🇪🇸 Toca para versión en español
The upcoming San Sebastián International Film Festival will be the stage for the premiere of the new film directed by Johnny Depp, titled Modi – Three Days on the Wing of Madness. This feature film, which will not compete in the official section, is Depp’s second project as a director, following his debut in 1997 with The Brave.
The film is a biography of the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, played by Riccardo Scamarcio. The cast also includes prominent figures such as Al Pacino, Stephen Graham, and Antonia Desplat. The plot, set in Paris during World War I, narrates 72 hours of intense and chaotic events in the painter’s life, in a story that explores themes of art, love, and rejection. It will tell the story of the painter and sculptor in Paris in 1916. Considering himself a commercial and critical failure, Modigliani navigates through 48 turbulent and memorable hours that will become a turning point in his life, ultimately solidifying his reputation as an artistic legend.
The film, co-produced by In.2, Al Pacino, and Barry Navidi, will be based on the essay by Dennis McIntyre and adapted for the big screen by Jerzy and Mary Kromolowski.
“The saga about Mr. Modigliani’s life is one that I feel incredibly honored to bring to the big screen,” declared Depp, who produces for IN2 Film, the European branch of his production company Infinitum Nihil. “It was a life of great deprivation, but ultimately also of triumph. A universal human story with which all viewers will be able to identify.”
Depp, who already received the prestigious Donostia Award in the 2021 edition for his film career, returns to San Sebastián with this work that promises to be one of the main attractions of this year’s festival. The event will take place from September 20 to 28.
This wasn’t Depp’s first directing experience
At 34 years old, Depp embarked on directing a drama about misery, starring himself and the legendary Marlon Brando.
In The Brave, Johnny Depp plays Raphael, a desperate father trying to find work as quickly as possible to escape utter poverty. In a dimly lit warehouse, a mysterious character offers him enough money to drastically improve his family’s life. In return, he has to let them film his murder.
Although the critics were divided, today this feature film is considered a cult classic.
Who is Modigliani, the main character of this new film?
The artist who will bring Depp back behind the camera is none other than Amedeo Modigliani (Wikipedia), an Italian painter and sculptor whose life and works will be presented to us in the form of a biopic (biographical film).
Modigliani (Livorno, 1884 – Paris, 1929), nicknamed “El Greco of the Avant-garde,” is known for his elongated portraits and nudes. Alicia Vallina describes him very well in her article in the magazine “Descubrir el Arte”:
Like El Greco, Modigliani tries to reach the sky through his infinite figures, not neglecting to sculpt faces with sinuous elongations, with eyes of empty orbits. Sculpture brings him closer to the anthropology of the African, to the simplicity and beauty of the Greek, to the philosophy of silence in the churches where he discovers Bellini and Carpaccio.
Alicia Vallina – “Descubrir el Arte” Magazine (nº 253)
Born into a Sephardic Jewish family, he was raised among the works of philosophers like Spinoza and Nietzsche. From a young age, he also read writers such as Dante and Baudelaire. At the age of 14, he learned to paint with one of the masters of the artistic movement known as “macchiaioli”. Later, he enrolled in the Free School of the Nude (Florence) and subsequently in the Institute of the Arts (Venice).
Art and frenzy in Paris
In 1906, Modigliani decided to move to Paris, the cradle of avant-garde, where the most important artists of the time were concentrated. Painters such as Gauguin, Cézanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec changed his artistic perspective. The latter, known for his nudes done behind the scenes in the most exclusive Parisian cabarets, awakened his passion for painting the female body.
You can’t make love with a cube.
Modigliani about Picasso’s artwork, on his first steps into cubism.
Jeanne, his muse until death
Although his nudes were the subject of various women, his great muse was Jeanne Hébuterne, a painting student and bourgeois whose family disowned her for having a romantic relationship with the painter. He never painted her nude.
Modigliani was taken years later by tuberculosis. Hours after his death, Jeanne, pregnant with their second child, threw herself from the fifth floor of the house they lived in.
Like most artists, Modigliani gained posthumous fame, his works becoming more recognized after his death.
What did you think of the article? We are eager to know about this artist’s life through the eyes of Johnny Depp. Tell us your opinion in the comments: