Johnny Depp just can’t shake Amadeo Modigliani, it seems. Decades ago, the actor came close to playing the Italian painter in a project that was scuttled. But now, he’s telling Modigliani’s story from the director’s chair.
This and more, Depp shared in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter as his new film, Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness, screened at the Rome Film Fest. The work imagines 72 hours in the life of the artist, best known for his modernist portraits, debauched lifestyle, and early death, as he navigates “art, love, and rejection,” according to the movie’s logline.
Modi had its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival last month, where journalists decried a lack of access. No such gripes in Rome, where Depp gamely discussed Modigliani in the exclusive sit-down.
“My upbringing was not the same as Modigliani’s, but you do understand the levels that you have to climb—up a ladder or up a wall—to get to a point where you earn your stripes,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I do understand him in the sense that he stuck to his guns with his particular style, which was far too ‘brute’ for those at the time.”
Modigliani’s art was indeed subject to some harsh criticism during his career. After moving to Paris at age 24, he spurned bourgeois convention and tradition to paint and sculpt his own strangely elongated yet elegant figures. Alas, he barely made a living off his work; his only solo show in 1917 was closed by the authorities for its inclusion of scandalizing nudes. The artist’s nickname, Modi, was a play on the French word “maudit,” meaning cursed.
Amedeo Modigliani, Léopold Zborowski (1916) in the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo: Fine Art Images/ Heritage Images/ Getty Images.
Depp explained that Al Pacino had initially roped him into a Modigliani project in 1997. Though that film “sort of disappeared,” he said, Pacino returned some 20 years later to ask him to “direct the Modigliani thing.” Pacino shows up in Modi playing art collector Maurice Gangnat.
The actor and director, though, won’t go as far as to identify with Modigliani, who was bitterly rejected by the art establishment. “He is the exact opposite of me,” he said. “I adore rejection.”
In recent years, Depp has been mired in controversy following a long legal battle with his ex-wife Amber Heard over allegations of defamation. His career and reputation (as well as that of Heard’s) have taken a battering. Modi, coming after last year’s Jeanne du Barry, marks his comeback to film, though notably via the European market, outside the orbit of Hollywood.
“It was a vast wilderness and ultimately that vast wilderness taught me a whole lot,” he said of his time away from the screen, before characterizing his problems as following him like they did “O.J. or something.”
Riccardo Scamarcio plays Modigliani in the film directed by Depp. Photo: Modi Productions Ltd, courtesy of the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Modi has been greeted with mixed reviews. Variety welcomed it as “a hangout movie to some extent”; Deadline commended its “rough-and-tumble” quality though noted it “wafts into pretension all too easily.” The Hollywood Reporter, meanwhile, deemed it a “decorative period piece for the art-house circuit.” Overall, it has fared better than the 2004 Modigliani biopic, starring Andy Garcia, which was widely pilloried.
In a separate art outing, Depp has just opened a huge show of his artwork in New York, in which he likewise lamented on his plight and the perils of fame. “The business celebrates you,” he explained in a film that accompanies the exhibition. “They build you up to this great height, but you’re choking on that.”