Alexander Barnett thinks that he is King Lear and he also thinks he is Vincent Van Gogh, and no this is not a man who has simply gone mad, but the actor, producer and director really does make the most of “being in the moment,” when he portrays William Shakespeare’s King Lear and the artistic genius, but very disturbed Van Gogh. In 2005, Barnett brought the post-impressionist Dutch painter to the screen with his film, The Eyes of Van Gogh, which was more a study of the artist’s personality, character and the influences upon his life, than it was a presentation of his celebrated drawings and paintings. Speaking to Riveting Riffs Magazine from his home in the United States, Barnett took time to reflect back on that film venture and to look forward to his next one, which will revisit the play that he has toured three times in Europe, that being King Lear.

 

“I did the show (Lear) three times, the first time when I was thirty-two, then when I was in my mid forties, and finally the last time (the play toured) was in Europe about twelve years ago. I know the show quite well, as I have done over four hundred performances of the play. The only places that we didn’t go were France and England, England, because they have a work permit situation and France was a bit of a problem also,” says Barnett.

 

Comparing the stage to film, and how it will affect the presentation of King Lear, Barnett notes, “Because it is a movie, I have more alternatives. When you are working on stage, the actors move. When you are working on a movie, even though the actors still move, the audience can move too, so you have many more options. I can think of enough different alternatives to drive me out of my mind. In my minds eye I block it out. So far I have almost one thousand pages and different shots. Even though I know it very well, it doesn’t matter, because it is like starting all over again. What I want to do is to put it on stage again and let that be the rehearsal period. With The Eyes of Van Gogh I did all of the (preliminary) work before I had the actors and when it came time to shoot, the actors were well prepared. We rehearsed prior to the shooting, but then we continued to rehearse during the week. What I would do is to rehearse one or two days and then shoot for a day, rehearse another day and shoot a day. It is a very unusual way to work and it is rare that people will work that way. It is not feasible today (for others) in terms of budgets and whatever, but I have to work that way as an artist, otherwise what happens is I could do all of the early work and then take a month or so before starting to shoot. Conceivably I could hit areas that I haven’t hit since I rehearsed a month earlier, and I won’t have time to review it. What I do is have (the actors) rehearse and then do (the scenes) on stage with the film blocking. After that we will go right into shooting. It is an immense project, but that is the way that it is.”

 

Barnett compares the two film productions in terms of the settings “On the Van Gogh film we did the interiors in a warehouse in the south Bronx and then of all places, I did the exteriors in a park in New York. Here it is going to be more difficult, because it is more complex. There are twenty-two scenes in King Lear and they cover a lot of territory.”

 

I focused on Vincent rather than his work. We recreated the house where he worked with Gauguin and there are paintings up there that people would know, but we never showed a close-up of a painting, it is always in the background. There were people who were disappointed and who wanted to see the paintings up close. I show Vincent doing the work, but we don’t show the work.  I show him responding to the south of France, to the environment and to people, but I don’t show the thing that he is responding to. I want to see his reactions. That’s what I am involved with. That’s what I want, so the people who want to see the movie and who think they are going to see the close-ups of the sunflowers and all of that, forget it. That’s not what this is about. He is the work. I want to see how he looks at a panorama and how he is taken by it. There are times when he will discover a particular subject that he wants to paint and we won’t see that, what we will see is his reaction to it. That’s the key to the whole movie actually.