SCENE 1 — The announcement that someone is making a film about an artist is never met with enthusiasm in my household. There have been too many horrors. Films about artists are invariably a cultural mistake — melodramatic, overwrought, inaccurate, irritating. The spectacle of Ed Harris sweating and trembling his way through the Jackson Pollock movie, or Willem Dafoe pretending so earnestly to be Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s histrionic At Eternity’s Gate, or — worst of all — Salma Hayek pouting and shouting from bed to bed in her outstandingly vain tribute to Frida Kahlo makes my mind shudder and my soul squirm.
So the news that Johnny Depp was directing a film about Modigliani did not fill me with vim. To be frank, it worried me.
You can, of course, see immediately why Depp would wish to make a film about Modi. While Depp is a rebellious cultural icon, a notorious womaniser, a practised drinker and a famed dabbler in mixed narcotics, Modigliani was a rebellious cultural icon, a notorious womaniser, a practised drinker and a famed dabbler in mixed narcotics. The fear here was that Modigliani — Three Days on the Wing of Madness was more a case of looking in the mirror than a film about a complex artistic giant.
But that is not how it turned out. Not at all. Depp’s Modigliani storm starts out as a comedy and ends up as a twilit rumination on the meaninglessness of life, but between these far-flung poles it attempts complicated things as it tussles with deep ideas about being an artist. It’s ambitious, beautiful to look at, courageous in its direction and, above all, deceptive.
Plenty of viewers will emerge from a showing thinking they have seen a repeat of the one about the mad artist who drank too much, screwed too much, died too young and sold too little. But, actually, they haven’t. What’s really happening here is that someone twisty — stand up for your bow, Johnny —has set out to remind us that life is precious and unique, and that it needs to be lived, not survived. Artists are merely a magnifying glass through which we can see and enjoy the enlarged textures of our own existence. Live every day. Taste every mouthful.
This mindfulness is not immediately obvious. At the beginning of the film we appear to have strayed into a Keystone Kops moment as a cheeky Modi, played with heavyweight Italian charm by Riccardo Scamarcio, insults a French general in a café and escapes the chasing crowd of enraged bourgeoisie by breaking through a stained glass window. Off he scarpers into the drunken Parisian night in what feels like the start of a caper.
The sense of parody is heightened by a directorial decision to present the chase scene in flickering black-and-white, which puts quotation marks round it and signals that we are in the world of symbolic cinema truths. Artistic biopics are always sweaty and thunderous. This one seems immediately determined to change the rules. And that’s what happens.
Modigliani’s life was dramatic. Born of Jewish parents in the off-the-map Italian town of Livorno, in 1884, he contracted a particularly virulent form of tuberculosis in his teens and spent the rest of his life coughing, until his death at the age of 35. All he wanted was to be an artist. So the Fates relented and made it happen.
Arriving in Paris in 1906, he took a year to transform himself from a skilled Renaissance draughtsman to a drunken Montmartre vagabond, gulping down modernity in greedy mouthfuls, careering through the nocturnal hotspots of Paris high on hash and absinthe, bedding every woman who came near him. This one-way dodgem ride to destruction ended in the blackest of ways when the tuberculosis killed him in 1920. The next day, his partner at the time, a sensitive art student called Jeanne Hébuterne whom he had been painting and immortalising obsessively for two years, and who was eight months pregnant with their second child, killed herself by jumping out of a fifth-floor window.
None of this is in the film. Indeed, Depp’s Modigliani is as remarkable for what it omits as it is for what it includes. Instead, in what qualifies as a magnificent resistance of temptation, the movie concentrates its action to just three chaotic days in the painter’s life centred on the visit to Paris of a rich collector, played by a superbly grumbly Al Pacino, during which Scamarcio’s Modigliani keeps banging himself over the head — and keeps banging us over the head too — with the huge question: what does it mean to be an artist?
SCENE II — Out of the blue, I get a text message from Depp’s man asking me if I would like to moderate a conversation at Tate Modern between Depp and Scamarcio about the film.
Why me? Well, Johnny is big fan of your films, the text says, he’s learnt a lot about art from them and — as I later find out — he likes to fall asleep in Tunbridge Wells, where he now lives, watching them. So I’m Johnny Depp’s Ovaltine? Yup.
And that’s how he, Riccardo Scamarcio, Polly Morgan (the fiercely talented post-YBA who works with stuffed animals) and I end up sneaking into Tate Modern at night before an invited audience to fret our way round the vexed question of what being an artist actually means.
I start probing immediately, turn to Depp and ask what it was about Modigliani, the rebel, the womaniser, who drank too much and took too many drugs, that attracted Depp to him. It gets a laugh, especially from Depp. Then off he goes, unstoppably, a steamroller with the soul of a butterfly.
“God only knows. It’s a mystery to me and it will remain so for ever. Why my attraction to the likes of Amedeo Modigliani? But also Baudelaire. Why do we love him? Why do you love Edgar Allan Poe? Why do we love Van Gogh? Why do we love these artists who had, let’s say, no choice in the matter? It wasn’t, ‘I’m going to be an artist or I’m gonna be a painter or I’ll be a this or a that.’ No. There’s a desperation. Something happens to these people. They find the only thing that keeps us all alive — which is purpose. I have a reason. I have a purpose.
“For centuries and centuries, there have been artists who felt something else. Something more. I see it consistently in some of the people that I’ve known in my life. People I’ve been very, very honoured to meet. And it’ll never make sense to me. How did Hunter S Thompson come into my life and allow me to learn from him? How did Marlon Brando allow me to come into his life and learn from him on so many levels? How did Jeff Beck allow me into his world? How did Patti Smith? Or Allen Ginsberg?
“I’ve been very, very blessed in terms of meeting my heroes. And I have never been let down by each and every one of them. So where does it go? I can take it straight back to one line that opens the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was published in 1971. I didn’t understand that line, until I had spent, let’s call it an admirable amount of time with Hunter — without going to prison.
“So the line is simply this — and this is Dr Johnson, Samuel Johnson: ‘He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.’ I’m not saying it’s just for a man, let’s be clear … A human, an individual. A hypersensitive being. And that is exactly the people I’ve known: hyper, hypersensitive.”
One question from me. All the answers. Embrace your primal instincts and existence becomes bearable. For the next hour the conversation meanders this way and that. Scamarcio joins in with excellent memories of how Depp would rewrite the scripts and present him in the morning with 28 pages of new dialogue. Morgan tells us what being an artist means to her, and chides Depp and Scamarcio for breaking all the crockery in the film and forgetting that someone, a woman probably, has to clean up after them while they live their artistic lives.
It’s all taken with good humour and at a merry lick. Because the truth is already out there. Being an artist is having a purpose. And never swaying from it. Keep going till you’ve said it, like Johnny Depp answering a question.
Modigliani — Three Days on the Wing of Madness is in cinemas July 11. Special previews will take place in cinemas nationwide on July 10, including a discussion with Waldemar, Johnny Depp, Riccardo Scamarcio and artist Polly Morgan, recorded at Tate Modern