The cinema of art

>> Julian Schnabel creates another tragic-artist biopic, Before Night Falls

by MATTHEW HAYS

Friend of Warhol, darling of the international art circuit, painter Julian Schnabel made his first foray into feature filmmaking in '96 with Basquiat. The eagerly anticipated film, which featured David Bowie playing Warhol, recounted the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the graffiti artist who shot to fame and subsequently crashed and burned in a heroin overdose at age 28. The film found a cult following, while critics were divided about the its overall impact.

But there has been little critical dissent about Schnabel's second feature, Before Night Falls, an evocatively shot, gorgeous and highly intelligent telling of the life of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Schnabel certainly chooses his subjects well; Arenas had a rich but extraordinarily conflicted life. He worked as part of the revolutionary forces who brought Castro to power in '59, but soon after Arenas's first novel was published, the gay writer was deemed a subversive counterrevolutionary by the government and was hounded by secret police and ultimately imprisoned for two years. All the while, foreign friends were managing to smuggle Arenas's novels out of the country where they were published and warmly received by literati. Finally, Arenas would escape Cuba during the Mariel Harbor boatlift in '80 and resettle in Manhattan. In '90, he committed suicide after a lengthy struggle with AIDS.

As with Basquiat, Schnabel has shown a keen sense of casting, landing Sean Penn and Johnny Depp in supporting roles for the film, as well as Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who earlier this week was nominated for an Oscar.

Schnabel spoke to the Mirror about his ambitions with Before Night Falls from his New York home. Not one for false modesty, he stated that Before Night Falls is "the best movie of the year."



Mirror: This film feels very Impressionistic to me. It's got this painterly quality to it. How much of that was a conscious effort on your part, being a painter, and how much of it do you attribute simply to your vision of cinema generally?

Julian Schnabel: I would say that I've never been self-conscious about being an artist or trying to be artistic. I never decided I was going to be a painter when I was a little kid. I never thought, "I'm going to become an artist." I never knew that I was going to be anything else. I guess my mother and father wanted me to be a dentist because I was good with my hands and they couldn't see how I would survive being an artist. I didn't try to be artistic. I guess I'm just an artist. Being a painter certainly informs whatever I do. If the movie doesn't look like other people's movies, well, I'm not really looking at what they're doing, rather I'm looking into my unconscious. Obviously though, I'm carrying things that I remember from films that have affected me. We're all a product of our environment in some way.

Getting hooked

M: I certainly thought a lot about I Am Cuba when I watched Before Night Falls...

JS: That's a really great movie.

M: I thought about the pool scene. Did that have an influence on your pool scene?

JS: No, but that was a funny scene, wasn't it? I think that was important to capture Reinaldo's sense of humour. There were other shots where I thought of I Am Cuba though. I thought a lot about The Passenger by Antonioni.

M: What first drew you to Reinaldo's story?

JS: I saw him on TV on a BBC documentary. Someone brought this tape to me and I saw him and it put a hook in me. I started to work on this script and it took me about six years. I'm really proud of this film. I made this film because... someone's got to do it, right? Someone's got to make thoughtful films. Did you see Cast Away?

M: Yes. Why?

JS: Exactly. Why did you go see it?

M: I liked the plane crash, and it was basically downhill after that. With both your films, Basquiat and Before Night Falls, you focus on artists who have these tragic ends. Is there something that draws you to this?

JS: I knew Jean-Michel. These things happened to me as well, but I survived. I suppose we all have a fascination with death. Can you believe this deal we get? We're born and then we all have to face infinity? It's pretty fucked up. In paintings, you have to deal with death all the time. It's like concretizing a moment in the present. So it's something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about. You've got to have conflict and drama in a movie. I didn't mean to make two movies about two artists, but I was drawn to it.

M: This is a very dense, complicated autobiography. What were some of the principal challenges in bringing it to the screen?

JS: There were certainly things that we changed. It's not really an illustration of the book, rather, it's an accumulation of different moments of a man's life which make sense to me in what I want to tell about him. There's a feeling you get, in great films, where film really takes its true nature. Not a special effect, it's when a camera is placed a certain way, and watching the world or reality kind of unhinge itself. I guess I look for those moments. I shot the movie hand-held instead of putting it on sticks, because I wanted to make it feel like the movie was breathing all the time.

The weight of Cuba

M: Have you been to Cuba a lot?

JS: Yes, and every time I get there I feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders. Because the people are not free. As a Canadian or an American you have more rights than Cuban citizens do. There are shops you can go into that they can't. It's weird, because it's beautiful and the people are so great, but they don't have their freedom.

M: Has the attitude towards gays there changed? Hasn't it become more open?

JS: In a sense yes, because you can't stop people from being gay. Is this a gay newspaper?

M: No, I'm the gay guy at the newspaper though.

JS: That's okay (laughs). The thing is that a lot of people who work in the cultural world there are gay. There's one person I can think of there who everyone knows is gay, but no one would ever actually say it to his face. I think that he has people around him who are gay and they work for the government and somehow it's okay. There are so many gays in Cuba, really, it's ridiculous to think they'd try to eradicate them. The gay sensibility in Cuba is a real natural resource. For writers like Reinaldo to be censored is ridiculous. In the movie it says that the drums of militarism are always trying to beat down the rhythm of poetry and life. I think that's the basic problem. Some of the people are homophobic and machista and they can't handle life being out of their control or incomprehensible to them. This film really condones homosexuality. This film says that some people are homosexual, some aren't. So what? It's like in the film when it's said that Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci were gay. Who cares?

Beautiful boys

M: I confess I was impressed to read that you're straight. This is a very honest, textured and unapologetic film about a gay life. You appear to have a lot of insight...

JS: My friend said to me, "Maybe you are gay, because if I'd made the film I would have all these beautiful girls in it, and you've got all these beautiful guys in it." I've had so many friends who are gay. The community of artists has generally always been heavily populated with gays. My children have grown up seeing no difference between gay and straight people. You're either a good person or a bad person, or a boring person or an interesting person. My son Vito plays Reinaldo as a kid. If I had any kind of homophobic worries, I wouldn't have cast him that way. We just don't make those kind of judgments.

M: Let me guess: you didn't vote for George W. Bush.

JS: I can't even look at him.

M: Was Cuban politics a big concern for you? In Canada, we have no trade embargo with Cuba.

JS: I think it's great that you don't. I think America's been stupid to have maintained it. But I also wish they'd have elections there. I think it's great that Castro educated the people. Now he should let them proceed to use the knowledge they've gained to make political choices. The fact is, horrible things happen over there. The promise of revolution Castro promised he didn't deliver. I'm not Right wing by any means, but Castro simply became another dictator.

I'm anxious for people in Canada to see the film because I know many Canadians have been there and I think it's one of the only films that looks like it was made there, even though it wasn't. There's a lot we show with this film. No one has really talked properly about the camps. Nestor Alemandros did with Improper Conduct [a documentary about mistreatment of gays in Cuba]. People said that was financed by the CIA, which was nonsense.

Before Night Falls opens Friday, Feb. 16 at Cinéma du Parc