The Brooklyn Rail

However much we may assume of the relationship between painting and film, with the former having been created in the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000-60,000 years ago), and the latter merely 138 years ago, one thing we generally take for granted is that technical images, be them still or moving, are products of mediated processes, hence have deeper roots in made images, from either painting or sculpture. As filmmakers often create their own tableau vivant on screens, with countless evocations in regards to composition, lighting, color, atmosphere, artists are equally conscious of their own pictorial inventions, while being solicitous of filmic allure. Since the birth of film, painters have been aware of film’s power of dissemination, for storytelling shares greater importance than personal aesthetics. While it’s true that some have argued film is a natural extension of painting, as images are set in motion and freed from their intrinsic stationary position, there are few exceptions from which artists have inherently embraced film as ways to expand their visual sensibilities, including Andrey Wajda (1926–2016), Derek Jarman (1942-1994), David Lynch (1946–2025), Steve McQueen (b. 1969) Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), and Julian Schnabel (b. 1951).

Having made seven films and one documentary, Julian has proven to be most fearless and restless as his fluidity and autonomy must be freely maintained at all costs, and on all fronts, be it painting, sculpture, film, or whatever else that lies in between his personal life and his enormous desire for the creative act. The following is an edited version of our conversation, originally published in Middle Plane, about all things pictorial and nothing is lost for your reading pleasure.

Phong H. Bui (Rail): Congratulations on this significant recognition in the form of the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award last September at the 82^nd Venice International Film Festival, ahead of the release your seventh film since 1996, In the Hand of Dante (2025). I thought it would be timely if I was to begin with some rather philosophical questions. How and when did you come to realize that you’ve been fearlessly protecting your, to borrow a term from Meyer Schapiro, “inner freedom”, almost a childlike innocence, as an absolute necessity to express yourself as fully as an artist, that your nature cries out for?

Julian Schnabel: I don’t think I ever thought of it as an issue of confidence or courage. I always felt I had an instinct to do something, and no one ever stopped me from doing it. Despite not knowing anything about art, my mother took me to see Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was a child, which made a big impression on me. I remember there was a barrier with a big velvet rope so you couldn’t get near it, yet the painting was glowing! And I thought to myself I’d like someday to make something with the same magical presence. Since I was a child, it seems I could draw whatever I looked at, or at least a representation of it. I remember when I was in third grade everybody was supposed to draw a self-portrait. And the other kids couldn’t draw, so I drew their self-portraits for them. The teacher obviously knew that they were all done by the same hand so I got in a lot of trouble for doing it. Later my mom wanted to send me to the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where I wanted to paint with oil paint, but I was barely nine years old and you had to be thirteen to use oil paint. So instead, I looked at the sculpture of Antoine-Louis Barye, Theseus Fighting the Minotaur (1843), among others, then made paintings of them on my own. My brother and sister were a lot older than me, so I was alone a lot and this was something that I could do by myself. Looking back now, painting got me into a lot of trouble and it also saved my life. At the same time, I could paint my way through things. You know, as a young artist you’re searching for some way to make something that you haven’t seen before. You take the things that you have seen before, along with certain things that speak to you, and then somehow it comes out through you and it becomes yours. This applies to painting and movie-making, because I have no formal training in either. I wasn’t aware that a life of an artist would entail a constant battle. I soon learned that by confronting these endless battles, you get to keep the integrity of your voice.

Rail: Aristotle touches the head of Homer with such reverence, it’s as if he was giving the permission, the wisdom, to carry out his work with greater confidence. But in order to receive wisdom, you have to first accumulate information and then you have to process that information which becomes knowledge. And the final stage is wisdom. At any rate, there is a perpetual dialogue that constantly oscillates between two modes of creative thinking: on one hand, noting the profound limitation of history that has a tendency to repeats itself, Edward Young once said “We are born originals, why is it that so many die copies?” On the other, remarking on the need to proclaim optimism to create something new, Guillame Apollinaire declared “even if it is true that there is nothing new under the sun, the new spirit does not refrain from discovering new profundities in all this that is not new under the sun.” What are your thoughts on these opposing perspectives?

Schnabel: Andrei Tarkovsky put it brilliantly, that art is a living, breathing organism and a representation of life that is different than life itself. Life contains death, a representation of life excludes death. And because it excludes death, it is optimistic. So even if the subject matter, or the life of the artist is tragic, the art is always optimistic by nature. He also said that “take a watch into pieces, it doesn’t work. Similarly with a work of art, there’s no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.” So, analyzing your work is something that happens after you’ve made it.

Rail: It’s so true.

Schnabel: In other words, you have to not get in the way of yourself while you’re in the act of making. I feel free from thought when I’m actually painting: whether I’m looking at someone and making a painting by looking at them, or I’m looking at something that’s not an image of something and it’s just a mark that I’m making, or looking at the way that the paint is going to sit on a particular material. Similarly when I’m making a film, I’m working with people that can do something that I can’t do. I see what their potential is and what I can get from them. It’s all based on trust, because if you trust each other then they can go into a space where they don’t know what they’re doing, but they’ll know they can be themselves. They can go outside of themselves and know that you’re going to make something happen and not let them fall through the cracks. So they can be as free as possible, and I can be as intuitive as possible, or as free as possible in giving them my comments. What we call directing. Part of that is knowing when to get out of the way, and let the actors who you’ve selected and who can do something you can’t do, turn something that you did into something that’s much better than you could have even imagined.

Rail: It’s similar to what Ingmar Bergman once said “I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.” [laughs] But Julian, I find it interesting that most of your fellow American artists tend to make their works that relate to and affirm their identity as Americans — the American volksgeist so to speak, infused with a heavy dose of Puritanism, or what Philip Roth refers to as the American Indigenous Berserk. But in your case, art and culture is from everywhere, from, be it France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, etc., all are open sources to be freely explored. Can you elaborate more on this openness?

Schnabel: Being open means being curious and being vulnerable, which leads you to discover different versions of yourself.

Rail: You are yet to have known that they’re inside you.

Schnabel: Yes, when William Gaddis wrote about my exhibition in Cuartel Del Carmen, Seville (1998), he said the artist can go and find the different version of themselves and a different history, and only after they get through the mud will this path be opened. Max Hollein said that painting the unknowable gives a much more realistic or clear depiction of reality than any realistic depiction could. Rudi Fuchs wrote in the catalog for my show in Derneburg at the Hall Art Foundation, which was Georg Baselitz’s old studio, that how I embrace European Art and make it my own, is basically a very American idea. The fact is, there’s Spanish painting, there’s Belgian art, there’s German art, there’s Italian art. It’s not one thing. So he couldn’t write a text about the question they were asking – he needed to ask that question back to them, and then, answer it himself. The reason I mention this is because Rudi was the curator of Documenta in 1982, and I was the most famous absent artist from that exhibition. I had already had a show at the Stedelijk Museum, but he didn’t include me. Rudi explained the essay as his mea culpa text, essentially.

Rail: True. He did struggle at first to understand your work, from the initial shock of the the energetic bluntness of your plate painting. He came to appreciate the “high tragic sentiment” as he puts it, and the necessary scale, and so on.

Schnabel: That’s right. He described the trajectory as similar to why Bob Rauschenberg won in Venice instead of Antoni Tàpies or Emilio Vedova. I guess there was something shocking about what I did, and he needed to argue with those paintings rather than accepting them at that time. Rudi needed to come to grips with what it was that I was trying to do which was different than what came before.

Rail: So being absent from the 1982 Documenta turned out to be a greater reward in the end, through this thoughtful and revisionist essay.

Schnabel: It’s always good to have a fight with somebody and then make up with them, don’t you think?

Rail: I have the feeling that you’ve done this more than once. [laughs] Regarding your resistance to stylistic uniformity, you once said interview that America loves a signature to the point of dullness. When did you come to this realization and how did you gain the confidence to follow your “inner freedom” rather than conforming to a certain tendency?

Schnabel: Well, at a certain moment in postwar American art, people found an irreducible image that became the emblem of themselves. Whether it was Jackson Pollock with the drip paintings, Mark Rothko making blurry or soft edges that would blend with fields of color next to them, or Franz Kline making strong black marks, calligraphy, and so on. At the time, America was looking for an identity different than Europeans, and needed to get rid of their historical baggage. So over time, there came artists who kept making the same work for which they were recognized, especially when critics like Clement Greenberg elevated concepts about modernism that really only had to do with his taste.

Rail: It was a hypnotic formalist doctrine for sure.

Schnabel: By doing so they were excluding things that didn’t fit into their concept of the natural progression of what it was to be modern. And for me, I didn’t have that battle where I needed to find an irreducible image that was the representation of myself. When I made the first plate painting, I didn’t see it as a series. I made two paintings: The Patients and the Doctors and The Death of Fashion (both 1978), and I didn’t know at the time how much drawing was required to make these works. I just knew I needed to find ways to fracture the surface, and thus fracturing the whole. I didn’t even know if I was fracturing the whole concept of what a painting could be. I measured the armoire in my room in Barcelona, after being at the Park Güell, and I thought, ‘okay this looks like it could be a good anthropomorphic armature for a painting.’ Obviously, I couldn’t then glue a bunch of broken dishes to the closet in my hotel room, so when I came home, I asked my friend Brooke Larson to build me an armature that was those proportions and then I got some plates at the Salvation Army and broke them. I thought there was a molecular quality to this. They were like brush strokes!

Rail: Ready-made brushstrokes.

Schnabel: If anything, yes, and they were very reflective, which was very different from the matte quality of the paint or the Bondo, the auto-body putty that I was gluing them with, that looked like plaster. The contrast between the matte-ness of the paint and the shininess of the plates produces another kind of fracture. So, there was a disagreement between the pictorial and the object. There was this notion that history became the personal history of each of those plates, and I think the viewer can feel that history as their own. They feel the personal touch, even when I painted over already made things like Kabuki backdrops, or traps, tents, drop cloths, that had different functions previously.

Rail: The patinas of time which many of us appreciate. At any rate, most of us believe that a person is made by education, by language, which was not invented by one person, but by many others from previous times. This belief is what provides us a prerequisite that resists any political or aesthetic dogma, as you mentioned the Greenbergian dogma, which can be in so many ways nurturing when it is shared with a larger and governing intellectual and artistic premise. We have friends who are writers, poets, actors, musicians, and so on. We support each other in our collective struggle, you know? To be an artist or to be an intellectual means that you should be informed of each other’s field of discipline and to learn from each other. How can you describe what you consider was your community and how did that community feed you in your own work?

Schnabel: For me, whether it was the Capella Degli Scrovegni in Padua by Giotto, all the amazing frescoes and paintings of Veronese of Titian in Venice, or the paintings of Caravaggio in Rome, and the countless great paintings were made after, and then came paintings made by my peers. I see all of them as contemporary. Frank Stella once said there’re only two things: what to paint and how to paint it. I felt like I could find other materials that brought with them a history and also a geography, a freedom that broke down a bunch of boundaries. I always thought that when it said the Whitney Museum of American Art, it was kind of saying the Whitney Museum of American ‘Folk’ Art. I mean, I was very happy when they showed Malcolm Morley in the Whitney Museum, because Malcolm Morley is actually—

Rail: … an Englishman.

Schnabel: Exactly, who lived in America like so many expatriates who came from so many other countries. Take another example, Francesco Clemente who has lived in the United States for long enough, can he have a show in the Whitney Museum as Malcom did? It’s interesting that each artist has their own definition of what art is, which is visible in their use of materials and imagery.

Rail: You mean the alchemy of the image!

Schnabel: Yes, again, everybody’s got their own version of what alchemy is. What I was saying is that it doesn’t necessarily come from other artist of your own generation. Malcolm and I were friends, but we made very different kinds of paintings and I never think about Malcolm’s paintings when I’m working, but I do think about Ron Gorchov’s paintings, especially how he found many permutations of the curved shaped canvasses that somehow embody the two marks, which say everything he wanted to say.

Rail: These two marks are very similar at times, or on some occasions with just minute differences, other times they’re overtly dissimilar.

Schnabel: Exactly. Ron applied different consistencies of paint depending on the image and its temperature. His paintings projected off the wall, and I wanted to do the same.

Rail: Which means quiddity– a distinct character that makes a thing exactly what it is and not something else.

Schnabel: Yes, some things need to be thick and some things need to be thin. I felt like a painting that was 7.5’ x 7’ with resin on it, had this ornate frame that I cast in fiberglass, was chunky enough to have the same kind of weight as a 16-foot-square painting on a tarp that was without a frame. I was always thinking about how things, physical objects, sat in a room and how they affected the architecture, how they affected people. When I made the series of Weather Paintings in 2015, the floor in my studio accumulated so much resin. I had been using purple ink and gesso when I was making previous series with the Goat Paintings (2012-16), and I used a hose to spray and disperse the ink, which I thought it was a good way to apply paint. Anyway, when I saw what remained on the floor, it looked like a topographical image of Mexico City–the streets are organized with clouds in between your arial view and the floor. So, when you looked at these paintings it looked like you were looking at them from up in the air rather than from standing on the ground.

Rail: Like at the beginning scene of Andrei Rublev (1966) when the peasant inventor Yefim was trying to escape from an angry mob in the balloon, you were able to recreate your own version in Before Night Falls (2000). Now, having watched In the Hand of Dante a few times now, the experience reminds me of how you’re able to express yourself as fluidly in your films as in your paintings. There seems an equal pictorial continuity as there is a filmic one, from Basquiat (1996), Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) or say At Eternity’s Gate (2018). In other words, this film is a culmination of various sensibilities, from the painterly, the made images, the mediated images, photography, print, to everything filmic, classic experimental film, poetry, literature, music, everything else you love! Without being redundant, I think what ties everything together is your love for water, as you’ve been surfing since you were a little kid. It emerged in the Basquiat film, with the surfer in the sky, then the scene with Arenas escaping from Cuba on the boat to Miami in Before Night Falls, or the segment of the glass of water in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly that lead to the prolonged underwater segment, and finally say how In the Hand of Dante, Nick Tosches jumps in the water, and the powerful waves that swallow Giulietta standing in the big scallop shell, referencing Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485). What are your thoughts on this reading?

Schnabel: Michelangelo Antonioni once said that he was more interested in truth than logic. When people talk about or think about narrative, I say to myself ‘what is narrative?’ I’m usually not surprised most of the time by what happens next in most films. With In the Hand of Dante, we’re looking at this group of individuals who are trying to find the original manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1321), which then needed to be authenticated. At the same time, I’m showing the real situation that occurred, and what the process was shifting from the present to the past, and vice versa, while at the same time keeping the suspense of Nick Tosches’ involvement with the manuscript. You remember when he says “I’ve been working on this translation for ten years, I know this poem so well, I feel like I wrote it myself.”

Rail: It’s as if he’s the reincarnation of Dante.

Schnabel: Exactly. It makes me think of Mikhai Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967). The reason why the devil paid a visit to Russia was partly because the Master wrote a description of what happened on the terrace with Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ which was so accurate. It’s as if the Devil felt like he needed to come down and defend the Master. What does it mean when you make a masterpiece? Dante could make this work that was considered a masterpiece, but his life could be a total mess. The fact that his art succeeded but his family life was a failure, I thought that people should be aware that art is incongruous to life. In a film called Random Harvest (1942), made by Mervyn LeRoy, Ronald Colman plays this guy who has post-traumatic stress and he’s in the hospital in World War I. The day the war ends, he walks out of the hospital and finds himself in a bar. Greer Garson is a singer in the bar, and she sees this puppy-eyed lost guy over there and she takes him under her wing, and they go off. They escape to a little village, get married, have a baby, he writes for The Liverpool Times, and one day in Liverpool he gets hit by a car. The next scene he’s sitting in a manor house outside of London, and basically, he’s a lord of industry. He forgets that he had a wife and a child, he became who he was before. At some point he presses a button on his intercom, and a woman comes in and it’s his wife. The audience knows it’s his wife, but he doesn’t. I thought having Gal Gadot playing Gemma in the fourteenth century, then Giulietta in the 21^st century, the audience just hears the voice and sees this woman, the reincarnation of Gemma, and she is reeling him in her home, as if she had a fishing rod, and by the time he shows up in Ravenna, where he lived before with her, and he sees her and he looks around at the surroundings, he realizes that, well, there’s something familiar about this place, and she says, ‘Familiar is good.’ And she knows that he’s Dante; he doesn’t know. I like the idea that he doesn’t know who he is until the end of the film, but that’s not something that was in Nick Tosches’ book.

Rail: Yes, I suspected that.

Schnabel: Nick Tosches couldn’t say that he was Dante, but I could. I thought I could superimpose this other feeling and this thing onto this story. Remember the scene in the Marciana Library, where the arrival of Rosario (played by Jason Momoa) is a reminder that you don’t kill a guy like Don Lecco without getting into some kind of trouble. Rosario is an avenging angel. By the way, the decision to shoot the end of the film in Venice is not that different than the decision to put a bra on Louie the assassin (played by Gerard Butler) when he was lying in bed. To me, it’s the same with mixing a color to paint with. If you ask me, ‘why do you do that?’, I’d say ‘I don’t know!’

Rail: [laughs] I feel the same way about the Rail not having a mission statement.

Schnabel: You know, I gave the commencement speech at the University of Houston in 2025, and I said “If somebody asks you a question and you say ‘I don’t know’, that’s a pretty good answer because usually if somebody gives you an answer they’re lying to you.”

Rail: It’s true Julian! By the way, everything in the present was shot in black and white, and everything belonging to the past was in color, was this a very conscious decision from the get-go?

Schnabel: Absolutely. After I watched Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest, shot in black and white, and not long after Victor Fleming’s two films The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, both made in 1939, it was intuitive to me to include both black and white and color for In the Hand of Dante. It’s a good way to have the rug pulled out from under the viewer, as you’re following one story and all of a sudden, you’re in this other story. It’s all happening simultaneously, but that’s how you know that it is in a different time. But at the same time, you’re being told these stories simultaneously and you’re making equivalences about Nick’s journey, his desperation, his falling apart in the same way that you see the trials and tribulations of Dante. Mind you, I’m not analyzing The Divine Comedy whatsoever. The fact is, Nick as Dante hadn’t finished Paradiso while he’s making these trips to visit Isaiah, this Kabbalistic Jew, who is basically sharing knowledge with him. And the first time when he shows him La Vita Nuova (1294), he doesn’t even look at it. Later, when he says to Dante, ‘You’ve lifted the veil on the inexpressible. You’ve entered the sigh. You’ve become the poem.’ That was the best reaffirmation he could ever get. What does an artist want to be? They want to become the poem. They want to become their work. Or everything that is in their work will end up being what they had to say.

Rail: ‘You dare to give form to the formless,’ he says.

Schnabel: Right. And finally, when he says ‘My name is Jacob.’ I mean, he told him his name. That was the best review, reaffirmation he could get and it’s always nice when you get the ball back in your court finally.

Rail: Reading Alfred Mac Adam’s insightful review of the film, I’d like to ask, how would a hard-boiled crime be infused with a tragic comedy? And how would one character simultaneously become two, and how does a child at the age of nine fall in love with another child at the age of eight and then spend the rest of his life immortalizing her?

Schnabel: What Alfred wrote was so true about human nature–the idea that you could have a fascination, a fixation with someone and then you would immortalize them but really, what you’re doing is becoming obsessed with your own projection of the idealized version of that someone. If you’re making a painting, for example, your wife or husband, if they’re not involved in what you’re doing, they could feel very left out. The question is: do you see making art as a narcissistic practice or do you see it as something that exists in an otherworldly sense? Art is an entity that has its own autonomy from your life in a way, but you need to spend your life doing it at the same time. You’re spending your life making art instead of being with that person who has committed to being with you, but the fact is that without artmaking you can’t be yourself and love the person that you’re with. It’s a serious predicament! I’ve been lucky enough– my wife Louise and I worked together on this film. Even though we don’t paint together, I’d always ask her what she thinks, as I trust her eye. In Gemma’s case, she was left out, and you would imagine it might be very hard for his children to hear him talking or reading his love for Beatrice. Anyway, I thought it’s both ironic and provocative that Nick Tosches is trying to steal the original manuscript of the Divine Comedy which he himself wrote as Dante.

Rail: As I was happy to see Franco Nero, who was a huge movie star in Vietnam after he appeared in Sergio Corbucci’s classic film Django (1966), in his brief appearance as Don Lecco. My next question is, how did you manage to cast all these mainstream film actors to perform in your experimental art films? Say with Basquiat, Gary Oldman as Albert Milo (yourself), David Bowie as Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper as Bruno Bischofberger, Jeffrey Wright as Jean-Michel, then Javier Bardem as Reinaldo Arenas, as well Johnny Depp, Oliver Martinez in Before Night Falls, and Willem Dafoe in At Eternity’s Gate. The lineup for In the Hand of Dante is equally impressive, from Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Jason Momoa, not to mention John Malkovich, Al Pacino, and Martin Scorcese, all of whom I thought were anchors of the film.

Schnabel: First of all, I know all the actors you mentioned pretty well. As for this film, they all read the script and liked it. I’ve known John Malkovich for over thirty years. I’ve known Al Pacino since he made Scarface (1983), we’ve always wanted to do something together. Al once said to me “You’re the only person I know that’s never compromised.” Anyway, I’ve been friends with the others for a long time, and I feel all the actors trusted me. I’d never seen Gerard Butler do anything like he did in this movie. Johnny Depp had given me this book originally. Johnny was going to do this film and somehow, he fell out of it–life has a way of taking you different places. When Nick heard that I was going to do this film before he died in 2019, he was super excited. So was Greg Cimino, the lawyer of Nick’s literary estate. Oscar Isaac read the script seven years ago and said to me if this ever gets made, I’m your man. I thought Oscar’s performance was extraordinary. Jason and I are dear friends. I surfed with his uncle, Titus Kinimaka, in Hanalei Bay years ago. Gal Gadot, Louis Cancelmi and Sabrina Impacciatore were all amazing. So was Benjamin Clementine, who did the music.

Rail: What we admire about Dante and the Divine Comedy is it inspires us to appreciate his use of language rather than trying to analyze it.

Schnabel: Yes, it’s all about learning, figuring things out as you’re doing it. The actors, the production team, and I, we’re building this film brick by brick, as we’re making forms and rhythm. Most importantly, I respect the audience. I want to be true to my voice and not talk down to people or dumb anything down. I don’t want to make it hermetic, but I do want to make it accessible enough for someone to understand what I’m intending to do. Even though we are all prisoners of our own subjectivity, I’d like viewers to see the film the same way they would look at a painting. When Marty Scorcese says when you let the viewers enter the dreamscape of the film and take them along, it will be continuously rewarding.

Rail: E.M. Forester once said, “Spoon feeding, in the long run, teaches us nothing except the shape of the spoon.” Why make compromises when you can provide the slowness of discovery?

Schnabel: That’s right, like what Isaiah said, “Time flies is what they say, but it is breath that is the winged thing. It is breath that flies.”