You guessed it! All the Vincent Van Gogh paintings in the new film “At Eternity’s Gate” are made by the filmmaker-artist, Julian Schnabel.
And in fact, he made all the self-portraits look more like the actor, Willem Dafoe, than Van Gogh himself.
The biopic film made its recent debut at the Venice Film Festival, but it’s more than “just another biopic” of the Dutch painter who already has 35 films about him. Rather, Schnabel and the team take controversial facts around his death and poses ‘what if’ scenarios on the last few days of how it all ended for the artist.
Van Gogh, who died of a bullet wound at 37, had a long history of mental illness and many believe it was a suicide.
Not Schnabel, who claims he was killed. “I don’t care if he killed himself or not, that is irrelevant to me,” Schnabel said. “Nobody was there.” The film travels next to the New York Film Festival, and many places thereafter.
Text by Nadja Sayej
Photos via variety
