5 things you didn't know about Vincent Van Gogh, as discussed by Willem Dafoe

Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate might be a movie in which Willem Dafoe portrays Vincent Van Gogh but it's hardly a traditional biopic. There are no montages or standing ovations. You don't get a hint of Van Gogh's prodigious talents as a child, and even the "cliché" of naysayers dismissing his genius is undercut in a stirring sequence where a rave review by renowned French art critic Albert Aurier, one published during Van Gogh's lifetime, is read aloud. "I mean this movie doesn't even try to account for Van Gogh," Dafoe told Yahoo Entertainment when he came to our Los Angeles studios. "It's very much about painting more than trying to account or give a psychological profile of who we think this guy was....it's a film about a painter made by a painter and it's very much about being an artist and about painting and about creative process. The guy happens to be Vincent Van Gogh." That being said, the film does present parts of Van Gogh's life that have been misconstrued or misunderstood and in doing so presents an alternate and possibly more accurate version of it. We talked to Dafoe about things about van Gogh you might not have known and how At Eternity's Gate handled them.