Antonia Desplat discusses Johnny Depp’s anti-biopic ‘Modigliani, Three Days on the Wing of Madness’
“It is an anti-biopic. It is not a biopic. You will not learn a lot about art. That is not the point.”
As far as opening statements on the nature of a film go, Modigliani, Three Days on the Wing of Madness star Antonia Desplat’s impassioned “anti-biopic” definition is undeniably intriguing.
After all, the movie is based on the life of Amedeo Modigliani, an Italian painter and sculptor who primarily lived and worked in Paris from 1906 until his death from tubercular meningitis in 1920; on the surface, it looks very much like a biopic. As Desplat insists, though, that descriptor is useless for a film that focuses on only three chaotic days in Modigliani’s life, and shows him making very little art.
“You will learn a lot about the being of an artist and the state of mind of a very sick and tortured man,” insists Desplat, the 30-year-old star who plays the English writer Beatrice Hastings in the movie. “I think the film is trying to give you an understanding of what it is to be an artist in that time who is struggling with so much rejection, and also with the sickness that’s taking over his life, and ultimately will end his life very soon after the film takes place. So, do not expect a structured biopic, because that’s not what the film is.”
For Desplat, a French star on the rise whose recent credits include the horror movie Witchboard and episodes of Netflix’s The Sandman and BBC’s The Gold, being cast in Modigliani sometimes feels like it was written in the stars. For starters, she grew up in Montparnasse, the area of Paris in which Modigliani rented an art studio. Even more incredibly, her childhood home was the same house that Constantin Brâncuși, a Romanian sculptor whom Modigliani studied under for a year, lived in. The icing on a particularly astonishing cake is that Hastings lived in the house next door, and in her diary, she wrote, “I’m playing piano, and I hope Brâncuși doesn’t mind”.
Amazingly, the team behind Modigliani had no idea that the actor they wanted for the role of Hastings actually grew up in the house next door to her, 70 years down the line. “This is kind of crazy to me,” Desplat laughed, “When I read the script, I said to my team, ‘Guys, you have no idea how much this is very close to home’.”
Naturally, by virtue of where she grew up and the fact that her parents loved that period of art history, Desplat was aware of the broad strokes of Modigliani’s story. He was a painter known for modern portraits and nudes, and he dedicated himself entirely to sculpture between 1909 and 1914. Within a year of arriving in Paris as a penniless artist, he became a “prince of vagabonds” and an alcoholic drug addict whose studio was most often in a state of disarray. Still, he worked at a furious pace, and after he died at age 35, his work finally experienced the success it never attained in his lifetime.
“My parents had a copy of this postcard,” Desplat recalls with a wistful smile, “a photograph of the card that Modigliani had written to our address, and Brâncuși, saying in French, ‘My dear Bronx, I will be soon in Paris again. I can’t wait to share time with you again. Love, your friend, Madri’. That was always in my house.”
Extraordinarily, this sense of being fated to play Hastings gained even more steam when Desplat was invited to a Zoom meeting to talk with the project’s director: Hollywood’s most famous artsy bohemian spirit, Johnny Depp. He loved what Desplat had done with her audition tape and soon became convinced she was the perfect person to play Hastings, a woman who wrote for the British magazine, The New Age, while living in Paris and having torrid affairs, including one with Modigliani.
Desplat and Depp spoke nonstop for two hours, discovering they had several things in common. For one, she starred in the AppleTV+ series Shantaram, based on a 2003 novel, which Depp had previously been attached to make as a film “for 14 years or something like that”. In addition, she and the Pirates of the Caribbean star bonded over smoking the same brown Rizla papers, although she has since given up the habit. “There were so many little things that were like, ‘Oh, this feels quite aligned’,” she noted, adding, “There’s a saying in French that it’s ‘underground rivers’, which I love because it’s a nice little metaphor. All these underground rivers that make things align.”
Modigliani was an enormous undertaking for Depp, who has only directed one previous film—1997’s neo-western, The Brave—and, by his own admission, had a pretty terrible time doing it. According to Desplat, though, he showed no ill effects of that bad experience while making Modigliani, and went out of his way to foster a creative environment that made everyone working on the film feel equal. Overall, it made for an experience unlike anything she’s previously had in her career.
“It was definitely different, because he’s bloody Johnny Depp,” the actor laughed. “He’s the best actor of all time, so having Johnny Depp as your director is already completely crazy. But he had so much fun. Honestly, we all had so much fun doing this film. He brought so much joy, passion, and space for us to have fun, create, fail, try things, discuss scenes, and rewrite scenes with him.”
Desplat remembers many days spent in Depp’s trailer with star Riccardo Scamarcio, of John Wick: Chapter 2 fame, who played Modigliani, as their “happy family” talked through that day’s scenes, spit-balling ideas, and changing things on the fly when inspiration struck. “I love them all so much,” she gushed, “and never did I feel like there was a producer and a director. It just felt like it was a group of fun, passionate people who wanted to make a great film.”
Ultimately, this made it an easy choice to go to set every day for the three months she was in Budapest, even though she only had 14 shooting days on paper.
In truth, Desplat half-expected to feel at least some degree of impostor syndrome with the movie, because she admitted, “It can be so intimidating to think, ‘Oh, my God, Johnny Depp is watching me act. I hope he thinks I’m a good actress'”.
Instead, she never once felt that way because of the “supportive” and “caring” environment the veteran star upheld, and it made for “an experience I’ll never, ever forget”. By the end of the shoot, Depp told her she “brought so much” to his film, and she admitted his words, “will stay in my heart forever, because it means so much to me”.
One of the other “pinch me” aspects of the film for Desplat was meeting Al Pacino, who plays the Polish art dealer Léopold Zborowski. She didn’t have any scenes with him, but one of the producers hooked her up with the iconic Godfather star afterwards. “We’ve been having dinner whenever I’m in LA,” she smiled, a twinkle in her eye, adding gleefully, “I have dinner on Thursday evenings with Mr Al Pacino.”
When asked if Pacino is as eccentric in person as his reputation suggests, Desplat emphatically shook her head. “He was really shy and quite discreet, if anything,” she insisted. “He’s the most humble, shy, sweet, and intellectual man. He’s not the type of actor who takes space and only talks about himself. But, yeah, he’s a genius.”
Overall, Modigliani was a transformative experience for Desplat, and her career now feels like it is on the precipice of something huge. Next up, she is playing the lead in an Italian TV show, of which she can say very little beyond beaming, “I’m really excited about that. It’s my first job in Italian, so I’m happy to open doors in the Italian cinema for myself”. This will be the fourth language Desplat has performed in, but even though she was born and raised in France, she finds English the easiest because she has been an honorary Briton for 15 years.
“I’ve been here longer than I have in France,” she acknowledged, “I trained in English, I read in English, I write my diary in English, I dream in English. I live in London. It’s definitely the easiest thing for me.” Nowadays, when she works in her native tongue, it’s almost like she has to relearn the language, and she admitted, “It’s getting easier, but it’s a different pronunciation. And, like, the consonants are very strong in French, and sometimes I find myself being quite lazy with them.”
With a rueful shake of the head and grin, she concluded, “It’s funny because it’s my mother tongue, but it’s kind of…upset.”
Still, despite the fact that it can be difficult to switch between languages constantly, not to mention the challenge of learning a new one like Italian, which she’s “never studied”, Desplat insists it’s all part and parcel of being an actor. “I don’t like to stay in a comfort zone,” she insisted, asking, “Why? Why exist? I’m all in for a challenge. That’s what makes this job incredibly thrilling and exciting.”
Looking to the future, she has a list of directors on her bucket list to work with, including Steven Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve, and Justin Kurzel. She particularly loved Kurzel’s version of Macbeth from 2015, and admitted that playing Lady Macbeth is one of her dream roles. “I’d love to play Lady Macbeth on stage,” she gushed. “I love the stage. I really do. And I love Shakespeare. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to train in England in the first place.”
One director whom she would love to work with again, after years of avoiding it, is Wes Anderson. You see, despite enjoying small roles in The French Dispatch and The Phoenician Scheme, she’s spent years running away from any connection to Anderson’s work because her father, the Oscar-winning composer Alexandre, is his regular musical collaborator.
For the longest time, she felt the pressure of being the daughter of a famous composer and tried to hide it when she attended drama school in London. “I tried so hard not to mention who my dad is,” she confessed. “I left Paris because I didn’t want to be ‘a daughter of Paris’; there’s a lot of that world. I tried to shoot myself in the foot, and give myself as much difficulty as possible to try to prove that I didn’t have it easy.”
In truth, Desplat’s father didn’t hit the big time until she was 14, so she argues that she “never grew up with whatever people’s assumption is. We had a very simple upbringing”. Nevertheless, over the years, the “nepo baby” accusation caused her a lot of angst, until she decided not to let it hurt her anymore. Being cast in Modigliani gave her tremendous confidence in her own abilities, and she remembers telling herself, “Ok, there you go. You wanted that, and you got it. You worked really hard”.
Then, when the opportunity came to join The Phoenician Scheme, she first thought, “Oh, my dad’s doing the music. It’s everything I never wanted to do”. But then that Modigliani-fuelled self-belief kicked in, and she was adamant, “I’ve done enough jobs on my own to be like, ‘Well, my dad had nothing to do with it’. I’m done trying to feel guilty about it. I’ve proved enough to be at peace with where I stand.”
Modigliani, Three Days on the Wing of Madness, is available on UK streaming/digital platforms now.
