Ed Solomon’s Family Portrait
“You know how sometimes you don’t know what something is really about?” the London-based screenwriter Ed Solomon (“Men in Black,” the “Bill & Ted” movies) cryptically asked the other day, in SoHo. “And, in fact, you block yourself emotionally from it completely?” The question was posed in a claustrophobe’s nightmare of an unmarked elevator, entered from street level, which felt like it could lead anywhere—perhaps to Socrates’ Athens or the Mongol Empire. The destination, alas, was only the Tara Downs art gallery.
“I like this piece,” Solomon noted, peering at a semiabstract work by Sofía Sinibaldi, “Remediation (The Past Creates the Future).” His latest film, “The Christophers,” directed by Steven Soderbergh, features Michaela Coel as a disillusioned young painter who’s hired by the money-grubbing children of a bitter, lapsed artist (Ian McKellen) to forge some of his unfinished portraits. Coel signs on as McKellen’s assistant; shifts in desiderata and allegiance ensue.
“I always wanted to make a movie about the relationships that I’ve had with certain mentors,” Solomon said—specifically, four male figures who, feeling villainized or betrayed, retreated from the public eye. Over pints one night, Soderbergh mentioned toying with the idea of a “chamber kind of thing—think of ‘The Dresser,’ but with more of a Patricia Highsmith bent.” Maybe this was Solomon’s chance.
They shot the film in nineteen days, in 2025. Solomon realized recently that his mother, Maxine, had inspired the script, too. “She’s a painter! She quit for nine years to be a parent. But she returned to it.” She’s since had to retire, at ninety-two. Solomon pulled up Maxine’s website, where she quotes the artist Richard Diebenkorn: “I can never accomplish what I want. Only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.” Maxine used both additive and subtractive painting processes to build textured canvases. “The more she did, the more she would obfuscate,” Solomon said.
His mother taught him “never to paint within the lines,” a lesson he plans to impart to his youngest, crayon-wielding child. In “The Christophers,” Coel’s character first starts painting after seeing the show “Enfant Terrible,” made up of work created by art stars in their youth. McKellen’s character supplied a piece titled “Anyone Can Do This and Call It Art.”
At Dimin gallery, Solomon studied a blue-and-orange canvas, and explained that his mom favored a specific type of paintbrush. Around twenty-five years ago, the manufacturer stopped making them. “They were basically dead stock,” Solomon said. She rallied her artist friends around San Francisco to all order a bunch.
“Every year, she’d go through one brush,” Solomon said. “And two years ago was her last brush. I have photos of her holding that brush.” McKellen’s character hasn’t painted in decades. He’s kept himself afloat by slinging quips on a reality-TV show called “Art Fight” (he tells one contestant to title a piece “Why My Therapist Chose Early Retirement No. 7”) and filming Cameo videos for fans, in a blue beret, by the glow of a ring light.
At Bortolami gallery, Solomon said that he had consulted the Pop artist Jann Haworth, who co-designed the “Sgt. Pepper” album cover, to get a sense of the British art world of McKellen’s character’s prime. “When Michaela is verbally undressing Ian, and basically saying, ‘I know you better than you think I know you, and I know you maybe even better than you are willing to acknowledge you know yourself’—I wrote a version of that speech with Jann’s help,” Solomon said. He also sent it to his mother for review.
Solomon strolled over to the Odeon, for some art respite and fries, and recounted watching both “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “The Christophers” at a Toronto film festival, during which he’d noticed a through line: “ ‘Bill & Ted’ is a film about the exuberance of two very optimistic people who really believe that their art”—a metal band called Wyld Stallyns—“matters, and that they will live forever through their art. And then here you have this movie about two people who have given up on the idea of letting others see their work.”
Another adviser on “The Christophers” was the art restorer Lisa Rosen, who offered tips on pulling off a convincing restoration (or forgery). “She was talking about literally the ability now to find an artist’s DNA on material,” Solomon said. In the film, Coel digs up some of McKellen’s old paintbrushes that she says “have been dead stock for decades” and remarks, “The microfibres alone would vet—huge.” ♦