A Brush with Genius Doctor Who Confidential


A Brush with Genius

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This week, the Doctor and Amy take in a bit of culture and team up

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with Vincent Van Gogh.

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Come on, capture my mystery!

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Maybe you've had enough coffee now.

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And we canvas Richard Curtis about his latest work.

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I think if you're going to write something about an artist, Van Gogh is the most accessible artist.

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The cast and crew go forth to Croatia, with a cunning plan to reproduce a Van Gogh painting.

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We brush up on our art history in LA, with actor Tony Curran.

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If you stare at this long enough, you do lose yourself in it.

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Episode 10 tackles a problem,

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and a situation, more heartbreaking than probably we have ever encountered before.

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At the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff,

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the Doctor Who crew are setting the scene

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for a very unusual art class.

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Morning.

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Action. And action.

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So, this is one of the last paintings Van Gogh ever painted.

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Those final months of his life were probably the most astonishing artistic outpouring in history.

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It was like Shakespeare knocking off Othello, Macbeth and King Lear over the summer hols.

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The Doctor travels to the Musee d'Orsay and sees

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in a Van Gogh painting a monster peering out,

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and realises he has to go and talk to Vincent Van Gogh.

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-Wait a minute.

-What?

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-Well, just look at that.

-What?

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Something very not good indeed.

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Look, there, in the window of the Church.

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-Is it a face?

-Yes.

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And not a nice face at all.

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We were very lucky to get Bill Nighy to play the part of Dr Black,

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because he is somebody who you pay attention to.

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We needed people to listen to what he was saying about Vincent Van Gogh,

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pick up some of the relevant facts that were going to be important in the story.

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Sorry, everyone, routine inspection, Ministry of Art and...Artiness.

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-So, erm...

-Dr Black.

-Yes, that's right.

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Do you know when that picture was painted?

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Ah, well, what an interesting question...

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-I'm going to have to hurry you, when was it?

-Exactly...

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As exactly as you can - I'm in a hurry.

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Well, in that case, probably somewhere between 1st and 3rd June.

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-What year?

-1890, less than a year before he... killed himself.

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We have Richard Curtis writing episode 10, which is so exciting.

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He has written a fantastic episode about Van Gogh, and it is actually really quite different.

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It has always been an idea I loved,

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just sitting there in the back of my mind.

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So, the moment I started thinking about Dr Who, I thought, oh, I have got this story I would

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like to tell, because Van Gogh is pretty well the only really, really famous artist, almost in any medium,

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who had no acknowledgement whatsoever during his lifetime.

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I'm also interested in sort of depression, and the price you pay for that. So I'm interested in him

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as a human being, as an artist, and then I had this idea where I loved the thought of making him happy.

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Along with a flat pack Tardis, the cast and crew travelled to Croatia

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to recreate the French region of Provence.

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The job of manning the TARDIS during this 1,400-mile-long journey

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was given to facilities co-ordinator, Bob Gurney.

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How many miles left, Bob?

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509. It's a long, long way.

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Here we are in Croatia, filming episode 10, Vincent and the Doctor.

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There is this really cool scene, that's set in one of Van Gogh's paintings, the Cafe Terrace.

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So, they made up this cafe to look like the painting.

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And it just looked incredible. It really did look like the painting.

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In the scene I have a little book of all Van Gogh's paintings,

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and I was just holding it up to the scene, and it was just exactly the same, it was really cool.

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He will probably be in the local cafe.

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Sort of orangey-light chairs and tables outside.

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-Like this?

-That's the one.

-Or indeed like that.

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Yes.

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Creating Van Gogh's night cafe for the Doctor and

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Amy's first encounter with Vincent took more than just orangey light and a few tables and chairs outside.

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Searching for the right location and transforming it

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for this scene proved to be a complicated assignment for the art department.

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Creating the cafe was quite a long-winded process.

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We went around Croatia about four or five times,

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with a postcard book and a laptop with the image of the Cafe Terrace.

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And we eventually found it, and we were very pleased about how it ended up.

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We obviously had to put a big awning up.

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We had to change the windows, we had to do in-fills for the windows

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and the door, and also make a platform to put the chairs and tables on.

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And there's another blue doorway which we married in as well.

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And obviously, just a bit of foliage.

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Just matched up the painting as best we could.

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One painting for one drink, that's not a bad deal!

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It wouldn't be a bad deal if it were any good.

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I can't put that up on my wall, it would scare the customers half to death.

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Bad enough you being here in person, let alone

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looming over the customers day and night with a stupid hat.

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-You pay your money or you get out.

-I'll pay.

-What?

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Well, if you like, I'll pay for the drink.

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To paint a better portrait of the real Vincent Van Gogh,

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Dr Who Confidential joined Tony Curran at the Getty Museum in LA,

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to meet up with curator Scott Allan,

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and take a look at one of Van Gogh's most famous masterpieces.

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But California itself, it is an incredible state.

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And just to come up to the Getty here,

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I come up here quite often, just to...

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look at the art work,

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but it's an incredible place just to be, just to relax.

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Situated in the hills of Santa Monica,

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the John Paul Getty Museum owns and exhibits important major art works,

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and is home to one of the most valued Van Gogh paintings,

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the Irises.

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This was painted maybe about a year and a few months before he died.

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This painting was done at a particularly...

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-Low point, yes.

-..critical and poignant time in his life.

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In December of 1888, about five or six months before he painted this,

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there was that infamous episode in the south of France,

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where he cut his ear. He was hospitalised.

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He had a few more bad episodes in the coming months, and eventually,

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just out of his own fear of his encroaching mental illness,

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he checked himself in.

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-In many ways, part of his therapy was his painting.

-Absolutely.

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And the garden was one of, you know, a little corner of nature

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that was readily available to him in the asylum.

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And for the first month or so, he wasn't going outside the walls.

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So you can just imagine him encountering this little patch of flowers.

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He was in the asylum for one year, and he painted 130 canvases.

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So that is a lot, that averages, you know,

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a picture every two or three days. So he is painting fast.

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If you stare at this long enough,

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you really... It's wonderful,

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you do lose yourself in it, I find, anyway.

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I mean, you look at it in the context of the gallery,

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and the painting pops off the wall, compared to everything else, the intensity of the colours,

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and also the really sharp, graphic quality that everything is drawn with.

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-Thank you.

-All right, pleasure.

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All that remains for the Doctor and Amy to do

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is to show Vincent what becomes of his art in the future.

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-Where are we?

-Paris, 2010 AD and this is the mighty Musee d'Orsay,

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home to many of the greatest paintings in history.

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Because it was such an emotional, high point of the story,

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it was important to find a way of conveying

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exactly how this would impact on Vincent Van Gogh.

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To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence

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was not only the world's greatest artist, but also

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one of the greatest men who ever lived.

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I think he definitely would have been overjoyed to see

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that people appreciated his work, most definitely.

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Thank you, sir. Thank you.

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You're welcome.

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If you're going to write something about an artist,

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Van Gogh is the most accessible artist.

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That's one of the things that makes him loved.

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I think it's a brilliant depiction of depression,

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but it's at the heart of a wonderful, glorious, life-affirming Doctor Who fable.

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The only thing which might slightly seem complicated or oblique to a younger viewer

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would be the question of having a thought about mental illness.

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But it's such a big subject in our society,

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one in four people suffer from depression at some point in their lives.

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Maybe it's not a bad idea to try and introduce it young.

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We have here the last work of Vincent Van Gogh,

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who committed suicide at only 37.

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If anybody who watched it has gone away with that understanding,

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that they have to be considerate and patient and interested in people who have mental complexities,

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then that would be great to me.

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The real meat of the story is the Doctor meeting someone he can't save

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because he can't save people from themselves.

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That's beyond his power.

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Even though he can at times re-write time as Amy wants him to at the end,

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he cannot do it this time because, simply,

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the demons that assail Vincent are far beyond the Doctor's reach.

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That is very much what Richard wanted to write about and I think,

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daringly and beautifully, that's what's realised

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in this absolutely heartbreaking final scenes.

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Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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