Original subtitles

I was brought up in Bytom,

which is in the south of Poland.

It's a region called Silesia.

It's a mining district.

And I was brought up by my grandmother in communism.

When I was around 14

I wanted to sign up to the theater club,

and I went there to sign up to the theater club

and the tutor, she was sick.

They offered me to sign up to the art, to painting club,

so I did that,

and I met people there that I really liked

and I actually discovered

that I really liked painting and drawing.

This is how it all started and I,

that's how I got into the art high school.

We had like this very close group of friends.

- We had also a lot of luck when it come to our professors.

Our art history teacher enabled us

to have our first proper and tangible meeting

with important basics of art.

- She used to take us for excursions

during school time and also on holidays

we used to go together to see museums all over Europe.

- Where, amongst others, we learned about Vincent Van Gogh.

- After high school, some of use stayed with

and carried on the same education,

went to a fine arts academy.

- Dorota, as long as I can remember,

always wanted to take on directing.

I think her love for it came from her grandfather.

Whenever she visited her family home in Bytom,

they would go to cinema together

and later had a discussion about film classics.

- One of my best friends, Kamil,

he went to film school and he came back always

with amazing stories and on some point

he got me involved with his films and his projects,

which, for me, it was just incredible.

It was kind of like a back door to film school.

Kamil invited me to work on his film Switez.

With Switez I was working on concept art,

on animatic, on animation, on texturing in 3D.

So all sorts of things.

After a few months, all of a sudden,

all the work on Switez were stopped.

Kamil just disappeared.

I was alone in the city that I didn't know anyone,

and I didn't have much to do

because I went there just to work on Kamil's film.

And when he disappeared I decided just to wait around

and wait for him, so I started painting,

and all of a sudden, he did come back,

and he met with me and then I realized

we have to take a break from Switez.

He needed a break and he just advised me to,

instead of waiting around for the other's people project,

to start my own project.

And I think that was really good advice

and I took it, and I started working on my own idea.

But on the other hand I really missed painting

and I felt that would be amazing

to actually combine these things.

And I think it took me around two weeks, maybe,

to decide what I'm gonna do

and that I'm gonna paint a film

and at first that is all I knew.

That I wanted to do a painting animation

and it would be a seven minute short film

that I would paint entirely by myself.

I was thinking about bringing my own paintings to life.

I was thinking about telling a fictional story

in the style of a famous painter,

and then I was also wondering whether

I could actually bring a famous artist's paintings to life

to tell their own story.

And as soon as I had thought that,

then I knew I would make a film about Vincent Van Gogh.

I vividly remember as a teenager at art school

being overwhelmed by both Vincent's work,

and also by the tragic sadness of his short life.

And I think that the fact that he started painting at 29

after having failed several professions

meant that I identified with him even more,

as that was the exact age I was

when I was coming up with the idea for the film.

Vincent's bravery in starting over at 29,

in throwing himself into a profession

he had no training in,

in believing that he could make art

that would touch people, help them even, was inspiring.

So I decided that I wanted to tell his story,

and tell it through his own paintings.

You don't get artist who paints so much and so personally.

He painted the world around him.

His room, his shoes,

the food he ate, the friends he spoke to.

So that's why it had to be Vincent.

I had to wait for three months to get the production started

and get the money, and so I had this three months

and then someone in Lodz,

he recommended me in BreakThru to Hugh.

So I thought that's amazing opportunity

and I went to Lodz to work on the project.

- I've been working in film and animation

for 20 years.

I started off going to film school.

After I left film school I set up my company,

BreakThru films, 17 years ago.

Before Loving Vincent, I was best known for

producing a film called Peter and the Wolf

which I won an Oscar for in 2008,

and after that I had another fairly big production

which was the Magic Piano.

Because of that project, I crossed paths

with a very talented woman called Dorota Kobiela.

- BreakThru, they were looking for a concept artist

and someone for animatic.

- A very unintended consequence of hiring her

was that we almost instantly fell in love.

- Hugh fell in love, not only with me,

but also with my project.

- It's not often that you feel that you see something

that's very fresh, that's very new, that's very exciting.

First it wasn't because of Vincent Van Gogh

because I didn't really know that much about him

at the beginning.

And then, as I started reading the books

that we had lying about our flat,

I became more fascinated.

And I was shocked when I found out

that Vincent had only started painting at 29

after failing at four other careers.

I'd always assumed he'd been a gifted artist

from a young age, like other geniuses,

yet Vincent's first encounter with art

was when he joined his uncle's art dealership,

and despite working very hard there

and despite his family connections,

he was sacked because of his inability

to deal with customers.

He subsequently tried to be a teacher

and then a bookstore clerk,

and finally he tried to be a preacher like his father,

but was thrown out of his own church

for being overly religious.

This ended him up in a barn

in a desperately poor mining region in Belgium,

subsisting only off bread

and doing nothing but reading books.

And at that low point he decided to gamble everything

on becoming an artist, and with the support of his brother

who was financing him and believed in him to do this,

he threw himself entirely

into becoming an artist,

and I think his extraordinary passion and emotion

was really what got me hooked on Loving Vincent.

- So it's fair to say that Hugh definitely became

interested in Vincent's life later on,

but at first it wasn't until our third date

that we talked about my project properly.

- In a bar called Kaliska in Lodz.

Through a night of tequilas, Dorota told me

six different stories in terms of the directions

that Loving Vincent could go into.

And this was at the stage when it was still a short film.

But even then, I think what we were both

most fascinated by was Vincent's final days.

How Vincent was in his final days.

- What was going through his mind?

Because by this point,

Vincent was beginning to have some success.

- And things seemed to be going well for him,

well, for the first time in his adult life almost.

And yet this was the time that he killed himself,

and that mystery really hooked us.

We had a few discussions about the possibility

of making it into a feature film.

- I thought it was a crazy idea.

Unlike Hugh, I'm a painter and an animator

and so I knew how much work it would be

to make a painting animation feature.

It would take an entire lifetime to paint.

- We knew that it was a very big undertaking.

To go from doing a seven minute film

that's fully painted by hand,

to doing an 80, 90 minute film

that's fully painted, was a huge change

and requiring a totally different outlook.

For me, anyway, the final straw in terms of going,

okay, let's do it, let's make a feature film,

was when I visited an exhibition in London

about his letters.

And that was a queue for three and a half hours

to get into this exhibition and I thought,

if people will queue up for three and a half hours,

this man is so popular that it has to be a feature film.

We have to give it the opportunity

for as many people to see it as possible.

So I went back to Dorota and I said look,

whatever it takes, we have to take the leap

and make this as a feature film.

While we were doing Magic Piano

we were traveling around the world quite a lot.

- It was great.

I was taking it all in.

Painting, sketching, visiting museums.

But then we stopped traveling

and I was faced with the reality of having

to turn my seven minute script into an 80 minute script.

I was confident about how I wanted the film to look

and about how we would animate the film.

But writing the script, that was scary.

I didn't know how to start.

I felt lost.

So I went through a period of binge-watching films

and thinking about and analyzing their story structure.

After that, I ordered every recommended script writing book

I could, and I started reading.

This gave me enough inspiration and enough tools,

and soon I was so absorbed by the story

that I forgot about my fears

and we began shaping the script.

- One of the things that I struggled with

was exactly how would this look

and what kind of feeling would it give to audiences?

Dorota would go oh, well it's gonna look like this,

it's gonna look like that.

And we got to a point where I thought,

let's stop talking about it, let's just do a test.

And that's when we came up with the idea

of the concept trailer.

With the concept trailer, we shot it with our friends

instead of actors.

We shot it with white bedsheets

instead of like, green screens.

So we found these four oil painters

who we were gonna try and train

for the concept trailer to be painting animators.

And essentially they were our guinea pigs.

- I worked on the first trailer,

but because I couldn't move to the free city,

I painted from home in Warsaw.

And the first animated Armand Roulin

that appears on the trailer, was done here in my flat.

- Hugh brought a couple of people over

from BreakThru and we had our team assembled

ready to start production on the trailer.

- Other than the material for the trailer,

we also shoot some material for tests.

We drove down to a barn

in extremely cold weather.

We dressed up just to see what it would look like

and how it will be to animate more dynamic scenes,

including one where I was a young boy in a cowboy suit

who could be Vincent potential here.

- If we could train those painters

to become painting animators during the time scale

of the concept trailer, then we knew

it was something we could replicate on a bigger scale.

- Eight years.

860 paintings.

1,026 drawings.

800 letters.

20 people telling the story of one man.

- He works til late,

get up before six.

He was happy here.

He was.

- Everybody rejected him.

- Until he started hanging around

with the Gachet's.

- On the wall he wrote a message in his own blood.

You know what he writes?

I'm the holy spirit.

- Well, the truth is, we cannot speak other

than by our paintings.

With a handshake, your loving Vincent.

- When we got to the end of that process,

how I felt about it was that I hadn't really seen

anything like it before.

I was very excited.

I was very keen to show it to people.

And two of the first people I showed it to

was Sean Bobbitt, who then immediately came on board

as a shareholder in BreakThru

and also as a producer on the film.

- He came to me and he showed me a trailer

for the next film that he was planning on doing,

Loving Vincent, and I immediately fell in love with it.

I mean, it was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

And I just said yes, I definitely wanna be a part of this.

- And the other person I showed it to

who had exactly the same reaction was Ivan Mactaggart

from Trademark Films.

- It's an animation about Vincent Van Gogh.

And I said, well let me stop you there

because we don't do animation.

And he said just watch this 90 second concept trailer

that we've made.

He pulled out his iPad and he sets it going,

and I watched, transfixed for 90 seconds,

and at the end of it said, okay, now we do do animation.

Where do we sign?

- And then you know, as things progressed

we needed to have a serious kind of base for the film.

We then moved to Gdansk.

We moved to GPNT Business center

and we had this huge empty space,

2,000 square meters, and there was five of us

rattling around in this enormous space.

So we had a badminton court, we had our roller blades.

We were gonna not only fill

all of that space in time,

but we'd need to have much more.

- While we were making the concept trailer,

it was taking us at least two hours

to paint a single frame.

We knew we had to find a way to cut the time

in order to make it efficient enough

to create a whole film in the same way.

- Our first work station for painters was very homemade.

An easel, a camera, projector, IKEA shelving unit,

a tripod, two computers, and a memory stick.

My job was to come up with something better

to help animators to be able to animate more efficiently.

So we came up with painting animation work station.

In addition, parts could minimize

the amount of things that could go wrong

during the animation.

- So I think in the very beginning,

Piotr was doing three hours a frame on our first set up,

and, you know, by the time we got him into

our painting animation works station,

our PAWS version 3.0, we had cut it in half

to one and a half hours.

- It took us five days to assemble the first

30 animation work stations,

and after that, we were ready for the first painters test.

- We went through a very careful process

of selecting the right paint.

We compared a number of major brands

and paid attention to the quality of the paint,

the differences in color, but also affordability.

And in the end, the best option

ended up being Van Gogh.

- With painting animation work stations set up

and paints chosen, the only thing missing

was to have enough good painting animators.

- In the case of Loving Vincent,

there weren't painting animators

or there certainly weren't enough painting animators

that were out there in the whole world

to come and work on this film.

So we had to create a work force from scratch.

We had to take brilliant painters

and convert them into painting animators.

- We had more than 1,000 portfolios

submitted just from Polish artists.

We ran three day tests in three cities in Poland

just for more than 300 of them.

From these, we selected 60 for training

of whom 40 joined the film.

- I had a three day test in Lodz,

after which I waited for a call from BreakThru.

Then after some time we brought back two times

where we went through a six week training course.

- After the training, those who were accepted

were invited to start design process for the film.

- We did 157 design paintings in total.

These were crucial for precisely defining

the look of the film.

The animators all had to follow the colors,

the style of the brush strokes,

and the feel of the design paintings.

Without them it wouldn't have been possible

to keep the painting animation consistent.

While we were designing the look of the film,

we also had to start animation tests,

but we needed to have material for the painters to test on.

We decided to dress up as the characters from the paintings.

It was great fun.

We just rented the costumes,

I dressed up as Marguerite Gachet,

Hugh dressed up as a post man.

- My friend wouldn't kill himself.

- Together we got funds from Kickstarter

and from the unemployment agency

and that allowed us to put together

a training program for painting animators.

Hello Kickstarter.

I'm Hugh Welshman.

I would like to show you something, follow me.

I think the first 65 people who went through

were funded out by those two entities.

- The 30 painters that you see here,

thanks to you, started training this morning,

and over the course of the next three months

we'll be able to train about 50 painters

with the monies that we've raised on Kickstarter.

- Then we needed money not just for training,

but for the whole film.

And as we're a Polish project,

having the backing of the Polish Film Institute

was a crucial step.

If you don't have the backing

of your national film institution,

then international investors are wary

and less likely to have confidence in your project.

- We applied for Loving Vincent as a feature film.

- We really had a struggle with PFI.

I think we were turned down two or three times.

- And then you get to go and see the commission

and discuss with them why,

and get to know about it.

So I went there.

I remember the situation was emotionally disturbing

and painful because I had to sit in front of four people

and they were all telling me

that this is first of all boring,

second of all, I do not have experience

and I'm not a proper director.

But of course after some time,

they proved to be a really big supporter of the project.

And without them, it would have been nearly impossible

to get the project going.

But it took some convincing and determination at first.

And as I was walking away from the institute

I was so emotionally destroyed,

but I was thinking, maybe they're right,

but on some point I thought, no,

I can't let them beat me down.

That's what Vincent did.

He really had this persistence

and I should follow him if I really, truly believe in it.

That's what kept me motivated.

- We were at a pretty critical point in the production.

Basically we had to either raise some money

relatively quickly,

or we had to stop production,

or at least put production on hold.

And at that point, a friend of mine came to me and said,

Wroclaw is the European capital of culture in 2016.

Maybe they would like to support the production

as part of the European capital of culture.

So I went to Wroclaw.

I met with the president of the city.

I showed him what we were trying to do

and he said, well, as a city,

we would like to support this production.

And it was a really important moment for the film.

We started looking around for work

that we could do in Wroclaw.

We partnered up a CETA,

which is Centrum Technologii Audiowizualnych.

They have a beautiful facility for shooting

on a blue screen, and they also had VFX facilities

so they could take on part of the work with VFX,

and we could also do the Polish shoot

at their facilities.

- And it was a really important time for us

because it allowed us before we had finalized

with the Polish Film Institute,

it allowed us to get the funding

which meant that we could shoot the first

shots from the film.

For example, the famous shot that's on the poster

of Vincent turning around,

that was actually shot right after we closed the financing

with the city of Wroclaw.

It was actually just a test shot

both for Robert Gulaczyk, the actor,

and for Anna Kluza, and it turned out to be

the most iconic shot of the film, I think.

- One of our main challenges

in bringing Vincent's painting to the cinema screen

was the fact that Vincent used many different canvas sizes

and that was part of his choice as an artist

in terms of the composition,

whereas for cinema we could only use one size.

This meant that we had to add or subtract

or cover the painting through some kind of movement.

And in the beginning, we did the whole film 16 by nine,

which is the standard HD format.

It was causing us a lot of problems

because actually most of Vincent's paintings

was a size 30 canvas,

which is more a square format.

So for every single painting almost

we were having to invent these side bars

and change the composition.

And then Lukasz Zal, our cinematographer,

came along to us and he said,

well why don't you just shoot at academy

and then you don't have to

second guess the genius of Vincent Van Gogh.

And we were sacked by our first sales agent company

because we made the decision to go with the academy format.

But I would rather go against the sales agent

then go against the compositional choices

of Vincent Van Gogh.

- We started working with Lukasz.

We invited him to our studio

to go through it step by step, shot by shot.

- That's when we had to have the very

detailed conversations of actually how

we were going to translate this 2D medium

into a live action reference shoot,

which would then have to go back into the 2D medium

of painting.

So we'd got to this point.

We had filled up a quarter of our studio

with 20 painting animators.

We had raised I think around a third of the money.

We were still a long way off

being able to go ahead and know that we can make this film

and finish this film.

We made the decision to actually go and shoot

a third of the film

and to do the painting animation of a third of the film.

- We decided to record

one of our main characters Pere Tanguy,

mainly because his role in the film

wouldn't change, even if we were going to change

other parts of the script later on.

And because we needed to have some painted material

to persuade people to join us and finance the film.

- This was really a decision

that would either make or break the production.

We swam in a direction which could potentially

not only bankrupt the company

and destroy our reputations as film makers,

but also make it unlikely that we'd make another film

in the future.

It was a tough decision to make.

There weren't so many options then

and so we took the plunge and we decided to

go ahead and do the Wroclaw shoot.

- Wroclaw was quite difficult for me.

It was my first shoot on a big set

and it was a real learning experience

and a very new situation.

I was a first-time director on a Polish, male-dominated set,

and I think the crew was quite skeptical

about how it would all turn out.

- We always had that hanging over us

that we knew that we had taken a big risk

in going ahead and making parts of the film

when we had no commitment of distribution,

we had no commitment of funding

that covered the entire budget.

- The most attractive thing about this project

is it's not a commercial project.

It's not a big bucks project.

It's not Harry Potter.

It's not Disney film or whatever.

It's an extraordinary labor of love about a great artist,

and involves a lot of extraordinary artistry to make

in every department of this film.

- It was a big lesson in directing a production

on this scale for me, but also for Hugh,

who had joined me as co-director.

- I think I kinda went from

being a creative and at points controlling producer

to an accidental director.

Me joining Dorota as director

just sort of organically flowed out of the experience

of the production and of the writing of the script.

Definitely the hardest part was the Wroclaw shoot.

I think it was particularly hard

because we were working out as we were going along

how this type of film making would actually be done.

After all, we were doing something new,

so we couldn't phone someone up who'd already done it

and ask for their advice.

We couldn't read any how to manuals.

We just had to find out for ourselves.

We had no proof that it would work out,

we just had to trust our instincts

and hope for the best.

- It's trying something incredibly new and exciting

by having moving images of the paintings of Van Gogh.

And hopefully we will all be remembered for it.

- So one of the scary things that came out of Wroclaw

first shoot was we realized that the actors,

when they were acting out the parts,

took almost twice as long as me and Dorota

when we had acted out all of the parts.

- Listen son, I'm afraid

you'll never deliver that letter to Theo Van Gogh.

- Practically in the space of three months

we had to cut over a quarter of the story from the script

that we've been carefully working on over three years.

And also we needed to record more painters.

- You'll see that now we have another 15 PAWS units

and inside each one we have a painting animator

doing their very first shot on Loving Vincent.

Once we saw the material, once it had been painted,

we got that whole enthusiasm back for the project.

We realized we actually were doing something

that was special.

And we cut together this little trailer of material

from that first shoot.

And someone took this trailer that we did,

they put it onto their Facebook page

and it went viral.

- Loving Vincent.

- Finally tonight, it's never been done before.

A fully hand-painted feature film

now giving new life to Vincent Van Gogh's works.

The attention to detail so extraordinary,

the finished product is turning into a masterpiece

in its own right.

- Within 24 hours, two million people had seen this.

Within three months, 200 million people had viewed this.

We went from a situation that seemed hopeless

to a situation where it was like,

we can go ahead and we can make this film.

We didn't have enough time but at least we finally

had a promise of resources to make the film.

- And, action.

- Even though for most of my life

I've been working with animation and painting,

I always wanted and dreamed about working with actors.

And suddenly when I found myself on that set,

I realized how much I enjoy it.

- For the London shoot, the biggest issue was time, really.

It is that we were trying to shoot

over 60 minutes of material

with our main actors in the space of 11 days

doing up to 30 setups, which is a speed of shooting

which maybe you get on soap operas.

- The concept of this film

was from the very beginning

that it will be a story told by Vincent's paintings

and the characters of his portraits.

Therefore, I though that it's important

that these portraits who were real humans

before they were painted,

should be portrayed by real humans now

because they had real emotions,

emotions that the actors follow

and show based on the script.

- I knew that we were all going to be turned into sort of

Van Gogh style paintings,

but I didn't quite know how

you guys were gonna go about doing that.

The concept was new and it was something

that hadn't been done before.

That's why I wanted to do it.

That's why I wanted to do it with you guys.

I was really interested

to see what the process was gonna be.

- We're working to enormous green screens,

the type that you usually don't see

unless you're on a huge multi-million dollar American movie.

- The cornflower is lovely this time of year.

It's really quite pretty, isn't it?

Amazing, the scenery around here

and I just live down the road around the corner

sort of back over there somewhere.

- I knew very little about Van Gogh before starting this.

Only what I had leanred in school as a kid.

I knew about his ear,

I think that's probably the most famous thing.

But I had absolutely no idea about him

supposedly killing himself,

or that there was ever any question around

how exactly he died.

It's been fascinating to explore that in the script

and also to read different accounts

from the different characters.

It's really interesting.

- I always like when the technical side of film

meets the artistic side.

So it's been a great experience

and the cast have been amazing.

- Oh Jesus Christ.

Dick.

You know that it's glued on? - Need that hot water.

- If I had known about the beard.

I would have ran away.

- What do I say when I find him?

- It's customary to start with I'm sorry for your loss.

- I play Armand Roulin

who is a young guy that Van Gogh painted

'cause he was the son of one of Van Gogh's best friend.

And throughout the film,

he sort of has a self discovery,

which is sort of aided by his discovery of Van Gogh.

To start with it was completely the painting

that captivated me because I didn't really know much

about him other than he was this mad guy

who cut off his ear

and everyone though he was a bit strange.

But then through this movie

and noticing more about the man behind the paintings

and suddenly the paintings became so much more interesting.

They just became alive for me to sort of,

he's one of the first painters

that really started painting with emotion.

- Once we had finished with the actors,

then it was all about painting.

Every single frame of the film would need to be painted

carefully in oil paints, mainly in Vincent's style.

And his style is not easy to animate.

The fact you can often see individual brush strokes,

the fact that he had such a thick impasto,

meant that for a lot of shots the painters

had to stop motion animate each individual brush stroke.

Move each individual brush stroke bit by bit

across the canvas.

It was my job to critically evaluate

and eventually approve every single one

of the 65,000 paintings.

- I think by that time we'd only painted

15,000 frames of the film,

so we had another 50,000 frames of the film to paint

and not enough time to paint it in.

And not enough painters to paint it with.

- We were still in the process of sorting out

all the applications that had been coming through

and trying to find the right painters.

- We had a whole new recruitment drive.

We had 4,000 new applications

and just the task of sifting through

all of these applications to try and find people

that we wanted.

- We did tests on I think over 500 painters.

- We were setting up a separate unit in Wroclaw

with 10 painters.

We were setting up a unit in Athens,

Studio Mabrida, that went up to 18 painters.

But we also knew that we're gonna need like

100 painters working on this film

if we were gonna stand a chance of getting it made

before the deadline.

- We now have three different studios

in two countries and our main studio

which at first had 20 painters,

was now filled up with 67 painting animation work stations.

- We were ready to go full steam ahead

with the painting process to complete the film on time

with our new larger team of painters.

Okay so let me take you through the animation process.

First thing, we start with a clean canvas,

open up the software and load up the references

from the live action shoot.

We take a key frame for the scene and based on that,

we paint the first frame

and check it over with our supervisor.

If the frame gets accepted,

we can move on and we can begin animation.

The projector display the second frame of the shot,

and then we have to scrape the paint off

or change it a little bit

and we paint the scene to match this new frame.

Once this is done,

we take another two pictures with the camera.

We are doing the film 12 frames per second,

but we have to take two pictures

to match the 24 frame standard for the film.

After we've taken the picture,

we project the next frame and start again.

- I had to look after a group of painters

and make sure that they were all sticking

to the correct style

and ensuring that every frame

has the same standard of quality.

- Some shots took a very long time to complete.

I think my longest shot took me about six months to finish.

Now imagine working every day here on one single shot

for it to then be on the screen for around 42 seconds.

- Some of us definitely spent thousands of hours

in a painting station,

half of our lives was there.

So in a way they became our little homes at work.

- It was very clear that some painters

became attached to their PAWS

and would decorate them and very often leave a mess

in there too.

- Sometimes we had to fix certain scenes.

We would paint and animate just a part

that needed fixing,

and stick in onto the original shot.

We wanted to avoid throwing out whole shots

as it would be a huge waster of time.

- It happened to me twice when I did a mistake

during my painting animation,

and I have to redo 10 or 15 frames again.

That was very painful.

- There are very few scenes that they were thrown out

after they were painted

because they all took a very long time to paint.

- You hear that,

I'd better go talk to the lad.

- I told you you're not going anywhere.

You are not help talking the shop.

- The scenes that took the longest were the dynamic scenes

which has a lot of camera movement.

- I painted descending through the starry night

over the town.

Because of moving camera, I often only managed

a painting a day, mostly one and a half,

on rare occasions two.

So it took me a long time to animate

just a few seconds of the film.

- We were held back a little bit by what we could do.

The moving camera shots cost,

I'm the finance guy .

On the set I was like, Dorota,

do we really need to have the moving camera shot here?

But you know at the end of the day

it was a matter of the budget.

- I think that we had the situation

several times a year where we really didn't know

where the next money was gonna come from.

It was brilliant working with Sean

because Sean had this ability

to pull rabbits out of the hat.

There was this month where Sean was like,

I have no more rabbits.

Really, the only option I could see

was getting on a plane to America

and going and talking to one of our largest investors

and saying to them,

we'd like you to increase your investment by 50%

and we'd like you to put it in in the next two weeks.

Thankfully, they were yet again very supportive

and came through to us.

That kept the whole thing moving forward

for more months until we wrapped up

all the legal work, all the bank documents

that finally got the final monies flowing through to us.

And then it was all about pushing to get more

painting done, week by week.

That was putting a lot of pressure on us

and that kind of increased when I had to go to Britain

to do the sound and the music

and left Dorota on her own in Poland

to continue supervising the production.

- That was very disappointing for me.

I had written every draft of the script

to Clint Mansell's music.

For me, he was the only composer for Loving Vincent.

I had my heart set on him.

He was a hero and inspiration to me

so to have missed the recording and mixing

was really heartbreaking.

But there was no choice because at that point

in the production, we were at our most intensive stage.

- We had people working five, six, seven days a week.

It was really up to the painters

how much they painted per week,

and the more they painted, the more they got paid,

and obviously we had a vested interest

in trying to keep them there as long as possible.

And one of the things that we would do

that later became a tradition

is that one of us would cook for the entire crew

and we'd post what we were cooking on a Friday night

and hope the painters would be streaming into the studios

on a Saturday.

We also provided breakfast in the morning

to try and get painters to start work earlier,

but some painters always preferred to work during the night.

- Like Vincent, I like the night time,

which was very useful as each night

I had to do scheduling for the next day.

Because in the day time, there was too many approvals to do.

Deciding which animator did which shot

was incredibly important to the quality of the film.

The studio was different by night.

Much calmer and there were few painters

who were also night owls,

so I could take a break and review the work

and discuss those shots in a more in-depth way.

But even with the long days,

we knew that we weren't going to meet

our September deadline, and a lot of our painters

who had arranged their return home

were starting to leave.

- The pressure just went up increasingly every week.

- Because on one hand we were still working very hard

and very intense.

The deadline was so close.

And on the other hand,

there were these people leaving every day

and every week.

- We would have a farewell party

at least once a week where we had some cake and beer,

and after we all said goodbye,

the rest of the crew went back to work.

- The studios in Wroclaw and Athens

finished their animation by the end of October.

In Gdansk we were still painting the front titles

and doing some corrections.

But by November 21st, the painting process stopped.

- I think that's it then guys.

Okay, champagne.

- By November 30th, we dismantled all the painting stations,

and it was time to move after four memorable years.

- Two years and 50 weeks ago,

I stood here in the snow

giving the first Kickstarter update.

In this studio over here,

which is now a warehouse,

we dreamed, devised, planned, produced, designed,

and most importantly painted the Loving Vincent film.

- Our life was revolving for five years

around Loving Vincent.

And we were expecting that we're gonna have

this incredible sense of relief

and achievement after we finished.

But it was quite different actually

because we finished in March

and we had to wait til the world premiere

that was planned for June in Annecy.

So yeah, these three months were really difficult.

I remember them as a very dark period of my life

because it was filled with this sense of dread and anxiety

and expectations building up in my head.

It was also very cold.

I remember snowing on the main day

and I just remember that I felt burned out.

I felt physically and mentally

really in a bad way, I think,

and I just really wanted finally to share this film.

I had to introduce the film and after I did that,

which was incredibly emotional moment for me,

I had to go and sit in the audience

and be part of the audience

and watch the film with them.

I was terrified and I had no idea what to expect.

I knew that I have to share this film with the audience

and they will react,

and I had no idea how.

I do remember that moment,

that time extremely vividly.

The film comes to the end.

The end credit starts to roll

and the audience starts applauding.

But then that applause is transforming

into bigger applause,

and then that bigger applause is transforming

into standing ovation

and that lasts 12 minutes.

- There was just this incredible relief

when we had that standing ovation at the end of the film.

- That was a moment in my life when it just ,

it all sort of washed away.

The stress of the previous five years.

Just realizing that we had done something

that people appreciated.

- Whatever happened after that,

whether it was successful in other countries

or other festivals,

we knew that there was this kind of appreciation

for the film there.

And I think that was a real turning point

and things moved very fast after that.

The day after Annecy we went straight out to Shanghai.

- We said yes to every opportunity

to promote the film.

We said yes to every interview,

every screening we Hugh and I

and all the promotional action.

- We barely went home.

We had 90 flights in 10 months,

so you know, having nine or 10 flights a month

to try and be there for all the premiers

and to just do as much press as possible

because we didn't wanna take anything for granted

and we'd spent seven years,

or more even, making the film.

And so we wanted to do everything possible

to make it successful.

- It really is touching,

to know that you actually made a film

that can make people cry,

that can inspire people,

and I think that's, for me,

the biggest success of the release.

- The reception of the audience,

and it wasn't just in the cinemas.

It was also at the festivals.

We got 16, I think now we've actually,

'cause we got another couple over the past month,

I think we got 18 audience awards.

And those awards are voted for by the audiences

and in a way they're like the best awards

because it's the people going out there

bothering to attend the festivals

and bothering to vote

and backing you for what you've done.

- In China, in the US,

in Germany, the Netherlands,

in virtually every country we visited,

we had these people coming up to us with tears

that wanted to share their love

and wanted to come up to us and hug us.

I wish that Vincent could have had

some of these kind words, these good emotions,

these hugs that I have received,

because I believe that this could keep him going

and keep him alive for more years

and keep him dreaming and creating.

- The Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences invites you to be its guest

at the 37th annual awards presentation.

- The film had done really well at festivals,

really well in the cinemas.

Financially it had been a success.

Yet somehow we were still viewed as outsiders

within the film industry.

And the biggest stamp of legitimacy that you can get

in the film industry is an Oscar nomination.

We were all racked with nerves in the days

leading up to the announcement of the Oscars, 2018.

- For best animated feature film, The Boss Baby.

The Bread Winner.

Coco

Ferdinand.

And, Loving Vincent.