things neat. But working fast, you know? It was fascinating.

It was great, and scary, because I was his creature. I was his Van Gogh. So I had to inhabit it. I was the go-between, between this creation and the director.

Which is a beautiful place to be.

At Eternity’s Gate opens in theaters on November 16.

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