Olmo Schnabel debuts with “Pet Shop Days”: «When you’re young you make mistakes»

ORlmo Schnabel grew up with his own idea of ​​proportions. Between an oversized father (the artist Julian Schnabel) and laboratory houses where outsized works were conceived and stored. «I was little when my father was walking around Basquiat (film where all the Schnabels played cameos, Jack, Lola, Stella, Esther, ed.)» he tells us. Later he would participate in the creation of another artist’s portrait, Van Gogh – On the threshold of eternity. Until the time came for him to tackle what “always seemed natural to me to do”: making a film.

«A small film» but inspired by very large models: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who, we remember, had among his goals that of “destroying families”), William Friedkin, Abel Ferrara and Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver above all. But also less obvious models: «the “quinqui” cinema»for example, a Spanish genre that produced wild films about juvenile delinquency in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

Olmo Schnabel’s debut in Venice

Pet Shop DaysOlmo Schnabel’s debut filmwhich had its premiere in Orizzonti Extra, the most extremist section of the official Venetian selection, is in fact bilingual like him (his mother is the Basque Olatz López Garmendia), and he talks about two places that are familiar to him: Manhattan where he grew up, “but which I abandoned” and Mexico, where he lives now. The device is that of a fatal encounter between two boys of his age (Schnabel is 29 years old): Alejandro (Mexican Dario Yazbek Bernal, brother of Gael García Bernal) who, in a dazzling opening scene (which reveals the intensity of his complicity with his mother, equal only to his hatred for his father), flees from his family, crosses the border and finally arrives in New York where he meets Jack (Jack Irv, a sort of young Jon Voight, Olmo’s childhood friend and also co-writer of the film) who works in the pet shop of the title and has a family at least as broken down as Alejandro’s. From that moment on, the night streets of Manhattan are all for them, and encounters with drug dealers, stripteuses, elderly women too bejeweled not to represent a temptation, weave a web, perhaps, of perdition. Certainly confusing.

Did you want to speak to your generation with this film?
I think so. But I’m still young, so if I do it I don’t think it’s from a nostalgic point of view. When I think about the cinema I love, I wouldn’t have imagined that my first two films would be coming-of-age stories (Schnabel produced, in 2019, Giants Being Lonely, by his friend Grear Patterson, ed.). My next one won’t be, but evidently for me this was the moment to talk about individuals who perhaps look a little like me.

New York will certainly have been an inspiration (“Why don’t you try to do like in New York, where we all talk to everyone and live together while each maintaining our own identity? Look at us, it can be done” Julian Schnabel told us in 2010). But filming in a place where so much cinema has already taken place can also backfire.
New York is where I grew up and it’s a place where there is adventure possible at every turn. I haven’t been there for a few years, since, even before the pandemic, it seemed to me that the city had stopped making me dream. So to try to discover something new I decided to go to Mexico. I returned for the film because I was looking for that intensity that I had known: therefore I made it a timeless place, more reminiscent of cinema atmospheres, perhaps the ’80s, than everyday life. I wanted to position myself at the edge of a cliff and see if I would survive or fall off. Many people told me: “Do something smaller, simpler”. I replied, no, “it’s worth it” (in Italian, ed.). I knew almost nothing before I started. And not knowing is very attractive. I like to leave things open, manipulate situations, wait and then sum up.

I was fortunate enough to interview his father years ago, at your home in Montauk, the Hamptons. I remember him telling me: «Films for me are learning processes. When I told the story of Reinaldo Arenas ( Before Night Falls, ed. ), I didn’t know much about the Cuban revolution. And I only knew one side of the story that I then told in Miral (the film written with Rula Jebreal, about the childhood and adolescence of a Palestinian girl in East Jerusalem).”
It was wonderful to grow up with someone I could have a dialogue with about art. My father and I have always talked about these things, ever since I was a child, and we continue even now that I have grown up. Julian always encouraged me to do what I felt I could do, I’m very lucky to have an artist I respect for a father. And that he watched many films with me.

In the two families of his film there is very little harmony, however.
Those relationships are pure fiction, portraits of families without hope, but which allow us to glimpse something behind their failure. I wanted the viewer to wonder what they were like before the disaster. And what had brought them to the moment where everything is on the verge of exploding. Alejandro has a relationship with his mother Maribel Verdú which to define as ambiguous is an understatement. They are very close, they depend on each other, they are best friends, they live in a golden cage, but they are lonely and perhaps empty people. Their relationship is not healthy, perhaps it is perverse. When the two boys meet, they discover that they both have unhealthy relationships with their parents and that they are very lonely, which brings them closer. The only person with a good head on their shoulders is Jack’s little sister, even though she’s only a teenager. The adults don’t come out well, they really don’t know what to do.

A kind of love is born between Alejandro and Jack. A love that doesn’t save though.
Jack is at a moment in life where he has a big question mark in front of him, when he meets this mysterious boy he thinks he has everything he doesn’t have. And for the first time he feels something. But when you’re young you think you’re in love and you think you won’t survive the end of a love affair. Your parents tell you that in six months you will be fine, but six months later you are at the same point. It’s not something adults can be of much help with. Life is an experiment and time is the only true revelation. Therefore we become wiser with age. When you’re young you make mistakes, and that’s the point of life. Proceed by trial and error, learn from mistakes and hopefully improve.

Is there no room for redemption?
I believe that in the end we all have to accept who we are. I don’t know if this is good or bad and if it coincides with the idea of ​​redemption in a religious sense, but it is certainly bad to deny our nature. It produces pain and confusion. If these kids fall it’s because their models didn’t do their duty. Jordi Mollà (who plays Alejandro’s father and is a criminal, ed.) and Willem Dafoe seem above all intent on demonstrating their masculinity with the aggressiveness with which they pursue their vices.

You say your film is “small”, but the cast is full of big names, Willem Dafoe, Emmanuelle Seigner, Peter Sarsgaard, among the executive producers are Michel Franco and Martin Scorsese…
It wasn’t easy, they are all very busy people. Sometimes even if they want to find time for you, they can’t. I know Willem and Emmanuelle through my father (Willem worked for Julian Schnabel in Basquiat, Miral And Van GoghSeigner in The diving bell and the butterfly, ed.). But I looked for and chose the rest of the cast. Matching the little free time of Willem, who works a lot, with the availability of the others was a poker game. There was no room for error, it’s a film shot at a hundred miles an hour.

He created his own production company. Projects?
I want to help filmmakers my age bring their ideas to the world. But in June I’m getting married in Italy (with the Italian Ludovica Quaratesi, also co-producer of the film). I will shoot the film I’m writing in Mexico in September.

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