"This week, the Doctor and Amy take in a bit of culture and team up with the artist Vincent van Gogh." "Come on!" "Capture my mystery." "Maybe you've had enough coffee now." "And we canvass Richard Curtis about his latest work." "I think if you're going to write something about an artist, van Gogh's the most accessible artist." "The cast and crew go forth to Croatia with a cunning plan to reproduce a van Gogh painting." "And we brush up on our art history in LA with actor Tony Curran." "If you stare at this long enough, you do lose yourself in it." "Episode 10 tackles a problem and a situation more heartbreaking than probably we've ever encountered before." "At the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, thedoctor Who crew are setting the scene for a very unusual art class." "One, A camera, mark." "And background action." "And action." "So this is one of the last paintings van Gogh ever painted." "Those final months of his life are probably the most astonishing artistic outpouring in history." "It was like Shakespeare knocking off Othello, Macbeth and King Lear over the summer hols." "The Doctor travels to the Musée d'Orsay and sees, in a van Gogh painting, a monster peering out and realises he has to go and talk to Vincent van Gogh." " Wait a minute." " What?" "Well, just look at that." " What?" " Something very not good indeed." " What thing very not good?" " Look there, in the window of the church." "Is it a face?" "Yes." "And not a nice face at all." "We were very lucky to get Bill Nighy to play the part of Dr Black, because he's someone who you pay attention to." "And that's what we needed, we needed people to listen to what he was saying about Vincent van Gogh, pick up some of the relevant facts that were going to be important in the story." "Sorry, everyone, routine inspection." "Ministry of Art and..." "Artiness." " So, um..." " Dr Black." "Yes, that's right." "Do you actually know when that picture of the church was painted?" "Ah, well..." "Ah, what an interesting question." " Most people imagine..." " I'm going to have to hurry you." " When was it?" " Exactly?" "As exactly as you can, without a long speech if poss, I'm in a hurry." "Well, in that case, probably somewhere between the first and third ofJune." " What year?" "1890." "Less than a year before he killed himself." "We have Richard Curtis writing Episode 10, which is so exciting." "He's written a fantastic episode about van Gogh." "And it's actually really quite different." "It's always been an idea I loved, just sitting there in the back of my mind." "And then, so the moment I started thinking about Doctor Who, I thought," ""Oh, I have got this story I'd like to tell. "" "Because van Gogh is pretty well the only really, really famous artist almost in any medium who had no acknowledgement whatsoever during his lifetime." "I'm also interested in sort of depression and the price you pay for that." "So I'm interested in him as a human being, as an artist, and then I have this idea where I'd love the thought of making him happy." "Along with a flat-pack Tardis, the cast and crew travel to Croatia to recreate the French region of Provence." "The job of manning the Tardis during this 1,400-mile long journey was given to Facilities Co-ordinator Bob Gurney." "How many miles left, Bob?" "509." "It's a long, long way." "Here we are in Croatia, filming Episode 10," "Vincent and the Doctor." "There's this really cool scene that's set in the theme of one of van Gogh's paintings, the Café Terrace." "So they made up this café to look like the painting." "And it just looked incredible." "It really did look like the painting, because in the scene" "I have a little book of all van Gogh's paintings and I was just, sort of, holding it up to the scene and it was exactly the same." "It was really cool." "He'll probably be in the local café." "Sort of orangey light, chairs and tables outside." " Like this?" " That's the one." "Or indeed like that." "Yes!" "Creating van Gogh's night café for the Doctor and Amy's first encounter with Vincent took more than just orangey light and a few chairs and tables outside." "Searching for the right location and transforming it into the famous 19th-century painting for the scene proved to be a complicated assignment for the art department." "Creating the café was quite a long-winded process." "We actually went round locations about four or five times around Croatia with a postcard book and a laptop and with the image of the Café Terrace." "And we eventually found it." "And we were very pleased with how it ended up." "We obviously had to put a big awning up." "We had to change the windows, we had to do infills for the windows and the door and also make a platform to put the chairs and tables on." "And a few..." "There's another blue doorway, which we married in as well." "And, obviously, just a bit more..." "A bit of foliage." "Basically, just matched up the painting as best we could." "Scene 6, take 1, A camera, mark." "One painting for one drink, that's not a bad deal." "It wouldn't be a bad deal if it were any good." "I can't put that up on my wall." "It'll scare the customers half to death." "It's bad enough you being in here in person, let alone..." "Looming over the customers day and night with a stupid hat." "You pay your money or you get out!" "I'll pay." "What?" "Well, if you like, I'll pay for the drink." "To paint a better portrait of the real Vincent van Gogh," "Doctor Who Confidentialjoined Tony Curran at the Getty Museum in LA to meet up with curator Scott Allan and take a look at one of van Gogh's most famous masterpieces." "California itself is an incredible state." "And just to come up to the Getty here." "I come up here quite often just to look at the artwork." "But it's an incredible place just to be, just to relax." "Situated in the hills of Santa Monica, the Jean Paul Getty Museum owns and exhibits important major artworks and is home to one of the most valued van Gogh paintings, thelrises." "This was painted maybe about a year and a few months before he died." "This painting was done at a particularly critical and poignant time in his life, in December of 1888." "About five or six months before he painted this there was that infamous episode in Arles, in the south of France, where he cut his ear, he was hospitalised." "He had a few more bad episodes in the coming months and eventually, just out of his own fear of his sort of encroaching mental illness, he checked himself in." "In many ways, part of his therapy was his painting." "Absolutely." "And the garden was one of... you know, a little corner of nature that was readily available to him in the asylum." "And for the first month or so he wasn't going outside the walls." "So, you can just imagine him, you know, encountering this little patch of flowers." "He was in the asylum for one year and he painted 130 canvases, so that is a lot." "So that averages, you know, a picture every two, three days." "So he's painting fast." "If you stare at this long enough, you really..." "It's wonderful, you do lose yourself in it," "I find, anyway, I think it's..." "Well, I mean, you look at it in the context of the gallery and the painting immediately pops off the wall compared to everything else." "Just with the intensity of the colours and also the really sharp graphic quality that everything is drawn with." " Thank you." "Thanks a lot." " All right." "Pleasure." "All that remains for the Doctor and Amy to do is to show Vincent what becomes of his art in the future." " Where are we?" " Paris, 2010 AD." "And this is the mighty Musée d'Orsay, home to many of the greatest paintings in history." "Because it was such an emotional high point of the story, it was important to find a way of conveying exactly how this would impact on Vincent van Gogh." "To my mind, that strange wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived." "I think he definitely would have been overjoyed to see that people appreciated his work, most definitely." "Thank you, sir." " Thank you." " You're..." "You're welcome!" "I think if you're going to write something about an artist, van Gogh's the most accessible artist." "That's one of the things that makes him loved." "So I think it is a brilliant depiction of depression." "But it's at the heart of a wonderful, glorious, life-affirming" "Doctor Who fable." "The only thing which might slightly seem complicated or oblique to a younger viewer would be the question of having a thought about mental illness." "But, you know, it's such a big subject in our society, one of four people suffering from depression at some point in their lives." "Maybe it's not a bad idea to try and, you know, introduce it young." "We have here the last work of Vincent van Gogh, who committed suicide at only 37." "If anybody who's watched it has gone away with that understanding, that they have to be considerate and patient and interested in people who have mental complexities, then that would be great to me." "The real meat of this story is the Doctor meeting someone he can't save." "Because he can't save people from themselves." "He can't do that." "That's beyond his power." "And even though he could..." "He can, at times, re-write time, as Amy wants him to at the end, he can't do it this time." "Because, simply, the demons that assail Vincent are far beyond the Doctor's reach." "That is very much what Richard wanted to write about, and I think daringly and beautifully, that's what was realised in those absolutely heartbreaking final scenes."