The Art of Timing: How Barry Navidi, Johnny Depp, and Al Pacino Willed “Modì” Into Existence

By Stephen Cyrus Sepher

There are some films that feel fated, not because of their budgets or star power, but because they seem to arrive at the exact moment the universe finally gives permission.
Modì, Three Days on the Wing of Madness is one of those films.

For decades, the story of Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian painter who died penniless in Paris yet would later redefine portraiture, drifted through the dreams of Al Pacino. He wanted to make it in the 1980s. He had the script. The passion. Even the directors. But the money never came. Studios didn’t see the value in “another tortured artist biopic.”

And so, like Modigliani himself, the project sat in exile, a beautiful ghost waiting for the right moment.

A Circle That Closed

Enter Barry Navidi, the quiet force behind so many of Pacino’s passion projects.
Navidi is not the kind of producer who hides behind a spreadsheet. He’s a throwback, the kind who builds trust in rooms where deals are made on instinct and heart. He’d already walked the long road with Pacino through films like The Merchant of Venice and Wilde Salomé. But Modì was different. It wasn’t just about getting a movie made. It was about finishing a conversation that started decades ago.

Navidi once said producing is “like chasing ghosts, you never know which one wants to be caught.” This ghost, it turned out, wanted to be caught by three men at once.

Because when Pacino re-opened the conversation, he reached out to Johnny Depp, not to star, but to direct. It was Pacino’s idea. And Depp, in the midst of his own creative rebirth, said yes.

Not for the money. Not for the headlines. But because he saw himself in Modigliani, an artist misunderstood, stripped of myth, trying to find beauty again.

The Universe Said “Now”

Timing, in art and life, is everything. You can push against the world for years, scripts die, financiers vanish, actors age out, and then one day, everything clicks. A call connects. A door opens. A sentence lands.

That’s what happened with Modì. After nearly half a century of false starts, the film found its moment. The financing came together through the Red Sea Film Foundation and European co-producers. The cameras rolled in Budapest. Pacino joined as both actor and producer. And Navidi, steady as a compass, held the entire orbit together.

It wasn’t luck. It was alignment, the kind the universe seems to reward when passion outlasts pragmatism.

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The Passion of Making Art About Art

There’s something poetic about the way this film was made. A movie about an artist who couldn’t find recognition, produced by artists who refused to let go of his story.
Depp called it “a slice of life,” not a biopic. Just three days, three furious, beautiful, broken days in Modigliani’s life. Pacino said it was about “the courage to create when the world isn’t listening.”

And Navidi? He saw it as destiny. He once described this project as a full-circle moment, a collision of friendship, faith, and the strange luck of timing. A producer’s work, at its best, is invisible. But in this case, the invisible is everything. It’s what carried Modì across generations, egos, and eras of cinema.

A Film About the Soul of Artists

When Modì premiered at the San Sebastián Film Festival, it wasn’t just a comeback story for Johnny Depp, or another notch on Pacino’s legendary belt. It was proof that some stories simply refuse to die, that there are still films made not for algorithms or weekend grosses, but for spirit.

In a world addicted to speed and virality, Modì is a reminder that real art takes time.
Sometimes decades. Sometimes a lifetime. And sometimes if you’re lucky, the universe waits until the right people are ready.

Author’s Note

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