FLOW THROUGH ME

AT ETERNITY’S GATE IS A PORTRAIT OF Vincent van Gogh during the last and most prolific years of his life. It is directed by Julian Schnabel, himself a painter, and stars Willem Dafoe. The film is so much a collaboration that I hesitate to designate it Schnabel’s alone. Together, Schnabel and Dafoe, who is in virtually every frame, have made the first convincing and illuminating non-documentary film about what great painters do and how they see, and for his efforts, Dafoe won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. Since 1980, he has appeared in over 100 films and has been nominated for three Supporting Actor Oscars. He began in the theater as a founding member of the experimental company The Wooster Group. While bringing the group’s physical approach to character to his screen work, he has never fallen into staginess. His characters, of which van Gogh is among the most visionary, inhabit the screen as if it could be a portal to infinite possibilities for transformation and for touching the real.

I was looking at an interview we did in 2000 around E. Elias Merhige’s . You were explaining what you do when you act. You said: “My impulses are the impulses of a child because I like being the thing itself. My real pleasure—where I feel vital and everything drops away—is when I’m in the middle of doing it, and I look for that pleasure untainted by