Doctor Who: 11 Cool Details We Just Learned About Vincent And The Doctor

3. The "Tears Of Joy" Line Came From A French Documentary

Doctor Who Vincent and the Doctor Matt Smith Tony Curran
BBC/Twitter: @emmafreud

Unsurprisingly, Vincent gets very teary-eyed when the Doctor takes him to modern-day Paris and shows him around the Van Gogh section of the Musée d'Orsay.

But, as the character himself states, they aren't tears of sadness - they're "tears of joy."

According to Curtis, this particular line was taken from a French documentary film called Elle S’Appelle Sabine - or, translating to English, Her Name Is Sabine.

Directed by Sandrine Bonnaire, the movie is about her sister, Sabine, who goes through a lot of troubles in her life and is forced to live in protected care as a result. At the end of the film, Sandrine shows Sabine some old video footage, taken back when Sabine's life was "better". This makes Sabine cry, causing Sandrine to try and turn the footage off. However, she's stopped by Sabine, who says that they are "tears of joy".

They say that inspiration can be found in the unlikeliest of places, so it's perfectly normal that Curtis borrowed one of the episode's key lines from an obscure French flick released in 2007.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!