It’s no secret that Oscar Isaac’s acting range is enviable. For his latest turn in In the Hand of Dante, he inhabits not one but two characters living over 700 years apart. The Dante in question? None other than Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy. The film, an adaptation of writer Nick Tosches’s 2002 novel of the same name, is by painter and arthouse filmmaker Julian Schnabel, and, like so much of Schnabel’s other cinematic work, is concerned with the construction (and corruption) of great male genius.
The globe-trotting thriller—part gangster film, part dark night of the soul—follows Isaac in the early aughts as a fictionalized version of Tosches, a rogue journalist who convenes with the mob to steal and authenticate the Divine Comedy manuscript. Running parallel to this are flashbacks of Isaac as Dante, alongside a host of other characters played by the likes of Martin Scorsese (buried under a pile of faux-facial hair) and Gal Gadot, working through the spiritual anguish that drove the Divine Comedy’s conception. With a run time pushing three hours, there’s a bit of everything: ominous John Malkovich monologues, Gerard Butler ranting about New York dog owners, and the horny Italian concierge from The White Lotus season two, to name a few.
Schnabel has always been drawn to eccentric, even fervent, figures—mainly artists—seen in his films such as Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and At Eternity’s Gate, in which Isaac co-starred as the Paul Gauguin to Willem Dafoe’s Vincent Van Gogh. As the film heads toward its bloody conclusion, In the Hand of Dante is mired in the destructive act just as much as the creative one.
Ahead of In the Hand of Dante’s premiere in theaters on June 12, longtime friends and collaborators Schnabel and Isaac spoke with CULTURED about acting on instinct, Apocalypse Now, and the beauty of a midlife crisis.
Oscar Isaac: We met, is it nine years ago now? It was at the New York Film Festival. We sat next to each other.
Julian Schnabel: We sat next to each other and we held hands.
Isaac: [Laughs] That’s right. We communed, and then that’s when we got connected, watching a movie together.
Schnabel: What were we watching?
Isaac: We were watching Inherent Vice.
Schnabel: I’d seen Oscar’s work before I met him, and I was tickled to sit next to him. I felt like we knew each other before we knew each other. I noticed in Ex Machina that his voice sounded a lot like Dennis Hopper’s voice. Dennis was one of my best friends. That kind of familiarity—there’s something about it that makes you feel like you know somebody even more. I’d seen other work of Oscar’s and I just thought he could do just about anything. I don’t know what he knew about my paintings at that time, but I think he’d seen some of my movies.
Isaac: Of course, I’d seen Julian’s movies. I was really taken aback that he even knew who I was and had seen anything that I had done. Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, these were formative movies for me and incredible expressionistic works about artists. That’s the first time I had seen Javier Bardem in anything, too. They’re the kind of stuff that I was hoping as a young actor I’d get a chance to do.
Shortly after that, you’re like, “You wanna see some of the stuff I’m working on?” And you sent me a couple of your scripts—not to be in, just to share—and I read In the Hand of Dante. I said, “What’s going on with this? This thing is wild.” You said, “Yeah I got Johnny Depp on it.” I said, “Okay if he ever drops off, then please know that my hand is raised for it.” That was my first interaction with that script.
Schnabel: That was about nine years ago now. Maybe it was seven years ago when Johnny gave me the material in the first place, gave me the book. Nick Tosches even lived in his house when he was writing it. Johnny had been very generous and caring with Nick, but somehow they had a falling out. I don’t exactly know what happened. I really waited until the last minute to realize that Johnny wasn’t gonna do it. I had sent him the script, but we really weren’t communicating. It’s funny how life just has a way of taking over and taking up all your time. So who knows what was happening to him.
Oscar certainly delved into it as deep as anyone could. He inundated himself into this character in such a profound way. It wasn’t that I was just giving him lines to repeat or things to illustrate, but there was a real collaboration in terms of desire. Throughout the whole filming—and there were a lot of people that came in and out of the movie, you’re in a moving, living, breathing thing—I never saw Oscar lose a beat or lose the sense of where he was in his character, where the character was, or where we were.
It’s like you’re in a foxhole in a war. You want that guy in your foxhole. Somebody’s shooting at you from the front, the back, and the side, you want that guy in there, because you don’t have to think. You can just do whatever else you have to do. And I certainly had a hell of a lot of other stuff I had to do in this particular movie.
Isaac: A lot of incoming fire.
Schnabel: But that was one person I didn’t have to worry about.
Isaac: We were shooting in medieval castles, having to block off streets. We were having to get a lot of stuff done in a very short amount of time. Sometimes we’d only have one or two takes at certain things. We were going back and forth between time periods, sometimes on the same day. We had a largely Italian crew as well, and so had to learn how to communicate properly. There were a lot of challenges.
Schnabel: We actually had more than one shot, but I got it right away. [Laughs] I don’t rehearse. I cast actors because I believe that they could do that. I trust them, and I guess they trust me. You have to be able to let yourself go to where you’re not even aware of what you’re doing once you focus so hard and become that thing. It’s an out-of-body experience.
There’s a line in At Eternity’s Gate, a movie about Van Gogh, where Dr. Gachet, played by Mathieu Amalric, says to Willem Dafoe, “Why do you paint?” And he says, “To stop thinking.” “Oh, is that a form of meditation?” “No. When I paint, I stop thinking. I become a part of everything that’s inside and outside of me.” I would say that it’s the same thing for an actor. They know the lines, they know what it’s supposed to be like, but then there’s another thing that’s supposed to happen that is totally not scripted. It’s how much energy they have inside of themselves, how many things they can draw from, that is outside and inside of themselves, in their unconscious and consciousness. This movie’s very much about that.
Once I was talking with Bob Hoskins years ago—he was at a show I was having at the White Chapel—and I said, “You act a certain part and then all of a sudden people treat you differently. It must be really difficult to be an actor because all of a sudden you did something so ephemeral and then everybody treats you like you’re someone else. For a painter, you could go check the painting and say, ‘Oh, I know what that is. I know why people are reacting like this.'” He said to me, “You’re wrong. It’s all about that moment when you paint that stroke, you sing that note, you act that sequence—it’s all the same thing. It’s about that moment.” I believe that to be true.
We’re doing something that ultimately becomes a physical reality, a physical fact, a recorded thing. You know what Kobe Bryant said, “It’s irrelevant if the ball goes into the net. It’s being in that zone.” Once when I was making At Eternity’s Gate, Niels Arestrup, who died this year, he was in a bathtub, and he was saying this monologue. I think Roman Polanski told me that he didn’t understand something that he said. But, I said, “Did you think you could do that again?” And Niels said, “I’m like a leaf blowing in the wind. I have no idea where I was. I can’t do that again.” I accepted that, and then he did it again.
Isaac: There’s an idea that the way consciousness works is that there’s a feeling. No, there’s uncertainty. Uncertainty creates a feeling, feeling creates conscious response to that, and that’s the sequence of events. The mind is actually there to limit as much uncertainty as possible.
But Julian, what you do is, you try to foster as much uncertainty as possible to create real living consciousness. A feeling is elicited to try to understand hunger. Oh, I have to do something about this feeling I don’t understand. You often talk about “first stroke, best stroke,” because that’s probably where the moment of most uncertainty exists, so there’s the most possibility for, in a way, the consciousness. That’s the feeling I had a lot. We talked about preparation, but I think it was more engagement. It wasn’t so much that I needed to know all this so that I could execute some plan. But, to be so engaged that when the moment comes, the moment arises.
Schnabel: And you have something to do. Because it’s really about doing. You either do it or you don’t do it. For example, if you see Oscar working with Louis Cancelmi, the timing, and, I would say, the understanding of who you are as a character and who he is, is so deep that you can’t take your eyes off it. You can’t judge it. You just watch it.
Maybe that’s the thing that really has attracted me to making movies: I can work with people that can do something that I can’t do. I can tell them what I think might be a good thing for them to do, but ultimately you set it up, and you get out of the way, and you let them be. They know that you’re gonna not let them fall through the cracks, and they could go as far out as they wanna go. That kind of trust is immeasurable because people will do things that they might not consciously and pragmatically do.
Isaac: You came to watch me in Hamlet. We exchanged ideas, things that you love. That was a long process before our first actual engagement where we collaborated together.
Schnabel: We spent at least five years before we even started to work on a movie.
Isaac: At Eternity’s Gate being the first one.
Schnabel: Oscar played Gauguin in At Eternity’s Gate. He did an amazing job. He was perfect. He really had to jump through some hoops because he was working on a big movie, I think it was Kathy Kennedy and some other people. He had to go down and say, “Listen, I’m gonna go there and do this thing with Julian.” She actually was a producer on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you know. But it’s a commitment. It’s not a job. I’m not a professional movie-maker. When somebody says “your career as a painter”—I don’t have a career. I’m basically unemployable.
Isaac: You have a vocation.
Schnabel: It’s a practice. It’s something that I can do. There’s an incredible line in Apocalypse Now where Brando says, “You have to be able to act and trust your instinct to…” In his case, to kill. He said, “If I had seven of these guys, our troubles here would be over.” Meaning to act without judgment.
Later we’re gonna go upstairs, and I wanna just show you a painting from 1979. You know it already, but we should look at it after this conversation. One: I didn’t know what I was doing when I was making it. Two: I did it anyway. And three: To look at it almost 50 years later and see what the decisions were, and think, I can abide by those decisions—it’s still something that I can’t really wrap my mind around.
If you try to figure out what you were doing, you couldn’t repeat it. You could do a version of it. You could write about it. You could talk about it. People could write about it in a way that you think that they understood, and you can feel good. People can walk out of the movie and not understand it, and you could be hurt, but it’s not for everybody. No movie is.
The thing is that when you’re satisfied with it, you might even be uncomfortable with what you’ve done. Being comfortable is not necessarily part of the reward that you get for doing the job. I have a show up right now at Château Lacoste of nine paintings that were painted over the past 50 years. The Edge of Victory is a painting that’s painted on the boxing ring floor from the Gramercy Gym where Mike Tyson trained. When I saw Raging Bull, there’s a close-up of the ring and blood dripping off of the ring, the tape that’s on the ring. That’s one of the paintings that’s included in this show. That’s the practice. We’re at the edge of victory. It’s conceivable that one could maybe win.
Isaac: The irony is that you’re saying you’re fighting with something greater than yourself, when usually what’s greater than yourself is God. It makes me think of Jacob wrestling the angel. This kind of impossible thing. Nobody really has ultimate victory, right? We all die. It’s the doing of it, that wrestling match, that fight at the edge of victory, something that can’t be won.
I thought it was particularly interesting that Dante, to a certain extent, is having a midlife crisis when he’s talking about the midpoint in our journey. That’s how he starts the “Inferno.” Divine Comedy starts at the halfway point of our lives. This thing that we all go through: To go forward is scary, and it’s darkness, and it’s woods, and you can’t go back because that’s where the wild animals are. What do you do? You go into that, to get to somewhere better, somewhere different, somewhere more true. That is where I found myself. The fact that this happened at that exact same time, that was maybe a divine light.
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