Next Time, I’m Going to Make a Film About Rainbows: An Interview with Hugh Welchman

Cinema has undergone two significant, canvas-expanding innovations so far in the 21st century. The first, as ushered in especially by the films of Timur Bekmambetov and Bazelevs Company, came was the advent of screenlife. As with the introduction of sound, color, or 3-D, film art here demonstrated a new mode of presentation. The second innovation came with the paint-animation films of D.K. and Hugh Welchman. The married couple’s first painted feature film, 2017’s Loving Vincent, was a biography about the death of Vincent van Gogh, and each of the film’s 65,000+ frames was hand-painted using an oil painting technique in the artist’s own style. On average, the frames took about 2 ½ hours to paint. For The Peasants, their second paint-animation film and an adaptation of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novel of the same name, the elaborate and detailed style, as well as the more sophisticated camera movements, made it so that each frame took roughly five hours to complete. As such, only the keyframes were painted, and then supplemented with the work of computer animation artists. The filmmaking process, which here took more than 200,000 hours of work, is, as Hugh Welchman says, “the slowest form of filmmaking anyone’s ever invented.” The labor of artistry pays off. Even if the film doesn’t work for a particular viewer, any fair-minded viewer would be hard-pressed to deny its marvel or spectacle. “They don’t make them like this anymore” is a cliché that doesn’t work with regards toThe Peasants. They never made them like this.

This interview was edited for clarity and concision.

Joshua Polanski: Congrats on the film. I loved it. It’s now in my top four on Letterboxd.

Hugh Welchman: Great. Wonderful. What are the other films?

JP: Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s October (10 Days that Shook the World), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun.

HW: Wow. We’re in great company. Wonderful.

JP: Yeah, just an awesome movie. Good luck at the awards as well.

HW: Thank you.

JP: [So, let’s get started.] Any film takes a long time to finish, especially the way you make your films. What about the novel The Peasants did you feel was compelling enough to spend the better part of a decade on?

HW: Luckily, we managed to do this one in half a decade. The plan was to do it in three years, but the complications of Covid and the Ukrainian war extended our timeline. So it ended up being four years. If you can count the promotion, then it’d be five.

To oil paint a film is an incredible undertaking and not one to be done lightly because it’s the slowest form of filmmaking anyone’s ever invented. And there are easier ways to make films. Pretty much every other way to make a film is easier than this and certainly quicker. It’s [also] a big financial risk to dedicate half a decade of our creative energies and life to one project.

Continue reading at In Review Online.