Julian Schnabel has never made easy films. Basquiat was a biography of the street artist who became a protege of Andy Warhol. Before Night Falls portrayed exiled gay author Reinaldo Arenas. And The Diving Bell and the Butterfly told the story of author Jean-Dominique Bauby - all from the point of view of the one eye from which he could see after a paralyzing stroke.
Miral is a story set in the midst of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, told through the eyes of a Palestinian girl. Miral (Freida Pinto) grows up in a Palestinian orphanage, where her teacher, Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass), encourages her to stay out of politics. But young activists in the PLO like Hani (Omar Metwally) are powerful examples to Miral, and she wants to get involved.
Schnabel's fourth film has upset Israeli groups even before its release. It premiered at the United Nations General Assembly Chamber on March 14, despite an outcry from The American Jewish Committee, who claim the film is one sided and anti-Israeli. The Anti-Defamation League and B'nai B'rith International also protested the premiere, where, inside, Rabbi Irwin Kula and Israeli Air Force Reserves pilot Yonatan Shapira (who refused to fly attack missions on Palestinian territories in 2003) joined Schnabel and author Rula Jebreal for a discussion.
Schnabel is comfortable talking about touchy subjects because he's pretty well able to control the conversation. Back in L.A., sitting in a conference room at his Hollywood PR firm's office, Schnabel spoke slowly and carefully, sharing one thought at a time until suddenly you realized he'd filled a whole page.
SG: The Diving Bell & The Butterfly made me think if this guy could write a book with one eye, I have no excuse for any kind of self-pity. I feel most people saw it and found it inspiring but went right back to worrying about their own problems. How can we make that feeling last long after we see a movie?
JS: That's a really deep and good question. I'm not going to be patronizing. I won't say what I think of you for asking. How do people keep this feeling about focusing on how lucky they are to actually be able to walk or lucky they are to be able to think about some interior life other than just feeding themselves and getting the next thing that they need? Obviously, you must be getting to another point through that question because the movie that I just made has to do with making people think about other people, think about people that are having a problem and their problem is our problem because they're people like we are. Whether they're Palestinians or whether they're Israelis or whether they're from Afghanistan or whether they are crippled or whether they are not. The point is what can we do as individuals to make the world a better place? Do we have a moral responsibility or is it just hedonistic kind of life where we just move from one pleasure to the next. It's about consciousness ultimately. You won't be able to affect all people the same way, but you can affect some people. If you had the sensation that how do you make this last, that means that somebody else probably felt that way too. I know that many people have come over to me and said thank you to me for making that movie. I never thought anybody was going to thank me for making that. Whenever I make something, I'm doing it to find out something in the process of making it. I'm not doing it because I know something. I won an award from the Sloan Foundation for the most accurate medical film. I don't know a damn thing about what the medical qualities of what somebody that's got Locked In Syndrome has. I asked the nurse, what did he have in his room? Did he have a humidifier? What did he have? Oh, his hands were on foam. You start asking questions and basically I hired his nurse to be his nurse and his physical therapist to be his physical therapist. I felt like I needed to go to that hospital to shoot it there. When I went to make this film, I shot the movie where Nadia was raped. I shot the movie where the kids were brought to the Husseini house. I think what I do as an artist is I try to do something as intensely as possible and if I come across something in the process of doing that and that's recorded, people in the audience can feel that. Some people it will stay with for a long time. Some people will walk out of the room and they'll forget about it pretty soon but I feel like the works that I've made have a cathartic element to them and they resonate with people.
SG: When Israeli groups are protesting Miral, are they saying it's us or them?
JS: I think that the film is pro-peace. It's not pro-Palestinian. It's a Palestinian story. It's about Palestinians. I think what's good for the Palestinians is good for the Israelis and vice versa. They just don't know that, the people in these groups. We have to live together and there are more things that the people have in common than are differences. There are people that are decent people, that are Israelis and Palestinians that are not screaming as loud as fanatics on both sides. This story is just a story about these people. I [could tell] a story about somebody in Afghanistan. The movie In This World by Michael Winterbottom is about two Afghani guys. Nobody complained about telling a story about Afghanis. Obviously there's a problem that people have. People don't like to be criticized. People just don't enjoy it. Criticizing people is not pleasant for the person that's doing the criticizing or for the people that are being criticized. Now in this country, if we say that there's a problem, does it mean that we're anti-American or does it mean that we care about the country and we want to make it a better place and we actually have higher expectations of what the country could be? I have higher expectations about the democracy that could exist in Israel and that should exist there. That doesn't' mean that the movie is pro-Palestinian. It's pro-Palestinian, it's pro-Israeli, it's for all people. It's pro, not con. It begs the issue that aren't we all human. It's a human story. All these people are not the same. We need to at least acknowledge the fact that they exist. In this movie, all violence is bad, all miscommunication is bad and it presents miscommunication as a bunch of people that are held hostage. The civil society is held hostage by the politicians over there on both sides.
SG: Could Gandhi's approach be relevant here, that you should show love and compassion even to people being violent towards you?
JS: Well, who's being violent towards whom?
SG: Not to say who started it, but there is violence on both sides.
JS: I think Gandhi's approach is absolutely essential. I think there has to be a nonviolent democratic revolution of people that will not accept being governed by violence on either side. Absolutely, you have to think about guys like Nelson Mandela who forgive people. Yitzhak Rabin was killed because he wanted to make peace. They said he was a traitor. Do you think he was a traitor? So the same people that say that Yitzhak Rabin was a traitor because he wanted to stop the settlements are saying that people shouldn't look at this movie. I think the movie's relatively innocuous in a lot of ways. What's so absurd is that just the mere consideration that it ought to be talked about, that these people should be recognized as people, and they're all different kinds of people in the movie, seems to be an affront to these different groups that wish we wouldn't show the movie at the United Nations. But then there were other Jewish groups that came out in support of the movie. You know that, right?
SG: Was the United Nations the appropriate place to premiere Miral?
JS: Absolutely. I didn't make a movie that I felt needed to be shown at the United Nations before this. I thought the United Nations was the perfect place because that's where stories of this conflict, this is where the resolutions are vetoed and this is where the state of Israel was born and this is supposed to be a place where people listen to each other. It was a pretty glorious evening. The place was packed, the screen was gigantic, the sound was great and it was a very peaceful and positive moment. So yeah, what do you think?
SG: The question came from would you be concerned that showing it at the UN makes it more political than you intended to be?
JS: Joseph Deiss, the president of the general assembly, somebody said to him, "Is this a political statement?" He said, "Absolutely." The thing is if you're going to tell this story, it's political just by the mere existence of telling it to somebody else. Now before I ever made this movie, years ago, I wrote if you tell somebody anything it's political. In this particular situation, obviously it is. You can't get away from it. But I thought that it's worth doing. I knew it from the beginning that it would be something that there are so many people that are scared of this topic, that are scared to write something positive about the film, that are scared to be connected in any way because they might not get a job, they might get fired. Luckily I'm unemployable. Nobody's going to fire me and I don't care. It's not going to limit anything that I am doing. So I had the sensation that I grew up in a free country and my parents encouraged me to find my voice in some way. They didn't make demands on me to go into my father's business or whatever. I was able to find my voice as an artist. I think I was doing what I was supposed to do. I made the movie and my big question to myself was can I tell this story, can I make a film that's educational and poetic at the same time? Will my storytelling be hampered or is it a good limited palette to superimpose on yourself so then you can see how to tell a story of a 16-year-old girl and this political conflict and make you care about the characters and find these epiphanies that can take place in the course of the film that will give you an emotional and cathartic experience, a first person experience and then you walk out of it, something happened to you. The result is not something that's designed because, like you said to me when you walked in here, how do you keep that feeling? Some people have it, some people don't. Obviously people react whatever way they will. There's a myriad of different possibilities because everyone is different somewhat.
SG: What didn't you want to tell me you thought of my first question?
JS: Because it would've sounded too patronizing because I liked the question, that's all. That's the reason I said that.
SG: What would have sounded patronizing?
JS: You sounded like a sensitive guy.
SG: I'm okay with that.
JS: Well, I'd rather tell you that now after I talked to you for a little bit than giving you a compliment before you started to ask me questions.
SG: What was the feeling in the community while you were shooting the film?
JS: It's super interesting because I needed the permission from the mayor, which was extremely helpful. He asked me, "How can I help?" I said, "Don't ask me too many questions." He said, "Well, okay, I have one question. Will Jerusalem be beautiful? Will it look beautiful?" I said yes, it will. I think some people were scared of the point of view that it might have. I think there was a lot of people that wanted to work with me because they like my movies. I think also the mayor let me work there because they liked the idea that an American film was going to be shot there, for the industry of it. I needed people, Palestinians and Israelis, to work on it because I needed things from both. I shot in Hind Husseini's house, in the Al Axa mosque, in Nadia's house so Rula's relationships with these people were important. At the same time, the community did not want to know that Rula's mother was promiscuous, that her father wasn't her father, that her mother was raped by her stepfather or show that a Palestinian man is killed by a Palestinian. I mean, there's a lot of different people that come to it with their point of view and what they don't want people to see and whatever. The mayor said, "You're putting a mirror up to us and I don't think people will like it on either side, but it's honest." He actually invited me to show the movie in Jerusalem. He said he would host a screening there but I haven't talked to him about that in a while. Obviously there were complains from, what was it, The Jerusalem Post? I didn't read that. Did you read Jewish Journal? Very good, a lady named Danielle Berrin. It was called Why Can't Jews Handle Miral and it's very insightful and nice. Just sensible. I think all the controversy and all that back and forth is very good for awareness about the film. I think when people go see the movie they're going to go see something, and maybe it's a little bit too noisy because they'll go, "Well, that's not so incendiary." Or "That's quite light in a way." On the other hand, you've got some Palestinian people saying it's not tough enough. I don't accept these clichs or I don't speak in generalities where people say pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli, I don't know what that means because there's a lot of different kinds of Israelis and a lot of different kinds of Palestinians and they all don't speak the same thing.
SG: Does it speak to the bigger issue of anyone who wants to get 100% of their way will not get entirely their way in any situation?
JS: You know, it's a beautiful thing when you meet someone and you can partner up with them and they can contribute what they're good at and you can contribute what you're good at and you can do something even better. Javier Bardem is a better actor than I am. I don't know if I'm a better director than he is because I've never seen a movie that he's made but together, we were able to make something extraordinary. Matthieu Amalric is a good director also, a wonderful actor. I made that movie with him. If I said, "Look, don't contribute anything. I don't want you to do that. Just do what I say." I'd be shooting myself in the foot because he can contribute something that I didn't think of that will be better than what I can think of. That's my experience in making movies with people. You work with somebody like Benicio, I've had such a privilege to work with so many great actors in just a few movies. I mean, to work with Johnny Depp, he's got a million ideas. He's got his version of the thing. The directors that don't let actors contribute to what they're doing are shooting themselves in the foot in a way. I think if fear governs the way that you're going to behave because you're going to lose control, you already lost. So I think that works in families. I think it would work in communities. You have to let people help. Let them participate. Let them do what they're good at. I don't think anybody, Israeli or Palestinian, doesn't want this to stop because anybody that's got children wants them to be able to go to school in the morning and they want to know that they're going to see them at the end of the day. That lack of familial security that people have on both sides is so disturbing that you end up with this deformation of life that is a conundrum.
Miral opens March 25, 2011 in select cities.
Miral is a story set in the midst of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, told through the eyes of a Palestinian girl. Miral (Freida Pinto) grows up in a Palestinian orphanage, where her teacher, Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass), encourages her to stay out of politics. But young activists in the PLO like Hani (Omar Metwally) are powerful examples to Miral, and she wants to get involved.
Schnabel's fourth film has upset Israeli groups even before its release. It premiered at the United Nations General Assembly Chamber on March 14, despite an outcry from The American Jewish Committee, who claim the film is one sided and anti-Israeli. The Anti-Defamation League and B'nai B'rith International also protested the premiere, where, inside, Rabbi Irwin Kula and Israeli Air Force Reserves pilot Yonatan Shapira (who refused to fly attack missions on Palestinian territories in 2003) joined Schnabel and author Rula Jebreal for a discussion.
Schnabel is comfortable talking about touchy subjects because he's pretty well able to control the conversation. Back in L.A., sitting in a conference room at his Hollywood PR firm's office, Schnabel spoke slowly and carefully, sharing one thought at a time until suddenly you realized he'd filled a whole page.
SG: The Diving Bell & The Butterfly made me think if this guy could write a book with one eye, I have no excuse for any kind of self-pity. I feel most people saw it and found it inspiring but went right back to worrying about their own problems. How can we make that feeling last long after we see a movie?
JS: That's a really deep and good question. I'm not going to be patronizing. I won't say what I think of you for asking. How do people keep this feeling about focusing on how lucky they are to actually be able to walk or lucky they are to be able to think about some interior life other than just feeding themselves and getting the next thing that they need? Obviously, you must be getting to another point through that question because the movie that I just made has to do with making people think about other people, think about people that are having a problem and their problem is our problem because they're people like we are. Whether they're Palestinians or whether they're Israelis or whether they're from Afghanistan or whether they are crippled or whether they are not. The point is what can we do as individuals to make the world a better place? Do we have a moral responsibility or is it just hedonistic kind of life where we just move from one pleasure to the next. It's about consciousness ultimately. You won't be able to affect all people the same way, but you can affect some people. If you had the sensation that how do you make this last, that means that somebody else probably felt that way too. I know that many people have come over to me and said thank you to me for making that movie. I never thought anybody was going to thank me for making that. Whenever I make something, I'm doing it to find out something in the process of making it. I'm not doing it because I know something. I won an award from the Sloan Foundation for the most accurate medical film. I don't know a damn thing about what the medical qualities of what somebody that's got Locked In Syndrome has. I asked the nurse, what did he have in his room? Did he have a humidifier? What did he have? Oh, his hands were on foam. You start asking questions and basically I hired his nurse to be his nurse and his physical therapist to be his physical therapist. I felt like I needed to go to that hospital to shoot it there. When I went to make this film, I shot the movie where Nadia was raped. I shot the movie where the kids were brought to the Husseini house. I think what I do as an artist is I try to do something as intensely as possible and if I come across something in the process of doing that and that's recorded, people in the audience can feel that. Some people it will stay with for a long time. Some people will walk out of the room and they'll forget about it pretty soon but I feel like the works that I've made have a cathartic element to them and they resonate with people.
SG: When Israeli groups are protesting Miral, are they saying it's us or them?
JS: I think that the film is pro-peace. It's not pro-Palestinian. It's a Palestinian story. It's about Palestinians. I think what's good for the Palestinians is good for the Israelis and vice versa. They just don't know that, the people in these groups. We have to live together and there are more things that the people have in common than are differences. There are people that are decent people, that are Israelis and Palestinians that are not screaming as loud as fanatics on both sides. This story is just a story about these people. I [could tell] a story about somebody in Afghanistan. The movie In This World by Michael Winterbottom is about two Afghani guys. Nobody complained about telling a story about Afghanis. Obviously there's a problem that people have. People don't like to be criticized. People just don't enjoy it. Criticizing people is not pleasant for the person that's doing the criticizing or for the people that are being criticized. Now in this country, if we say that there's a problem, does it mean that we're anti-American or does it mean that we care about the country and we want to make it a better place and we actually have higher expectations of what the country could be? I have higher expectations about the democracy that could exist in Israel and that should exist there. That doesn't' mean that the movie is pro-Palestinian. It's pro-Palestinian, it's pro-Israeli, it's for all people. It's pro, not con. It begs the issue that aren't we all human. It's a human story. All these people are not the same. We need to at least acknowledge the fact that they exist. In this movie, all violence is bad, all miscommunication is bad and it presents miscommunication as a bunch of people that are held hostage. The civil society is held hostage by the politicians over there on both sides.
SG: Could Gandhi's approach be relevant here, that you should show love and compassion even to people being violent towards you?
JS: Well, who's being violent towards whom?
SG: Not to say who started it, but there is violence on both sides.
JS: I think Gandhi's approach is absolutely essential. I think there has to be a nonviolent democratic revolution of people that will not accept being governed by violence on either side. Absolutely, you have to think about guys like Nelson Mandela who forgive people. Yitzhak Rabin was killed because he wanted to make peace. They said he was a traitor. Do you think he was a traitor? So the same people that say that Yitzhak Rabin was a traitor because he wanted to stop the settlements are saying that people shouldn't look at this movie. I think the movie's relatively innocuous in a lot of ways. What's so absurd is that just the mere consideration that it ought to be talked about, that these people should be recognized as people, and they're all different kinds of people in the movie, seems to be an affront to these different groups that wish we wouldn't show the movie at the United Nations. But then there were other Jewish groups that came out in support of the movie. You know that, right?
SG: Was the United Nations the appropriate place to premiere Miral?
JS: Absolutely. I didn't make a movie that I felt needed to be shown at the United Nations before this. I thought the United Nations was the perfect place because that's where stories of this conflict, this is where the resolutions are vetoed and this is where the state of Israel was born and this is supposed to be a place where people listen to each other. It was a pretty glorious evening. The place was packed, the screen was gigantic, the sound was great and it was a very peaceful and positive moment. So yeah, what do you think?
SG: The question came from would you be concerned that showing it at the UN makes it more political than you intended to be?
JS: Joseph Deiss, the president of the general assembly, somebody said to him, "Is this a political statement?" He said, "Absolutely." The thing is if you're going to tell this story, it's political just by the mere existence of telling it to somebody else. Now before I ever made this movie, years ago, I wrote if you tell somebody anything it's political. In this particular situation, obviously it is. You can't get away from it. But I thought that it's worth doing. I knew it from the beginning that it would be something that there are so many people that are scared of this topic, that are scared to write something positive about the film, that are scared to be connected in any way because they might not get a job, they might get fired. Luckily I'm unemployable. Nobody's going to fire me and I don't care. It's not going to limit anything that I am doing. So I had the sensation that I grew up in a free country and my parents encouraged me to find my voice in some way. They didn't make demands on me to go into my father's business or whatever. I was able to find my voice as an artist. I think I was doing what I was supposed to do. I made the movie and my big question to myself was can I tell this story, can I make a film that's educational and poetic at the same time? Will my storytelling be hampered or is it a good limited palette to superimpose on yourself so then you can see how to tell a story of a 16-year-old girl and this political conflict and make you care about the characters and find these epiphanies that can take place in the course of the film that will give you an emotional and cathartic experience, a first person experience and then you walk out of it, something happened to you. The result is not something that's designed because, like you said to me when you walked in here, how do you keep that feeling? Some people have it, some people don't. Obviously people react whatever way they will. There's a myriad of different possibilities because everyone is different somewhat.
SG: What didn't you want to tell me you thought of my first question?
JS: Because it would've sounded too patronizing because I liked the question, that's all. That's the reason I said that.
SG: What would have sounded patronizing?
JS: You sounded like a sensitive guy.
SG: I'm okay with that.
JS: Well, I'd rather tell you that now after I talked to you for a little bit than giving you a compliment before you started to ask me questions.
SG: What was the feeling in the community while you were shooting the film?
JS: It's super interesting because I needed the permission from the mayor, which was extremely helpful. He asked me, "How can I help?" I said, "Don't ask me too many questions." He said, "Well, okay, I have one question. Will Jerusalem be beautiful? Will it look beautiful?" I said yes, it will. I think some people were scared of the point of view that it might have. I think there was a lot of people that wanted to work with me because they like my movies. I think also the mayor let me work there because they liked the idea that an American film was going to be shot there, for the industry of it. I needed people, Palestinians and Israelis, to work on it because I needed things from both. I shot in Hind Husseini's house, in the Al Axa mosque, in Nadia's house so Rula's relationships with these people were important. At the same time, the community did not want to know that Rula's mother was promiscuous, that her father wasn't her father, that her mother was raped by her stepfather or show that a Palestinian man is killed by a Palestinian. I mean, there's a lot of different people that come to it with their point of view and what they don't want people to see and whatever. The mayor said, "You're putting a mirror up to us and I don't think people will like it on either side, but it's honest." He actually invited me to show the movie in Jerusalem. He said he would host a screening there but I haven't talked to him about that in a while. Obviously there were complains from, what was it, The Jerusalem Post? I didn't read that. Did you read Jewish Journal? Very good, a lady named Danielle Berrin. It was called Why Can't Jews Handle Miral and it's very insightful and nice. Just sensible. I think all the controversy and all that back and forth is very good for awareness about the film. I think when people go see the movie they're going to go see something, and maybe it's a little bit too noisy because they'll go, "Well, that's not so incendiary." Or "That's quite light in a way." On the other hand, you've got some Palestinian people saying it's not tough enough. I don't accept these clichs or I don't speak in generalities where people say pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli, I don't know what that means because there's a lot of different kinds of Israelis and a lot of different kinds of Palestinians and they all don't speak the same thing.
SG: Does it speak to the bigger issue of anyone who wants to get 100% of their way will not get entirely their way in any situation?
JS: You know, it's a beautiful thing when you meet someone and you can partner up with them and they can contribute what they're good at and you can contribute what you're good at and you can do something even better. Javier Bardem is a better actor than I am. I don't know if I'm a better director than he is because I've never seen a movie that he's made but together, we were able to make something extraordinary. Matthieu Amalric is a good director also, a wonderful actor. I made that movie with him. If I said, "Look, don't contribute anything. I don't want you to do that. Just do what I say." I'd be shooting myself in the foot because he can contribute something that I didn't think of that will be better than what I can think of. That's my experience in making movies with people. You work with somebody like Benicio, I've had such a privilege to work with so many great actors in just a few movies. I mean, to work with Johnny Depp, he's got a million ideas. He's got his version of the thing. The directors that don't let actors contribute to what they're doing are shooting themselves in the foot in a way. I think if fear governs the way that you're going to behave because you're going to lose control, you already lost. So I think that works in families. I think it would work in communities. You have to let people help. Let them participate. Let them do what they're good at. I don't think anybody, Israeli or Palestinian, doesn't want this to stop because anybody that's got children wants them to be able to go to school in the morning and they want to know that they're going to see them at the end of the day. That lack of familial security that people have on both sides is so disturbing that you end up with this deformation of life that is a conundrum.
Miral opens March 25, 2011 in select cities.