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Miral

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : MIRAL, the visceral, first-person diary of a young girl growing up in East Jerusalem as she confronts the effects of occupation and war in every corner of her life. Schnabel pieces together momentary fragments of Miral’s world – how she was formed, who influenced her, all that she experiences in her tumultuous early years – to create a raw, moving, poetic portrait of a woman whose small, personal story is inextricably woven into the bigger history unfolding all around her.

Opens Friday, March 25, 2011

Runtime:1 hr. 52 min.

 

Interview with director Julian Schnabel

 

(Q): So when you’re making the movie do you push out of your head the possible implications that it’s going to affect the Jewish community or the Palestinian community and do you try to screen that out? Or are you always conscious of as you’re making the film, as you’re reading the material?
 
(Julian Schnabel): I thought this movie could help. I thought this movie couldn’t do worse than what’s happening over there, what the politicians are doing, and I hadn’t seen another film that another American filmmaker had made about a Palestinian girl, and I hadn’t made a movie about a teenage girl, and I wanted to make a film about women. Women are the recipients of violence and of war that usually has been generated by the decisions of men. They seem to be the recipients of this fallout all over, not just in Palestine but I mean in Afghanistan, or you could pick a million other places. So I think it’s a good thing to discuss things, it’s a good thing to give a voice to people that haven’t been heard.

(Q) : What narrative of the birth of the state of Israel were you exposed to and how is that different from what we see on screen?
 
(Julian Schnabel): My narrative is Exodus. My narrative is I was sitting in the movie theater, I don’t know if you were also, but at the Rivoli Theater when I was a kid with my parents, and when they sang Hatikva everybody stood up and put their hand on their chest. That’s my experience. I was very proud and very happy. And then there was the good Arab, played by John Derek, who gets hanged for collaborating with the Israelis.

And I was scared of the Arabs that are behind the bushes that slit the throat of Yvette Mimieux, the beautiful blond Jewish girl. But every time there was a battle, and certainly when there was the Six Day War, I was absolutely thrilled that the Israelis won. But the notion of actually taking the land and keeping it and then not caring about the people that are living there is not acceptable. I think Nasser did a lot of damage. Did anybody in this table ever hear of the Deir Yassin massacre before this movie?

(Q) : I think so. I’ve read enough about a set of massacres but I’m not sure I’m confusing it with another one.
 
(Julian Schnabel) : Because I had never heard of it, but I certainly heard about Mount Scopus incident where the Arabs attacked the Jewish doctors and nurses and killed them in the buses. You asked me what my perspective was, I mean I knew all about that, but that happened three days after the Deir Yassin massacre.

(Q) : In the context of where the international community stands on Palestine now that there’s an increasing push for Palestinian voices to be empowered to decide their own future where did you land as an artist? Were you just interested in telling Rula’s story or do you also have a particular standpoint on the politics there?
 
(Julian Schnabel) : Well I think through the process of telling Rula’s story and going to Israel and going to Palestine in affected my perspective and I learned more about the situation and I have opinions about the situation I didn’t have before I made the movie. That happened to me when I made “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” If I saw somebody that was in a wheelchair I didn’t want to look at them, and all I saw was their malady at first. But if I lived in a hospital with people that were paralyzed for a while I started to think oh that’s just the first thing that you see, that there’s a whole world going on.

These people are fathers, they have family, they have a sense of humor, there’s life beyond my first image of that person and I think “Oh god; I don’t want to end up in a wheelchair. I don’t want to be paralyzed.” I don’t make the movies to illustrate what I know. I do it so I can find out something about life through the process of making art, and I found out something about these people. What do I think about what’s happened?

I thought that woman, Mona Eltahawy, was great what she was talking about when we were at the United Nations. I thought all of them were great. The pilot was articulate and so was the rabbi, and the notion of empathy is a wonderful thing. Why do it if it’s not going to shock people or change somebody’s point of view? I make movies not as entertainment but as some kind of cathartic form of communication for myself and for the audiences.

(Q) : Why did you decide to have the premier at the United Nations GA hall?
 
(Julian Schnabel) : That seems to be the forum. Maybe it’s an idealistic notion to think that there could be peace in the world or people will listen to other people’s point of view, but it seemed to be the perfect stage for that. Certainly the birth of the state of Israel occurred in that room in 1948, and so many resolutions that the United States has vetoed about the illegality of the settlements have taken place in that room.

I guess I’m a New Yorker and I watched them build that place when I was a little kid. I think whatever I say you’ve got to take with a grain of salt, because there is a part of me that can tell you a story or explain to you why I did it, but that might not really be true, because there are some things that I don’t necessarily understand about why I’m doing it.

I do things out of intuition. Somebody asked why is Roman Polanski’s film, “Repulsion,” in the movie theater? And I’m telling Rula’s story from Rula’s point of view. It’s a diary of that girl. But at the same time, I can’t say that I’m absolutely invisible from the process of the storytelling, and as a teenage person, in my early teens I saw “Repulsion” on Avenue M in Brooklyn.

I had no preparation for it at all and I was really moved and shocked, and it was probably one of the films that I didn’t even know I was going to be a movie director at some moment in my life, but it was certainly one of the films that turned me into one and made me think there’s another kind of filmmaking that’s not like, in fact, the movie “El Dorado,” which was playing in the movie theater, in the Zain movie theater, the night that Fatima put that bomb there.

I looked at the movie and I thought it was so boring I couldn’t find anything or a part of that movie that would connect with the audience. But this rape scene, in the context of Nadia’s rape, in the context of the demolition of the house, which is the rape of a home, and the participation, and the victimization of the people that are watching that are intended to be killed by this bomb, seemed to be a confluence of codifiers and keys that could set anybody’s synapses into a frenzy. I don’t know why I did it. Obviously for personal reasons, intuitive reasons, artistic reasons, and a slew of other ones.

(Q) : Is screening this movie in Israel part of the plan?
 
(Julian Schnabel) : I showed this movie to the mayor of Jerusalem, who gave me permission to shoot there, and he said he was going to host a screening of this film in Jerusalem. Now I don’t know if that will happen or if that won’t happen, but he came with his wife and three people who are his advisers and he said that he didn’t think anybody would be pleased, the Palestinians or the Israelis, but he felt like it was honest. And he was proud that the movie was shot there because it proves that Israel is a democracy. I mean that’s what he said.

(Q) : I was just wondering if you had a particular standpoint on the United Nations politics that are being talked about in terms of Palestine.
 
(Julian Schnabel) : I don’t care if it’s one state or two states; that’s all about demographics. When they say 22% in my movie, what’s interesting is that there’s not 22% left, there’s 5% or whatever. And when Hind says “I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime” she doesn’t, and that’s part of the storytelling where the audience goes “That didn’t happen.” It’s like when you see Jack Nicholson in “About Schmidt” and he’s not saying all the things that he really thinks about this marriage that he’s at and you know what he really feels. It’s part of the genius of that moment. Somebody will get up and say “We never should have taken 22% percent.” I wasn’t advocating taking 22%; that was just a fact of what was happening at that moment.
 
(Q) : There’s been a lot of talk about Jewish objection to this film but I understand there have also been Palestinian objections. Could you talk about those?
 
(Julian Schnabel): It seems like everybody’s got the right to object. Everybody should go out and make their own film the way they see it, not superimpose their own vision. They can make their own film if they can do that. There are all different kinds of Palestinian people. A man came up to me at Venice and he said to me “You did more for the Palestinian people than all the Arab regimes. And I got a letter from the president and the Palestinian parliament thanking me for making the movie.

So there’s a guy in Chicago who wrote complaining that it was too soft or whatever. I’m not trying to invent something that didn’t happen to Rula, that wasn’t part of Rula’s experience. What I’m talking about is her book, her diary, it’s her point of view, the point of view of a 16 year old girl. She wasn’t in Gaza, it’s not about Gaza, it’s not about something that we’re talking about now which might be my interior or retrospective 20/20 vision about the situation.
 
(Q) : But I was just curious what some of their objections were.
 
(Julian Schnabel): Well I don’t know. Like I said, there was somebody in the audience in Abu Dhabi that said “Why should we take 22% of the land?” I said “Do you understand the movie? Maybe you’re not paying attention to what the movie’s saying. That doesn’t even exist anymore. You’re not paying attention to the narrative of the film.” I can tell you that in Ramallah they showed the movie in a theater with 400 seats and there were 500 people watching it.

And my response from the Palestinian people that I know has bee extremely positive, and my response from the Jewish people that I know, and not only Jewish people, from Bernardo Bertolucci and Jonathan Demme and Josh Brolin and Diane Lane and Ron Myer and I could name another 30 people, filmmakers, Javier Bardem or people that I respect, Paul Thomas Anderson.

It’s a humanistic film. I’m not a politician or an historian, but I think what is happening, or what happened at the United Nations was an historical event. And it was beautiful because I was talking to Bob Edwards yesterday on NPR. We went up to Sirius, the guy was talking about the drowning scene and he was asking me about the rape scene or the way the piece of metal was, and it’s so refreshing to just talk about the way the movie is made.

I didn’t go to Hollywood to make this movie and I didn’t make the movie in Morocco. I mean three days after the incursion in Gaza I was in Jerusalem and I shot the movie where Nadia was raped, in the house where she was raped. I shot the movie where Hind Husseini took those children. I shot the movie where she found those children. We closed off the lion’s gate for four hours where the funeral is to the Muslim cemetery. So it’s no small feat and it was worth it. We shot the movie in Ramallah where the riot is and the police department was dressed up as Israeli soldiers. A Jewish person shot in the Axa Mosque.
 
(Q) : You’re always conscious of a certain visual. Could you talk about the visual approach on this film?
 
(Julian Schnabel) : You have a visual memory of things that you associate with that part of the world. Like I said, Exodus, the color in Exodus, the idea of Technicolor, and the idea of time is so important. When you look at the desaturated kind of color that’s in the scene with Vanessa Redgrave at the American Colony Hotel, and then there’s a shift from that to when we come back.

When Hiam finds the children you have to think; 55 children is not like five children. You get 55 children in the early morning before the sun comes up, it’s cold, it’s unpleasant, they have parents also, so they look like they’re isolated there but there’s a lot going on there and it’s hard to get that before the sun comes up too.

So what you can do by digitally grading your film is you have total control over the color. So I could bring it down, I could make it all blue like it’s before the light came up, or I could make the sky cobalt violet right before Hani gets killed. And at the same time I used different kinds of stock. When Nadia is being raped it’s a reversal stock that I’m using and there’s a kind of grittier moment. Hind is living one kind of life, she’s from one kind of echelon, and at the same time there’s this woman in a hut living in Halisa in the middle of nowhere who’s getting raped by her stepfather. So there’s a different kind of film stock that I’m using.

But I think if you look at all the movies they kind of look like they were shot by the same person because essentially I’m not asking the DP to tell me what they think. I’ve seen what they do, I know what they can do, and then I know what I want my movie to look like. As I was watching the film the other day at the UN, which was very satisfying, I realized that how am I doing it? I don’t ever make storyboards and I don’t rehearse, so I put people in a situation, they know who I think they’re supposed to be, and then they react to what’s happening. And what I’m doing is reacting to what’s happening in that room. So if Eric Gautier says to me “I can’t do that,” I say “Yeah you can, you’re just a little short.

Step on an apple box and get over this guy’s shoulder and you can shoot those people running down those stairs. Or get up against the wall and we can have that candle being at the bottom of the frame when the wedding is taking place.” Obviously water is something that’s very, very important to me, and sound, or the absence of sound. So when Nadia commits suicide I was watching the whole audience in there; it looked like everybody was going underwater each time that happened. So for me it’s very much a first person kind of thing. When you’re looking at a painting you don’t have somebody standing in front of it explaining it to you, you just look at the damn thing and you’re left to your own devices, but it’s something that’s happening in the first person. Try to tell a movie in that way also.
 
(Q) : That must make the casting critical to your filmmaking.
 
(Julian Schnabel) : Absolutely. I’m not interested in special effects; I’m really interested in people. And I think Freida Pinto is brilliant in this movie. And when you see that girl sitting being interrogated before she gets whipped when she’s just sitting there and she says “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” and the guy doesn’t let her go and she’s just sitting there. She’s got so much stuff going on inside of her. She’s so deep. And she was criticized for being an Indian person playing a Palestinian person. When I met Rula I asked her “Are you Indian?” She said “No, I’m Israeli.” I said “You mean you’re Jewish?” She said “No, I’m Palestinian.” The great thing about making art is you’re supposed to break down boundaries.

There’s no new language but there is a personal selection of language. I didn’t think I was reinventing the wheel when I became a movie director; it was just a part of my process as a storyteller and as an artist. Now that I’ve seen five movies that I’ve made I can see that there’s a style to what I did, but I had no idea what that was. You can look at it after and you go oh yeah, I like to frame things a certain way. I like it when a strand of hair comes in the foreground of a scene and you’ve got a big landscape behind it. One of my favorite moments is when the two girls are driving in the car and they’re not saying anything and you see that landscape just flying by. I could look at that for a long time. You have to say okay, it’s not a travelogue.

When I saw “The Children of Arna,” [“Arna’s Children”] this documentary, and there’s a little boy sitting in front of this house that’s been demolished I thought I wanted to see the demolishing of that house so I felt that I needed to build that house and knock it down in order to do that. And the DP and the first AD said “Well we should film the building first so we have enough images of it and we don’t have that many cameras and we only have one building.” I said “Listen, the people are not going to react the same way if they’re not looking at a building being knocked down. I don’t care what I don’t have; they’re not going to be faking this.” So I try to keep it real, I don’t want people to be acting, they’re reacting to a situation that they’re in and that’s how I do it.
 
(Q) : Can you talk more about the drowning scene?
 
(Julian Schnabel) : I’ll tell you one thing that’s interesting about it is that the girl who plays Nadia can’t swim. So I got her a swimming teacher but she was terrified of the water even though I was in the water with her. So I asked Rula to get dressed up like her and swim out the rest of the day for the wider shot, so I had her reenacting her mother’s suicide. You’ve got an AD that’s standing on a jetty somewhere yelling at a girl who’s in the dark who is not a big swimmer reenacting her mother’s suicide. And people say it’s a movie, or it’s not real; all the best movies are made by people really inhabiting those places. When I paddled out there on a surfboard to grab her she slipped out of my hands because she wanted to go down to the bottom.

And I grabbed her and said “What the hell are you doing?” And she was like “I’ve got to wash her off me.” So I grabbed her by the neck and ass and put her on the surfboard and let her paddle in and then I swam in. So it’s not easy sometimes and I think to go in there and to be in that house where her mother was raped and watch this going on, I think another thing that was very difficult for her just to see her father walking through Jerusalem bringing her to the school. Because if you read the book, there’s a moment where the father’s going and the soldiers are going to stop him and he says “They’ll stop me but they’ll let you go. You just keep going.”

I just think for her to go back there not only to write a book but to go back and to relive these things is a form of exorcism in a way and redemption and kind of a conclusion or a closure or resolution that I think very few people get to actually realize, and part of my interest in doing this was that. When I went to the hospital I understood something about Jean-Do and I talked to a man named Bernard, who was his best friend. And Bernard said to me that Jean-Do said to him “I’m not the same guy that I was. I’m somebody else now.” I always thought god, you’re going to get locked inside your body; it’s the worst possible thing that could happen, because I have claustrophobia.

He actually felt like he was dead when his body was fine and there was some other kind of thing that took over when he was living inside of his imagination, and I never thought that could have been a positive thing. I had no idea that that was even possible. When Ron Harwood wrote this script he never met any of those people and he didn’t go to the hospital. When the people came to me to ask me to do the movie I think they knew that I was going to rewrite the script that I was going to go there, that I was going to do it in a different way that it needed to be done. I bring my sensibility or my approach to this for good or bad, I don’t know, I can’t make a real judgment about it.

You saw what it was like in the movie theater with all of those people, so I don’t understand a lot of the negativity in the things that I’ve read, I don’t think it has anything to do with the film somehow. In Venice there was a standing ovation for 15 minutes; I thought we were going to win the Venice Film Festival. I was shocked when I read that people didn’t like the movie. And I think what happens to film critics sometimes, you end up in a little room with some other film critics watching something, a bad version of whatever, and then it’s very different than sitting in the audience watching the film. I think movies are made to be seen with other people.

End.