Natalie Portman in Goya's Ghosts Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films

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(posted 7/19/07)
Milos Forman made a discovery when he picked up a fashion magazine on vacation.

"On the cover of some Vogue or Elle magazine, [I saw] a face of a model and I couldn't believe it," Forman says. "This is the face of the last painting of Goya, 'Milkmaid of Bordeaux.' It was the same face, so who is this? I find out she's an actress."

It turns out that the face belonged to Natalie Portman, an actress who has been known to inhabit the role of muse before (see: Garden State, Closer, The Professional…). Perhaps Forman should be forgiven for not knowing Portman's famous visage, given that the release of Goya's Ghosts concludes an all-consuming 23-year journey for the director. When he wasn't dealing with the controversy created by The People Vs. Larry Flynt, his 1996 biopic of the Hustler publisher, or fine tuning Jim Carrey's transformation into Andy Kaufman in 1999's Man on the Moon, he was steeped in the Spanish Inquisition and the work of Spanish artist Francisco Goya.

Forman had been inclined to make a film about the Spanish Inquisition ever since he was growing up in Czechoslovakia, then under a communist regime that closely resembled the omnipotence of the Catholic Church in 1700s Spain. But it wasn't until he traveled to Spain to promote Amadeus in 1984 with Goya's Ghosts producer Saul Zaentz that he discovered how he could condense into one film the sprawling history of the Inquisition with that of the French Revolution, the reverberations of which were spreading through Europe as the Inquisition wound down.

"We went to Prado and I saw Goya's etchings and drawings and paintings, and I realized Goya illustrated what I read 30 years ago [as a student in Communist Czechoslovakia]," says Forman. "He is the journalist who is describing to me what was happening and showing it to me visually."

Etched into Forman's mind with the same vividness displayed in his most famous works, Goya's paintings and engravings became the catalyst for the two-part tale of Lorenzo, a priest who, after commissioning a portrait from Goya (played by Stellan Skarsgård), tries to help his friend's daughter (Portman) escape persecution and imprisonment from the Inquisition. The film, written by Forman with his Valmont cowriter Jean-Claude Carrière, creatively explores the contradiction of Goya's art: exploiting his access to rich and powerful patrons while at the same time channeling his passion for political beliefs into art, which he did famously during the French Revolution in a series of prints called Caprichos. But as in life, Goya is primarily an observer in Goya's Ghosts.