In a Parisian palace, a French journalist interviews her idol, Salvador Dalí. The interview doesn't go well. The young woman decides to visit him at his home in Catalonia, to squeeze a little extra time from him. She discovers the master's regular eccentricity, the Rolls Royce – the same as Elvis's – that can ride on the sand, his gastronomic fads and incomprehensible aphorisms.

In Daaaaaalí! – released in theaters in France on February 7 – French director Quentin Dupieux shows less the intimacy of the man born in 1904 and died in 1989 than the mythology of the artist who was, along with Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, one of the best-known of his time. This was the man whose flights of fancy delighted talk-show viewers, the cravat-wearing character whose moustache defied gravity, the oddball who, in a famous advertisement, claimed to be "crazy about Lanvin chocolate." There is no mention of the man who composed canvases of a complexity that is still studied today, of the intellectual who dreamed of blending science, philosophy and art, nor of the man who was an ardent supporter of General Franco's regime...

Daaaaaalí! starring Anaïs Demoustier as the journalist, and a myriad of actors (Gilles Lellouche, Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmaï, Edouard Baer and Didier Flamand) as the painter, was partly shot in Catalonia, Spain, where the artist lived for decades. The astonishing atmosphere of his Portlligat hideaway, now one of the country's most visited museums, has been recreated on screen.

This is where Coco Capitán, a London-based Spanish photographer, went in the summer of 2023. At the request of Barcelona-based publisher Apartamento, she spent several days surveying the various spaces early in the morning, before the flood of visitors. Her photographs became a book, published in November. "What strikes me is the light that bathes the premises, the sun soaking everything," she said. "It's easy to see why he loved this place. It is ideal for a painter." Indeed, he prided himself on being the first Spaniard to see the sun rise, Portlligat being located in the easternmost part of the Iberian Peninsula.

'A truly biological structure'

The artist had been visiting this part of Catalonia long before he became "Daaaaaalí." His father, a notary (as was Marcel Duchamp's father, surrealism owing much to the profession), was a middle-class man from Figueras, a few kilometers away. As a child, he roamed the beaches of the Costa Brava. As an adult, he moved to Madrid and then Paris, never forgetting his native region. In France, he met Elena Ivanovna Diakonova (1894-1982), whom everyone called Gala. 10 years his senior, she was poet Paul Eluard's wife and painter Max Ernst's mistress. They fell in love and wanted to settle in Cadaquès. But Dalí's family refused to allow their son to be seen with a divorced woman who was already a mother.

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