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A new play about Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat opens tonight at the Young Vic theatre in London. Starring Paul Bettany as Warhol and Jeremy Pope as Basquiat, the play has been written by Anthony McCarten, screenwriter of recent, acclaimed biographical films The Theory of Everything (Stephen Hawking), Darkest Hour (Winston Churchill), Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddie Mercury), and The Two Popes (Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis), and is directed by the Young Vic’s artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah.

The play focusses on the three years, near the end of both artists’ lives, when they collaborated on a series of paintings for a 1985 show at the Tony Shafrazi gallery in New York. On one side Warhol, the Pop art superstar, desperate to maintain his hold on the cutting edge of art. On the other, Basquiat, the explosive new talent who made his name as a graffiti artist on the streets and imbued his canvases with a spiritual power that was anathema to Warhol’s celebration of the superficial. Two visions of art and two huge personalities collide and briefly coalesce in McCarten’s play, at turns both hilarious and heartbreaking, as the artists challenge and provoke one another before slowly revealing themselves. McCarten has also adapted the play into a film which goes into production later this year with the same cast and director as the play. We spoke to him during a break in rehearsals last week.

TAN: After Stephen Hawking, Freddie Mercury, Winston Churchill and two popes, why did you want to write about Basquiat and Warhol? And why this particular moment in their lives?

AM: By and large, yes. There are some direct quotes from Andy in the play; some of them are from his diaries, I’ve been working with the Warhol Foundation to make sure that the research is right. We have the blessing of the estates and that’s always important to me. Not that I am doing the bidding of estates, quite the opposite; hagiography is a lie. But I have found in the past 15 years that I’ve been doing a lot of portraits that estates are very willing to take risks with their prized possessions and to hold them up for close examination, warts and all, because of the public demand no less. I got permission to use excerpts from the diaries and I used maybe ten lines. They so captured Andy’s tone of voice that I wanted them in there.

TAN: There is such a wealth of material out there about Warhol, where do you start and stop the research?

AM: There is a point beyond which research is not helpful and can be unhelpful because it can constrain your imagination. This play is a work of the imagination, it’s my interpretation. But it also wants to be based in reliable research; nobody is interested in the story of a famous person that’s highly invented; it has to have its feet anchored in reality. My job is to fill in the bits where there is no record of what they did on these days or what they thought about these issues, so I have to engage in inspired speculation. It’s not idle fancy, it’s not just my best guess, it has to be based in solid research.

TAN: After Stephen Hawking, Freddie Mercury, Winston Churchill and two popes, why did you want to write about Basquiat and Warhol? And why this particular moment in their lives?

AM: By and large, yes. There are some direct quotes from Andy in the play; some of them are from his diaries, I’ve been working with the Warhol Foundation to make sure that the research is right. We have the blessing of the estates and that’s always important to me. Not that I am doing the bidding of estates, quite the opposite; hagiography is a lie. But I have found in the past 15 years that I’ve been doing a lot of portraits that estates are very willing to take risks with their prized possessions and to hold them up for close examination, warts and all, because of the public demand no less. I got permission to use excerpts from the diaries and I used maybe ten lines. They so captured Andy’s tone of voice that I wanted them in there.

TAN: There is such a wealth of material out there about Warhol, where do you start and stop the research?

AM: There is a point beyond which research is not helpful and can be unhelpful because it can constrain your imagination. This play is a work of the imagination, it’s my interpretation. But it also wants to be based in reliable research; nobody is interested in the story of a famous person that’s highly invented; it has to have its feet anchored in reality. My job is to fill in the bits where there is no record of what they did on these days or what they thought about these issues, so I have to engage in inspired speculation. It’s not idle fancy, it’s not just my best guess, it has to be based in solid research.

TAN: After Stephen Hawking, Freddie Mercury, Winston Churchill and two popes, why did you want to write about Basquiat and Warhol? And why this particular moment in their lives?

AM: By and large, yes. There are some direct quotes from Andy in the play; some of them are from his diaries, I’ve been working with the Warhol Foundation to make sure that the research is right. We have the blessing of the estates and that’s always important to me. Not that I am doing the bidding of estates, quite the opposite; hagiography is a lie. But I have found in the past 15 years that I’ve been doing a lot of portraits that estates are very willing to take risks with their prized possessions and to hold them up for close examination, warts and all, because of the public demand no less. I got permission to use excerpts from the diaries and I used maybe ten lines. They so captured Andy’s tone of voice that I wanted them in there.

TAN: There is such a wealth of material out there about Warhol, where do you start and stop the research?

AM: There is a point beyond which research is not helpful and can be unhelpful because it can constrain your imagination. This play is a work of the imagination, it’s my interpretation. But it also wants to be based in reliable research; nobody is interested in the story of a famous person that’s highly invented; it has to have its feet anchored in reality. My job is to fill in the bits where there is no record of what they did on these days or what they thought about these issues, so I have to engage in inspired speculation. It’s not idle fancy, it’s not just my best guess, it has to be based in solid research.