Benicio Del Toro vs. Julian Schnabel
BlackBook
Winter 2004
The star of the year's most intense movie experience 21 Grams, talks with the renowned artist and director on friendship, Basquiat, and art.
There's a reason Benicio Del Toro is the only person to have appeared on Black Book's cover twice. At 36, he remains one of the most compelling actors in a crowded field, favored with a screen presence and natural-born cool that few of his contemporaries can match. Onscreen or off there is nothing forced or insincere about him. Nothing artificial. His new movie, 21 Grams, in which he stars alongside Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, has the intensity of a car crash and the lingering persistence of loss. Like Traffic and The Usual Suspects, it is urgent, complex, and transfixing.
Julian Schnabel was among those who spotted Del Toro's talent early on, casting him as Benny Dalmau in Basquiat, and establishing a friendship that has survived and flourished. This year marks a quarter century since Schnabel made his own, indelible mark with his debut exhibition at New York's Mary Boone Gallery. The show catapulted him to the forefront of the city's art scene, where he has remained - a brilliant, controversial colossus whose prodigious output has divided critical opinion ever since. With a new retrospective book, and an exhibition at the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt opening in January, Schnabel insists he is still very much the artist, even if it's his movies that garner most of the attention these days.
BLACK BOOK: Let's talk movies.
BENICIO DEL TORO: Have you ever seen Cocksucker Blues?
JULIAN SCHNABEL: No.
BDT: It's the Robert Frank movie of the Rolling Stones. And there's this shot of this sound guy who's kind of really wasted, and he goes like this, with the microphone, [mocks tapping of a microphone] "Uh, action. Action." It's the best rock'n'roll movie ever made.
BB: How did you two first meet?
JS: I remember that.
BDT: I was smitten.
JS: This guy came to interview me about Jean-Michel Basquiat. He wanted to make a movie about him, and I knew something about Jean-Michel because we were friends - so I thought I'd help this guy. I wasn't the producer, I wasn't anything, but I did go to California with him, and I knew this guy who worked with a casting director named Johanna Ray, and she heard that Jean-Michel was half Puerto Rican. So I go there, and I'm looking at these tapes, and all of a sudden I see this guy [Del Toro] sitting at a table in [the PBS series] The Drug Wars, and he's hardly moving and hardly saying anything, but everybody else on the screen just disappeared. And I said, "This guy's perfect. He's just the wrong color. Jean-Michel's black. Did you know that he was black?" I guess she called you, and we met, and you seemed very, very familiar to me. I grew up in New York, but I lived in Brownsville on the Mexican border from the time I was a teenager.
BB: He was supposed to be Jean-Michel Basquiat at first?
JS: In Johanna Ray's mind.
BDT: But she didn't know who Jean-Michel Basquiat was - she didn't know what he looked like. We went out to dinner, and you got me a copy of Pixote.
JS: Hector Babenco's film Pixote. It was made in 1981, and it was, I think, one of the best movies made in the past 20 years - more than that. But we started hanging around together, and we became really good friends. So there was a role, a blend of a couple of people, that became Beni's role in Basquiat, and we developed that together.
BDT: You know, Julian is someone who does his own thing, and I've always looked up to that, to the fact that he's singing his own song. The sense of humor is similar - maybe it's that Texas thing.
JS: I think that the ambience of Puerto Rico, where Beni grew up, was not so different, in a way, from Brownsville. It's the southernmost part of Texas, very close to Mexico, so that Spanish thing was a part of our adolescence, also. Benicio was going to play Reinaldo [Arenas] originally. It didn't work out, but he was present in other ways. For example, my mom and dad were having dinner in Montauk, New York, and Benicio was there, and my mother started to pick on my father, because sometimes he would say stuff that would piss her off. And she said, "You know Jack, you're just like milk cow that gives milk all day long and then kicks over the bucket." And Beni just looked at me, like, "Yeah, that line's definitely in the movie." So even though he wasn't in the film, he really helped me in making it.
BDT: Julian creates a family around the film, as if you're in your living room - you can just take chances. I could see it in Before Night Falls. I could see Javier Bardem just taking all that and running with it. You can see it in Basquiat, with Christopher Walken. And that's very rare - that's a gift.
BB: You said that one of the things you admire about Julian was -
BDT: - his skirts. Are they called skirts? No -
JS: - Paraios, but you can call them skirts.
BDT: Pajamas. They're pajamas. You come in and direct in those pajamas.
JS: It very hot.
BDT: But yeah, what did I say? About Julian?
BB: Well, you admired him for doing his own thing. Is that true of you - are you also a guy who does his own thing?
BDT: I like to be. I mean, it's not a choice - it's in the DNA. It's not like I woke up one day and said, "Well, I'm not going to go to that party - I gotta be this." It's organic. When it's organic, you immediately know. If someone is sexy, it's not because they're prettier than anybody else - it's just, they're comfortable within their skin.
JS: When you start making movies, people go, "What - you're not a painter anymore?" But really, I am a painter. Maybe my barometer, or the way I look at what has to be in each frame is different because I'm a painter, or there's a format for telling a story that might not feel like a necessity to me, and so it's a way you do whatever you do. I think it's very important to keep everything fresh, where it's just happening for the first time, and it's real. My theory of making movies is you throw somebody in a ditch and they gotta crawl out, then they can go home.
The actors who I like are people that only care about the work. I don't think Benicio minded getting the Academy Award [for best actor in a supporting role], but I don't think his goal was to be a movie star. I think his goal is to get it right, to make it believable to him. If it's not right for him, he's unhappy, and I think it's the same for me. I don't care what anybody says - if it's good or it's bad. I remember when I watched Javier [Bardem] after we had the first cut of Before Night Falls, and I said to him, "What do you think?" He was sitting there, miserable. I said, "From one to ten, what do you think it is?" He says, "I think. six." I said, "It's a fucking eleven. We're going to come back here and watch this thing tomorrow, and then we're going to watch it the next day," and he was really suicidal. I mean, he's a really great actor, and he really worries a lot, Javier, but after awhile, he started to see it.
BDT: As an actor, you're very limited, so you try to progress in some way, to reach a place where you might be able to be picky - and I'm pretty picky myself. But that doesn't mean that I have five or six projects ready to go if I say yes. There's a whole machine behind it that's about, "Can we make money out of that subject matter, or this subject matter?" I wish there was a place that you could go, and you said, "OK, I want to work with this director and do that story", but it's not like that. It's almost like swimming underwater.
JS: I mean, you do a movie like Traffic, for which you get an Academy Award, and then you're offered a movie like The Hunted, which is a more popular movie, and you do a good job in that, but maybe that's not exactly - you know? And then you do a movie like 21 Grams and I think it's an excellent film. Naomi Watts and Sean [Penn] and Benicio are incredible in the film. It's kind of the next step from Amores Perros [also directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu] in a way, to where that kind of fragmented storytelling really approaches clarity about simultaneity of time, and it's very, very, very effective. You know, Sean Penn got the Donostia Award at the San Sebastian film festival. I was the person who handed him the award.
BB: For 21 Grams?
JS: Not for 21 Grams. It's like a lifetime achievement award.
BDT: He got best actor in Venice for 21 Grams.
JS: It's really an ensemble piece. The three of you are amazing in it.
BDT: Did he thank me?
JS: [Pause] Yeah.
BDT: Yeah? Good.
JS: I thanked you, actually.
BDT: I'm interested in Sean. He told me he was going to thank me every time we get an award now.
JS: He was talking about this light-blue paper underwear that they gave him at this place where he got a massage, and he said, "I'm standing here in an Armani suit - but I really see myself as the guy standing in the light-blue underwear."
BB: Does what you do feel like work, when you're painting or acting, or is it something you're compelled to do?
JS: Well, I think it is work, but it's a work that we chose to do.
BDT: Before I get a job, I want a job, but the minute I get the job it becomes work, and it's difficult - it's not like a team all the time. As a painter, I assume that Julian doesn't have to answer questions of what color, what canvas, what materials to work with. As an actor, you have to have communication skills, and my communication skills have been getting better as I get older, but still, you have to -
JS: - It's work.
BDT: It's work, it's work, it's work. It's like, "OK, here's the scene. Can I play that, can I change it?" I go to the director, I ask, "Can I change it?" and the director says, "Well, let me think about it." It's not only that; it's also the fear of jumping into it - am I going to be any good, do I understand it?
JS: I've only made two movies, but I prefer to hear what the actor feels comfortable saying, rather than what a writer might think, because the actor's got to have the words come out of his mouth. There are certain things that I obviously want him to say, and it's my job to make him say what I want him to say.
BDT: Right, because it may be specific to plot, but it's very hard for an actor to get in front of that camera and make that table look real, make himself be real, make the situation real. When I saw 21 Grams, I couldn't even watch myself. Acting might look easy, but it's a difficult thing, because you always have to say what's in the script.
JS: Hey, there are some actors who want that.
BDT: And they're good at it, too. Some actors are really good at saying what's written - Tommy Lee Jones, for example, who I worked with. I looked at what he had to say, and wondered how he was going to do it, and then he came in and just said it perfectly. I was like, "OK, that makes sense. Yeah, he made it work." Christopher Walken, too - he can take the Yellow Pages and turn it into Shakespeare.
JS: He said something very interesting to you, when you were working on the - I think it was The Funeral, right? He said, "If you don't know what to do, don't do anything."
BDT: Great piece of advice.
JS: Don't do anything. If you don't have anything to say, don't say anything. If you don't know what to do, don't move. And you can see how he can be still. There was a scene in Basquiat where he's interviewing Jeffrey Wright - it looked like a fucking still photograph.
BDT: There's something about painting that is like acting, because it's about composition, it's about balance. OK, if you're going to yell here - let's say yell is red - are you going to yell again, or are you going to do it all yelling? It's about the colors, the composition, the balance of the painting. Or, you know, don't do anything. Some of your paintings could be, don't do anything. La nada. Don't do anything. La nada.
JS: What's really similar is that whenever you're acting that moment, or whether you're directing that moment, or whether you're painting or singing a song, you want something to happen that is unexpected, and you give everything away at that moment and let whatever you're doing fill you up. That moment is an invisible moment, a nonmaterialistic moment, and it's transient, but the great thing is that time has stopped at that moment, and that's recorded. The other thing about acting, I think, is that people see actors acting out emotions and situations, and they can identify with that. With painting, they look and they go, "Well, what the hell is that?" And the people who like paintings don't need to know the answer - they like the mysterious quality of that. At the end of the movie, people usually like to know what the hell happened. With the painting, they just might have to keep looking at it and be mystified, till they die.
BB: I think there's a lot of mystery in 21 Grams. The whole movie is a puzzle, a mystery, I came away much more with a mood and a feeling.
BDT: Alejandro [Gonzalez Inarritu] wanted to keep that mystery, and I liked that mystery. You don't need to show it all, you don't need to say it all. I think the audience is much smarter than most films think they are, or than a lot of films think they are.
JS: You want to give the audience some credit.
BDT: You definitely do, and I think 21 Grams really treats the audience the way Alejandro [Gonzalez Inarritu] was treating the actors.
JS: My mother-in-law had an extraordinary reaction to this movie. We were in Spain watching it, and Olatz, my wife, Olatz's mother, and her three aunts were there. We were sitting there watching this very tough, difficult movie, and Olatz's mother walked out. I said, "You OK?" And she said, "I feel great." I said, "You feel great?" She said, "Yes, usually I'll go to those movies where people live in a palace and everything's great and everybody's beautiful -"
BDT: - everybody's in love.
JS: "I go home to my shitty apartment and think, 'Fuck - my life is terrible.' Here, everything was so horrible, I came back to my shitty apartment, I thought, 'Wow, this is great!"
BB: Julian, both your movies have taken real lives and immortalized them onscreen. Benicio is slated to play Che Guevara in a movie by Terrence Malick. Is there an inherent risk in adapting the template of a real life and putting it on celluloid?
BDT: I feel that there is definitely a danger, but at the end of the day, it's just a movie. It's a romanticized idea of that person, maybe, and I think anyone who does a movie about anyone, they have to admire them, and at the same time, look at them eye-to-eye, too, as a human being. So I think you have to care and have to feel responsible, you have to feel very responsible.
JS: I didn't want to be the guy that made biopics, and I sort of rejected that kind of question when people asked me that. But the truth of the matter is I don't know a lot about a lot of different things, but I do know what it's like to be an artist, and I realized that I was making movies about stuff I knew, and I haven't really seen too many movies about artists where I actually believed that's what they were and what they did.
BDT: You definitely have a lot of sources if it's a real person.
JS: Did you read the book You Can't Win, by Jack Black? It was written by a career thief in 1926. You know, there are some people who just have a way of writing, and their way of writing is just so damn intimate and personal that you can't believe they're dead. They're right there with you, and so it's very palpable - you can really work with that kind of thing.
BB: One of the running threads in 21 Grams was the question of fate or coincidence, the way lives intersect. Is life chance or coincidence, or is it predetermined?
BDT: I think you rule your life, I rule my life, and then there is fate. We don't know what's going happen, but you make your choices. There's a lot of intersections - go left, go right, go back, go forward. I think you make choices, and then there is coincidence and fate, and you can sit there, indulge in it or look at it, talk about it, don't talk about it. But I think you make your own choices in life. You might make choices under the influence; you might make choices when you're asleep. Personally, I make choices with what comes my way.
JS: But I also think that there's a way that you want to live your life, and there are people who you meet, and you pick them over other kinds of people, and you have a similarity of interest. It's funny how you can meet someone and not know them at all, but you just - I met my wife - I mean, she was really beautiful - but there were a lot of beautiful women that I've seen, but there was something about her that made me feel invited, that if I didn't end up with her, life would be meaningless. We didn't even speak the same language when we met. But there was just something that you felt was there - I don't know if we were married in the 18th century or whatever - but there's something about certain people. And you just feel like you want to be around those people. One thing about making things that other people see, beyond all ideas of criticism, is for people to see what you do and relate to it. They share these things with you, or they feel like working with you, and that comes out of actually making work and putting it there, and that changes your life.
Married couples have fights - people, friends have fights. Different things happen, but a friend is somebody who knows everything about you and still likes you. But I feel like we're in the middle of a stroke [in time], or something like that - it's just like the beginning. It's always the beginning over and over again. We're just beginning all the time.
BB: Does the end ever come?
BDT: The story never ends.
JS: Does the end come? Who knows? I close my eyes sometimes and think, "OK, well, death is gonna look just like this." You just sort of know that at the last moment you're going to be conscious, and then you kind of go into whatever that's going to be. Is that the end? You got me. I'll tell you-
BDT: I don't know where the beginning is. If I knew the beginning, maybe I could tell you the end.
(Photographs by Ben Watts)