Home ›› 13 May 2023 ›› Show Biz
Johnny Depp has confirmed that Al Pacino has accepted a role in the biopic of artist Amedeo Modigliani, which will become Depp’s second film as director.
According to The Guardian, Pacino will play the role of real-life art collector Maurice Gangnat in Modi, a drama adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre. Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio has been cast in the title role, while French actor Pierre Niney is to play fellow artist Maurice Utrillo. ‘Modi’ is due to start shooting in Budapest, Hungary, in the autumn, and will be Depp’s first film as director since The Brave, released in 1997.
According to the film’s producers, ‘Modi’ follows a chaotic series of events through the streets and bars of war-torn Paris in 1916, during which Modigliani is on the run from the police desire to end his career and leave the city is dismissed by fellow Bohemians: French artist Maurice Utrillo, the Belarusian-born Chaïm Soutine and English muse Beatrice Hastings. Modi seeks advice from his Polish art dealer and friend Léopold Zborowski, but the chaos reaches a crescendo when he’s faced with a collector who could change his life.
Born into an Italian Jewish family in Livorno, Modigliani moved to Paris in 1906 and became enamoured of the bohemian life; his best known works, of nudes with elongated limbs, were mostly painted between 1916 and 1919. Modigliani died in 1920 aged 35 from tuberculosis, a condition worsened by his erratic lifestyle. While he made little money from his work while he was alive, his paintings now command huge prices, with his 1917 work Nu Couché fetching $170.4m in 2015.
