Conversation With Julian Schnabel

Etienne George/Courtesy Miramax Films

Conversation With Julian Schnabel

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They want to be entertained.  Most people don’t, but if my father could have seen this movie, he might have been less afraid to look into his interior life. Bauby was not an artist until after he got sick. He once told a friend “I’m reborn as somebody else.” It’s amazing that he felt he had been selected for something. All my movies are about the power of art to be life affirming, no matter how tragic the story. The director Andrei Tarkovsky said that life contains death, and art excludes it. So there can never be pessimistic and optimistic artists, only a talented mediocrity. I believe that.

You work on such a large scale, yet your films, especially The Diving Bell, tend to be quite intimate. How do you reconcile that with the size of your vision? 

Take another look: Even though this movie is intimate, you get to see the whole world in it. 

"Conversation With Julian Schnabel" originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2008 Table of Contents.