Julian Schnabel on Miral, Tough Critics and Trimming Down With Harvey Weinstein

Julian Schnabel strolled into the sitting room, a deceptively casual giant in faded clothes and bare feet. The surrounding paintings -- his own, the collective cornerstone of his vast legend and wealth -- dwarfed him, much as the towering, infamous pink palazzo in which we stood dwarfed the modest West Village beyond its walls. Part monument, part sanctum, it was all universe, indomitable as its creator. Except for one problem.

Schnabel is having a tough go of things with his new film Miral. Just when the celebrated painter-turned-Oscar-nominated filmmaker was getting accustomed to an artistic cosmos he could seemingly bend to his will, the movie has run into problems with both a conservative Jewish lobby that decries its Palestinian sympathies and an unforgiving critical climate that has found little to recommend in the follow-up to his beloved The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. A United Nations premiere two nights before our meeting drew angry protests, and the post-screening discussion undertook a dialogue that has since been drowned out by the polarized debate of what the contemporary crisis in the Middle East means for America. (The Weinstein Company will release the film Friday in New York and Los Angeles.)

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. Adapted from Rula Jebreal's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name and filmed entirely on location in Jerusalem, Miral stars Freida Pinto as a Palestinian teenager dispatched to an orphanage run by humanitarian heroine and educator Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass). Despite the non-violent principles of protest espoused by both Husseini and her father, Miral forms an ideological (and romantic) alliance with the PLO during the West Bank's bloody occupation strife in the late 1980s.

Thematically and stylistically removed from the biopic-impressionism of Schnabel's previous films Diving Bell, Before Night Falls and Basquiat_, Miral does tend to err on the side of bruising -- an on-the-nose parable about the fragility of inner and outer peace. But its sincerity -- as well as its maker's -- is as unmistakable as the canvases looming over us, all of them still and silent and just as surprised as I was to see Schnabel more vulnerable than ever.

[Minor Miral spoilers follow.]

Where should I sit?

Wherever you like. Do you wanna sit in this Napoleonic field marshal's chair? Here, try it out.

OK, sure.

It's pretty damn comfortable. Actually sit back in there. Huh? Those guys knew how to fight a war, no?

They did!

They'd get there, and let everybody else get their hands dirty, and they'd sit in those comfortable chairs and sip tea and decide about life and death.

I guess that works. Congratulations on the UN screening, by the way. How do you think it went?

You were there, right?

I was there.

Wasn't that far out?

Indeed. I think you're the first person to address the UN General Assembly Hall in pajamas. But between the screening and the conversation afterward, how do you think it turned out?

I think it went great. I thought the movie looked so beautiful. It's a shame to see the movie any other way, I think. It really is. It ain't gonna get any better than that. If you like it, that's as good as it's going to get. It's not going to get any better than that on television. It looked beautiful on that big screen, and the sound was great, and the audience seemed very moved. And everybody stayed through the conversation. At least an hour long. I loved what the pilot had to say, and the rabbi.... They were all very articulate. And it really is about empathy. I really think that came out. It was a historical, beautiful moment.

It seems like we are in an era where dialogue tends to be impossible; everything is ruled by ideology and dogma. We have Peter King's hearings about American Muslims; we have mosque battles downtown. All things considered, how much of an impact do you think Miral can really have in this contemporary climate?

Well... I don't know. You've got to be very idealistic to make art. Everything seems to be impossible. The world is one disaster after another. Obama is a good man -- I voted for him -- who's really trying to do something. He'll veto the fact that it's illegal to build these settlements. It's so hard for people to... I mean, just for the movie. People are saying we shouldn't show the movie at the United Nations? But on the other hand there were other Jewish groups that came out supported the movie being shown there.

So can a film make a difference? I think so. When I saw El Salvador, I think that affected something. When I made Before Night Falls, I think that it made a difference. I'll tell you one thing: Fidel Castro bought a house for Reinaldo Arenas's mother, to try to say, "We didn't treat your son like that." And I remember a very wealthy lady coming up to me after my screening in Florida whose son was homosexual, maybe 50 years old at that time, and she said, "I ruined my son's life for no reason at all." So if you can just change a couple of minds and make people consider other people and other possibilities, then I think it's worth it. It changed my mind. The process of making the film enlightened me in some way; it made me aware of these other people and broke down some prejudices that I had before I made the movie.

Like what?

I didn't know a damn thing about Palestinian people. I didn't know anything about them except that they were the enemy. And you know, you group everybody together, and I thought that if I didn't know, then maybe a lot of other people might not consider them as human beings either. We have obviously seen a lot of stories about Jewish people, and it's great. But I thought that they merited having a story about them. And what I did is... It's basically her diary. It's like The Diary of Anne Frank told through a Palestinian person. It's not my comprehensive, inexhaustible understanding of the conflict from the beginning to the end with all of the reasons that are cataloged alongside each event. It's her memory, it's her experience, it's her psychogenetic makeup from her aunt her mother. By the time Miral shows up, you kind of think, "I understand why she behaves the way she does." And that's an interesting way to get at a character in a movie that I don't see very often.

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