Painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel takes on a project that's
controversial with both his mother and Fidel Castro
By Jan Stuart, Staff Writer.
Newsday.com01/07/2001 - Sunday - Page D
18
"In some dreams I am a painter; I have a huge loft, and create enormous
paintings; I think the paintings I produce have to do with the people dear to
me; the color blue is predominant and people dissolve in it." -from
Reinaldo Arenas' memoir, "Before Night Falls" ANYONE WHO visited with
his or her parents over the holidays was reminded of three universal constants:
1) Parents worry. 2) Children wish they wouldn't.
3) Children never grow up in the eyes of their parents, even if the children
are pushing 50 and have children of their own.
When Julian Schnabel was 23, the painter and film director-to-be tested his
parents' mettle by dropping out of a Whitney Museum of Art independent study
program and going back to Texas to paint and support himself as a cook.
"They thought I was mad," recalls the artist, who assured them, "'I
work on my paintings at night, it's great to have this job, don't worry about
me.' They said, 'Look, you're good with your hands. Why don't you become a
dentist? Or a cartoonist? What do you mean, a painter?'" Twenty-five years
later, with five children of his own, homes and studios in Montauk and New
York's West Village, international recognition as one of the late 20th Century's
most successful living artists and an impressive film directing debut to his
credit ("Basquiat" in 1996), Schnabel freaked his parents out again
when he decided to make a movie concerning the victimization of the late gay
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas under Castro's revolution.
"'What are you crazy?'" says Schnabel, aping his mother's initial
reaction.
"'You're making a movie about all these homosexuals, and then you're
going to fight with Fidel Castro? You don't have enough stuff to do?' I said,
'Mom, it's about freedom. Read the book.' She read parts of it and said, 'This
is a dirty book.'" Arenas' posthumously published memoir, "Before
Night Falls," would become one of the primary sources for Schnabel's film
of the same name (now playing in New York and opening Jan.19 on Long Island).
Greeted with acclaim at last autumn's New York Film Festival after garnering the
grand jury prize at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, "Before Night Falls"
has made a global star of Spanish box-office idol Javier Bardem, who plays
Arenas, and has secured Schnabel's reputation as a filmmaker of singular vision.
Schnabel uses Arenas' erotically charged, often harrowing memories, poems
and dreams to tell what the director calls "the story of the enthusiasm and
disillusionment of the Revolution." Cutting an epic swath from Arenas'
impoverished rural childhood in Cuba to his death from AIDS in New York City in
December, 1990, at age 57, the film shows how the young Arenas' political
idealism is shattered when he is thrown in a concentration camp that Castro had
reserved for dissidents, homosexuals and criminals.
"Before Night Falls" is biographical drama as only a painter of
Schnabel's unabashed emotionalism could conceive. "I saw images in his
work," says the 49-year-old artist, who fills the screen as one would a
canvas. "I wanted the movie to be black, red and light blue." Arenas'
experiences become filtered through Schnabel's metaphorically pregnant visual
cues: The lithe connectedness of two synchronized swimmers echoes Arenas' first
serious romantic conquest; the crashing of a red kite on a beach portends the
end of Arenas' days of freedom and innocence.
WHAT CONTINUES to surprise those who had bought into the artist's bad-boy
persona in the 1980s-when he dissed his contemporaries in interviews and mixed
smashed crockery into his artwork-is the degree of empathy exhibited by his two
films. Schnabel's contrary image was largely cultivated by the artist, whose
self-promotional instincts are as keen as his painting sense. In the flesh,
Schnabel is a warm, chunky, huggy-bear kind of guy. Which still begs the
question: How is a white, Jewish, successful, heterosexual family man, former
surfer dude from Brooklyn by way of Brownsville, Texas, able to empathize so
profoundly with a self-destructive artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent
(Jean-Michel Basquiat) and a promiscuous Cuban homosexual writer such as Arenas,
who achieved his fame after death? Schnabel locates the answer in a family of
exiles. Schnabel's father, a former meat and roping business entrepreneur,
escaped from his Czechoslovakia birthplace into Belgium after his own father
died. "They wouldn't let him on a boat out of Czechoslovakia, so he went to
Belgium, stayed for four years and came to America.
"And my wife [Schnabel's second wife, Olatz, with whom he had the last
two of his five children] is Basque. Her father fought with Franco. She lived
the first 10 years of her life in exile. Her great-great-grandfather lived in
Cuba, and I think she and I both wanted to go there.
"I've worked as a cook, a cab driver. Believe me, I've wandered around
Italy without enough money to buy a ball of mozzarella. I've stood there in the
winter, broke and not knowing anyone, watching the people in their fox furs in
the Duomo in Milan. Every day that you could survive off your paintings was a
gift." Schnabel united his very Jewish-American concerns for family and the
suffering of the Other (cultural values also prodigiously displayed by Barry
Levinson in his comedy about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, "An
Everlasting Piece") by making "Before Night Falls" a family
mission: His parents do a cameo, his wife plays Arenas' mother and is overseeing
the Spanish-dubbed version of the film, and all five kids appear. (His son Vito
Maria plays Arenas as a teen.) Schnabel makes no apologies for his treatment of
Arenas' sexuality, which manages to be simultaneously frank and toned-down. "It's
like walking on thin ice, making a movie about people who are homosexual. I
showed it to a homosexual organization called Frameline, and one person wanted
to know why it wasn't treated as heterosexual sex is treated in the movies. I
said, 'Does anybody else here feel as this man does?' And the crowd said,
'NOOOOOO!' It was like a wave. The way sex is treated heterosexually in
Hollywood is not my goal.
"In European films it's done so much better. People seem so uptight
about sex in the United States. Look what happened to the president. Puritanical
ideas about sex. They gave him a hard time. And the other guy lost the
election, because he was silly enough to disassociate himself from Bill
Clinton, who I think is a good man." If "before Night Falls" is
an indictment of Castro's repressive regime, the director insists he did not go
in with preconceptions. "I'm not right-wing or left-wing," he says. "But
Fidel lumped homosexuals, criminals, mental defectives with dissidents and
shipped them off to America, like germ warfare.
[Arenas came to the United States during the Mariel boatlift in 1980.] "We're
living in a homophobic day, with this kid getting crucified in Wyoming. We're
living in the AIDS-phobic year of-I don't want to quote Garcia Marquez 'cause I
think he's a bum-but it's like the year of cholera, the time of AIDS. Our
children have to grow up thinking about that. We need to address this, it's an
epidemic. And the fact is we can't blame one group of people for this thing. We
need to be really tolerant of each other and protect each other.
Be more human.
"I don't hate all the people of Cuba. They're not the enemy. There is
something wrong with the government. And there is something wrong with the
government here. But at least you can criticize the U.S. government, you can
make a movie about Japanese people in concentration camps during World War II,
or 'Mississippi Burning.'" Schnabel's flamboyance as an artist found its
equivalents on the film's many locations in Mexico, where he would take his cast
and himself to extremes for a proper effect. For a scene in which Arenas is
locked in a tiny isolation cell, Schnabel, who is seriously claustrophobic,
locked himself into the cramped space with Bardem to show the actor firsthand
how flipped out such people can get. For a scene in which a rumba party is
stormed by Castro's military, Schnabel deliberately neglected to warn many of
the extras, which included his wife and several people who had experienced
Castro's ferocity at close hand.
"When the thugs came in, my wife and others were in tears. And they
really scratched up some of those guys. I shot it in less than two hours."
TIME IS OF the essence to Schnabel, who in 25 years has managed to reinvent
himself as a painter, a film director, a musician, record producer and writer
(his memoir, "C.V.J.," was published when he was still in his 30s).
What is this restless impulse about? "To live. To make something more
tangible, so that that feeling of tenuousness is not so overbearing. To combat
the ordinariness of all the compromises that happen in life. Because I feel
absolutely invisible most of the time. If I'm painting, it levels everything
else out. There is a real joy in that. But not in a hedonistic kind of way. It's
like trying to grasp one more breath. It happens when I paint or make a movie
or write or-something where you have total abandon. You disappear in that, it
fills you up. It's the only thing that makes life livable." Schnabel
rises, saying he is headed down to Florida to visit his mother, who is hanging
by a very slender thread of health. Over the years, he has learned a fourth
universal truth about parents: If you believe in yourself, they will come
around. Sure enough, the senior Schnabels couldn't have been more thrilled
about "Before Night Falls" when it was screened before an
invitation-only audience in Florida.
"My mother said, 'You know, I'm so proud you made this movie.' Then she
gave the book to her sister Mary, who is 90 years old, to read. Mary said,
'This is a dirty book.' My mother said, 'No, it's about freedom.'"
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