The Goldfinch
Short description
After his mother is killed during a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, thirteen-year-old Theodore Decker survives the attack and takes a painting called The Goldfinch. As he grows up, the artwork serves as a connection to the tragedy and his mother, while also leading him into a criminal underworld. This journey through grief and guilt shapes his path toward adulthood and redemption.
Directed by John Crowley, this drama followed his previous work on Brooklyn and preceded We Live in Time. The film features Ansel Elgort and Oakes Fegley as the lead character at different ages, with a supporting cast including Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson, and Sarah Paulson. Produced by Warner Bros. Pictures, Amazon Studios, and Color Force, the project had a budget of 45 million USD but earned 10 million USD at the worldwide box office.
Audience reception is mixed but generally more positive than the response from professional critics. On IMDb, the film holds a 6.4 rating from 30,000 votes, while on TMDB it has a 7.1 rating based on 960 votes. In contrast, film critics gave it a lower rating of 4.6 based on 227 reviews.
What's left behind the scenes
- The location for the spacious home of the Barbour family, to whom the boy comes after the tragedy at the museum, was found by Barrett and his team in Haven, New York.
- Director John Crowley initially wanted to cast someone from the Russian theater in New York for the role of young Boris, but Finn Wolfhard amazed both the director and the pronunciation coach during the audition with his impeccable Russian accent.
- Most of the scenes set in Las Vegas were actually filmed on the outskirts of Albuquerque. To further enhance the contrast between the city and the desert, according to the cinematographer, “most of the Las Vegas scenes were intentionally shot in bright daylight to achieve a feeling of scorching air and sun-bleached colors.” In addition to the lighting, a wider lens was also used “to make the space look more open, desolate, and hostile to Theo” – recalls Roger Deakins.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art also assisted the film crew in preparing the exhibition for the film. Copies of the exhibits hanging on the walls of the museum in the film were created based on high-resolution images for which the filmmakers obtained licenses from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Mauritshuis, the Rijksmuseum, and other galleries. Teams of graphic artists and set designers printed the images on photographic paper and then worked on their texture to make them look like old canvases. More than 80 reproductions were created for the "museum" episode of the film, the most famous of which is Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp." Given the degree of destruction that would occur as a result of the explosion, it was impossible to film such museum interiors in the Metropolitan itself. Therefore, the filmmakers recreated several adjacent museum halls in a large warehouse in Yonkers, which is often used for film shoots.
- The film is based on the novel of the same name (2013) by American writer Donna Tartt, who received the Pulitzer Prize for it.
- The film features a depiction of Carel Fabritius’s painting “The Goldfinch” (1654), which is housed in the Mauritshuis Royal Gallery in The Hague, Netherlands. For the film’s production, the museum was able to provide the filmmakers with a very realistic “double” of the painting. K.K. Barrett, the film’s production designer, recounts: “The museum used a 3D scanner to scan the surface of the painting, and then reproduced the canvas layer by layer at full size. For some shots, we enlarged the painting digitally, and then the prop artist applied a layer of paint on top to ensure the brushstrokes and texture looked just like the original canvas.”
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
