CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

June 13, 2001



'It's like a Schindler's List for Cubans'

The British censors don't like him, and neither does Fidel Castro. Danny Leigh meets artist-turned-director Julian Schnabel

Danny Leigh. Tuesday June 12, 2001. The Guardian.

Here he comes: Julian Schnabel, film-maker, artist, all-purpose renaissance man. And he's singing Danny Boy. "The pipes, the pipes are calling," he croons, with the proud conviction of a man who truly believes this is the first time anyone has ever sung it at at a bloke called Danny. And then we talk.

Or rather he talks. He talks about the endless promotional jaunts for his movie Before Night Falls, an acclaimed biopic of late Cuban dissident and novelist Reynaldo Arenas. "It's been a whirlwind," he mutters, his ursine frame draped over the soft furnishings. "The Oscars, the Golden Globes, the this, the that ..." Then he talks about his ardour for painting ("It's like being under water"); the ephemeral thrill of the creative process ("The warmth of the embrace gets distilled with every day"); his fondness for watching his own film ("It's like looking at a painting - you're computing the information differently each time"). And then he talks some more.

There's time for just one question before he starts: "How are you?"

Still, who could be surprised at Schnabel proving so loose-lipped? This is what he does when he's not before the canvas or behind the camera. Self-mythologising, navel-gazing, the gentle art of bigging oneself up - his speciality back when he was the toast of the cash-bloated early 1980s New York art scene - is apparently still Schnabel's party piece as the eminence grise of American bohemia.

Before Night Falls is an impassioned portrait of the much-vaunted Arenas, a self-proclaimed "hick" who joined Castro's 1958 revolution only to find himself persecuted for his homosexuality. The film is evidently driven by a profound personal commitment: besides casting his wife Olatz Lopez Garmendia as Arenas's mother, Schnabel made the film with his own money. The result is an intelligent, frequently moving character study. Visually inspired, blessed with a remarkable central turn from Javier Bardem, and politically charged enough to have enraged many on the international left, it's not a film short on talking points. Whether Schnabel will let anyone raise them is another matter.

There is, I suggest, a certain irony to such an intrinsically Latin American project being made by ... But he's off again. "Well, yeah, I mean, why does a Jewish guy from New York City make this movie? Maybe it's my parents' fault. Who knows how you get educated, what you notice for yourself, what's pointed out to you so you see things a certain way?"

Leaning in, brow furrowed, he races ahead. Two minutes later he's dissecting his relationship with Bardem: "He said I made him feel like he could fly." By minute five he has moved on to the appeal of Mexican technicians: "Great men and women." Minute nine, and he is hoping Before Night Falls could spark a reassessment of his other work: "I mean, maybe now people will look at my paintings and think, 'OK, I didn't get this guy properly.' "

Thirteen minutes in, he notices something is awry. "It's funny - you're not saying much."

For all the self-aggrandisement, Julian Schnabel has genuine insight. That may shock anyone familiar with the Schnabel of popular repute, whose name became synonymous with 1980s excess through his vast assemblies of broken crockery and public declarations such as: "I'm as close to Picasso as you're going to get in this fucking life."

Schnabel's art still routinely sells for six figures, but he has cast himself in a lower-key role. With Before Night Falls and 1997's Basquiat (a biography of his deceased Manhattan peer Jean Michel), Schnabel appears to have set up stall as a kind of latter-day notary, lionising the artistic dead. If this is a logical extension of his ceaseless namedropping ("So, Bertolucci said to me ...), it is also a strange evolution for such an arch-iconoclast. But - and you sense this is vitally important to Schnabel - it is a move that has finally brought him the kind of critical kudos that would have seemed inconceivable when he was daubing on plates.

And yet controversy pursues him still. There has been the selfgenerated variety, of course (not least after Bardem's fruitless Oscar nomination, when Schnabel described the competition as "fake" and "idiotic"). Less predictably, there has also been a stern ticking-off from the British censors, who recently demanded the removal from Before Night Falls of a scene in which chickens are lassoed ("The bird was not hurt. I did not hurt the bird.") And then there has been the Cuban problem.

The irony of Schnabel making what is, in essence, a loud denunciation of the Castro regime isn't confined to his being a "Jewish guy from New York". The Cuba Solidarity Campaign, among others, has argued that as an American making a movie about a country habitually bullied by his own, Schnabel cannot simply claim the apolitical refuge of the artist. Particularly since Schnabel shows Castro's apparatchiks as little more than grinning sadists but fails to make a single reference to a healthcare and education system that puts the US's to shame.

"Listen, people can construe things any way they want," Schnabel bristles. "The fact is, I'm not from the right and I'm not from the left. And I think the US has behaved idiotically towards Cuba for 40 years. But it's too easy to use that to evade the fact that people are not free over there. They can't see this film, for a start." There's a pause that, in the context of what came before, lasts an eternity. "I'm not trying to sell crumpet and tea here. I'm trying to tell one guy's story." It is, he says, "a Schindler's List for Cubans."

The audience seems to be drawing to a close. He clambers to his feet. "You know, I'd say this film is pro-rhythm and poetry. And anti the drums of militarism. So, anyway, you must have a ton of shit now ..."

Is that it? Interview over? "Yeah. I mean, I don't know how interesting this whole political thing is ... I mean, what are we supposed to do here? Say we don't like the US government so let's make believe this never happened?"

And then it dawns on me that he's upset. Not angry. Just upset, and entirely, enviably sure of his own moral authority. The photographer has arrived, but Schnabel won't let up.

"I mean, you're a writer of sorts. How would you feel about knowing the only person who ever read your stuff was your prison guard, because they keep confiscating everything you write?" And, between the snaps of the photographer, there's still no end to it: by the time I leave, he has given me what amounts to an exhaustive reading list on modern Cuban history and a thorough talking-to on the nature of postmodern politics.

"You know, I'm not going to be anyone's pitbull. That's not who I am. I am unco-optable." And then, having talked until he can talk no more, Julian Schnabel wishes me luck and does the other thing he does best: slowly and studiedly turns his face toward the camera.

Before Night Falls opens on Friday.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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