Movie Blog: Schnabel On 'Miral'

By Jonathon Sharp, WCCO

Not everyday does one meet the likes of Julian Schnabel. Not often does one talk about movies with a man whose last movie was nominated for four academy awards. Not often does such a man spontaneously read you a poem. However, this was the situation in which I – a young man with only a Netflix-knowledge of cinema – found myself. And I'm happy to report that it was awesome.

But that's not the word Schnabel would use.

The first thing he said to me, in response to my handshake and my use of the word "awesome" as an expression of excitement, was: "Awesome, you can't use that word, man. Everybody uses that word."

Surprised by his attentiveness to my diction and his calling me "man", I asked him what was appropriate to say, what wasn't cliche.

"Anything, man: Fluffy, far-out," he said.

This was not how I expected the interview to start. My preconceived idea of Schnabel was one of an artist who couldn't care less about the questions of a man 40 years his junior and who, in response to those questions, wouldn't utter anything other than monosyllables. I don't know where I got this impression, but thankfully, my idea couldn't have been further from the truth. Indeed, I could almost tell by his appearance that Schnabel was willing to talk.

Physically, Schnabel was the embodiment of the phrase "laid back." The 61-year-old artist/filmmaker's posture was that of a grizzly bear lounging in a movie theater. He wore a flannel shirt unbuttoned down to his solar plexus, burgundy cords and glasses with lenses the color of lemonade. Sitting down next to him, I had the vague sensation of entering a hot tub. Schnabel's considerable tan fortified the sensation. Beside each other, we couldn't have looked more different. I was on the edge of my seat, excited and ready with a quiver of questions; he seemed beyond relaxed – indeed, almost tired – as if he had just eaten a big meal.

And it seemed to me Schnabel should've been tired. He'd been up to a lot. Besides having all his films play at the Walker Art Center, Schnabel was in the middle of debuting his latest movie, the controversial Miral, into theatres nationwide.

The controversy surrounding Miral has to do with its story. It's based on a book by the Italian/Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal (who is now Schnabel's girlfriend) and her childhood as a Palestinian in Israel. It's about a people trying to preserve a culture and exist under the shadow of an occupying power. It was something the Israeli Delegation to the U.N. and many American Jewish groups didn't want shown. They said the film was one-sided and portrayed the state of Israel out of context and as a villain. Nevertheless, Miral played.

This fact was something Schnabel wanted me to know. He even had an assistant bring him his bag so he could show me a full-page ad, which highlighted the controversy, for his screening at the Walker. The ad showed the face of leading actress Freida Pinto, painted crimson, and a question which read something like Is this the face of a terrorist?

Schnabel seemed to enjoy the controversy. I should also say (if you haven't guessed from his name) that he is Jewish.

I asked him if he considered himself a Jewish filmmaker.

"I was never a Jewish artist until I made this movie," he said. "Since I made this movie, all of a sudden I'm the Jewish filmmaker, because it took a Jewish filmmaker to tell the story of a Palestinian girl that people in this country would have to pay attention to."

I asked what he thought his critics didn't like about Miral politically.

"I guess they don't want a Jewish person to be sympathetic to a Palestinian problem," he said. "The fact is: The Palestinian problem is a Jewish problem also."

He elaborated, talking philosophically about the movie and its message.

"We're all in it together. And so if the bomb goes off and my kids die, your kids are gonna die, too. So we need to take care of everybody. And we need to understand each other," he said.

In a step towards this understanding, Schnabel said he urged his critics to watch the film at the U.N. screening. However, they didn't show up.

If they had, they would have been justified in some of their critiques. For indeed, the film is one sided. But, as Schnabel is quick to point out, the story is that of a Palestinian girl, so, naturally, it's going to tell the Palestinian side of the Israeli/Palestinian story.

His critics would've been pleased to learn that Miral isn't Schnabel's best film. Its narrative is broken up and divided between the lives of several women and it comes off as rather unfocused. This is a striking contrast when one compares Miral to Schnabel's other films, which all have a strong central character whose struggles and hopes are easy to feel for. And it's not that Miral is difficult to feel for, it's that the story doesn't quite have the emotional gravity to pull you in as the others do. In other words: the unfocused storytelling makes it feel less lyrically personal. Miral isn't a bad film, it just isn't great.

I asked Schnabel if he made the film before or after he and Jebreal started dating. He said that it was through the process of making the film that he started to like her.

I asked what it was like working with her.

"I told her: you can't go back to Rome and do your work and just come here on the weekends or something," Schnabel said. "I need you 48 hours a day to deal with all this, because I was not a 16-year-old Muslim girl. You were."

Schnabel told me that, in order to be comfortable and make others comfortable on location in Israel, he would dress up like an Arab.

"I was making a movie about an Arab person, so I was thinking like an Arab, dressed up like an Arab," he said. "In fact, I had an Arab name, Abu Majdi [I'm not sure how to spell that], which means the father of Majdi."

To give you an idea about how Schnabel likes to make people feel comfortable, consider the following. In the middle of the interview, he turns the tables on me, starts asking me questions. He asks how old I am, where I'm from, what I like to do. In response to the last question, I tell him poetry: reading and writing poetry.

Schnabel then reaches behind him and finds a stack of small books. He picks one off the top, flips a few pages and reads me a poem he hadn't read in decades. It was a poem by Cesar Vallejo. We then spoke of Spanish poetry, of Federico Garcia Lorca, one of my favorite poets.

After talking poetry, I brought the conversation back to movies. I asked him about the significance of water, which is always a prominent image in his films.

"[Water] is something that, for me, is bigger and strong than we are," Schnabel said. "Obviously, in Basquiat it was something that was very optimistic – in the concept of I'll go there, I'll go surfing, I'll survive .... In Before Night Falls, water isolates Cuba from everywhere else, and in a sense, it's not just the water that is isolating Cuba geographically, it's the power of the impossibility of communication."

I then asked what audience Miral was made for. He told me it was young people and that he made the film with that in mind. There is no nudity or graphic violence. It is something any teenager could watch.

With that said, I'll end this longer-than-usual post with a cautious recommendation. Miral opens today (April 1, no joke) at the Lagoon and it's worth seeing. The story, although not as compelling as Schnabel's other films, is unique in that's it's told from a perspective not often explored, especially by an American-Jewish filmmaker. And with what's gone down in Libya, Egypt and Syria, its story of protest and preservation of identity and culture is particularly relevant.