Based on Nick Tosches’ 2002 novel of the same name, Julian Schnabel’s “In the Hand of Dante” divided audiences upon its premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. “His decade-in-the-kiln film is epically miscalculated despite sequences and stretches of grandeur,” Ryan Lattanzio wrote in his review for IndieWire. Yet Schnabel’s latest found a fan in Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, who not only agreed to release the film on his monolithic streaming service but gave final cut to its director, who won Cannes’ Mise en Scène award for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

The film tells two stories simultaneously: the first of Italian poet Dante Alighieri as he writes his literary classic, “The Divine Comedy”; and a second set in 2001, where a fictionalized Tosches agrees to help a pair of gangsters steal and sell the only known copy of Alighieri’s original manuscript. Oscar Isaac plays both men opposite Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, and Louis Cancelmi (also in dual roles), alongside John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa, and Martin Scorsese as Isaiah, Alighieri’s mentor.

Following a two-week run in theaters, “In the Hand of Dante” arrives on Netflix on June 24, where it remains to be seen whether subscribers are drawn more to its stretches of grandeur or its epic miscalculations.

Speaking last week to IndieWire via Zoom, Schnabel discussed the initial reactions from audiences and critics out of Venice and the subsequent journey to find distribution. He also discussed the choice to cast many of his actors in dual roles, examined the film’s themes in the context of his larger body of film work, and, with a film he calls “something that might not be like everything else,” offered insights on the individuals whose reactions to his work mean the most — other than himself, anyway.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

IndieWire: After the film premiered at Venice, it received mixed reactions. Did that prompt any self-reflection or changes as it embarked on the path towards distribution?

Julian Schnabel: No. I think that you make something, and some people will understand it, and some people won’t. If you start modifying your work for the lowest common denominator, what’s your goal? The fact is that there were some responses that were extraordinary, and there are a lot more that, as people have seen the film, have been piling up, and it’s very, very satisfying. I’m glad that I kept my position. And obviously, Ted Sarandos saw the film, loved it, and I had final cut, and he wanted to preserve that. The rest of it is a great ride. The reception at the Tribeca Film Festival was fantastic. Obviously, when you make something that might not be like everything else, some people don’t know what to do with it — some people like to be surprised, and some people like to be engaged and take the trip. I don’t know if the critics think they need to criticize or whatever, but I read some really beautiful things from people that really, really get it. And I think it’s something that’s going to be here for a long time. Did you see the trailer?

‘In the Hand of Dante’©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

I haven’t seen the trailer, but of course, I saw the film.

The response to the trailer was vast, and the people at Netflix have been extremely enthusiastic. I mean, I think Oscar [Isaac] gives the performance of his life in this film, and I think [Gerard] Butler also — you’ve never seen him like that before. I think I really picked the right people to do these roles. Obviously, there’s different tonal changes: Usually in a movie, people make the past in sepia or black and white, but in the 14th century, when Giotto painted the Cappella de Scrovegni in Padua, the world was in color, and we’re living in [black and white] purgatory in the 21st century. I mean, these gangsters groveling around to kill people and get this thing because it’s worth money is about the substance of art and what happens to it as it becomes a commodity.

Your films are almost all about creating art and the relationship that process has with culture, religion, and commerce.

There’s a line in the film where Marty Scorsese, as Isaiah, says to Dante, who hasn’t finished writing “Paradiso” at all [but] he says when he finally recites it to him, “You’ve lifted the veil on the inexpressible. You’ve entered the sigh, you’ve become the poem.” I think that is the goal of all artists: to become the poem or the art that we make. So I’m extremely pleased with it and the response that’s happening.

From “Basquiat” to now, are there things you’ve learned about creating art, and yourself, from telling these stories where you’re examining that friction?

It’s my life, so I’m dealing with a topic that I’m familiar with. I think one of the problems with filmmaking is when people don’t know their topic, or they’re pandering to audiences to try to make something that they think is going to be commercial. I never did that. What I do is I select people, luckily enough, that feel like working with me. In the process of doing that, we discover something together. And I think that Oscar and Gerry and Louis Cancelmi, and also obviously John Malkovich, the fact that these people, Jason Momoa, they just say yes because they feel like, [as] Sean Penn once said to me, “I’ll work for an artist for free.” The fact that Marty wanted to be Isaiah, and Al Pacino, who I think is extraordinary in that scene with this young boy. It’s an honor, and it’s very flattering in a way that they feel like conspiring together to do something — which is what Oscar [as Nick Tosches] says at the beginning of the movie. “I don’t get edited. I conspire to create something for the good of the thing.” When we get into the scene, I’m not blocking these things; I’m not rehearsing. I’m putting people in a situation where they can decide who they are, what they know about who they are, and they get to be creative. The freedom of it is part of my process.

Is that the same process as when you’re painting?

Nobody’s telling me or giving me notes like “do that” or “do this.” I mean, I don’t even know what I’m doing when I’m painting. You know what Kobe Bryant said: “It’s irrelevant if the ball goes into the basket; it’s about being in the zone.” I think that together we found something amazing. And I think it’s also the film is a tragicomedy. I think the tone of it shifts, and it’s funny. When Sabrina [Impacciatore] gets thrown off of the terrace, it’s funny. I like surprises, and I like to see something that I don’t know how you felt, but I get a kick out of it.

Writing himself into the fiction book this is based partly on, Nick Tosches is mythologizing himself in the way that Dante mythologized Beatrice, and history mythologized Dante. Was that layering something that you particularly wanted to explore?

Definitely. Giancarlo Esposito said after seeing this film, “Nick is Dante, you’re Dante, and I’m Dante.” And I think that it’s exactly correct. Nick would never say that he was the reincarnation of Dante. It doesn’t say that in his book. But I could say that about him after going to Italy and retracing his footsteps in all these libraries and all of these places. Why couldn’t a kid from Newark, New Jersey, be the reincarnation of Dante Alighieri? And I also think that the idea of the success of a work of art might be perfect, but somebody’s life might not be. I like to show the audience that incongruity and the parallel lives in having actors play dual roles.

How did you decide which roles each actor played in the two different timelines?

There’s an artificiality about that that speaks to people’s consciousness where they go, “Oh, that’s the same guy being the Pope and being Louie. Why is this assassin and the Pope the same guy?” Well, why not? But at the same time, is it Louie imagining as he’s being told the story that he’s him, or is Oscar imagining that he’s him, internalizing what’s happening where he happens to be playing the role. It also makes it much more interesting for an actor to have these different things that they can do. I don’t want them just to be subservient to the story. I’d like them to be able to spread their wings.

Benicio del Toro once said to me, “I like to be in the cockpit.” And I feel like these actors had the freedom to do that, and the production designer, and the costume person, and Roman Vasyanov, the DP. We had an extraordinary group of people working on this thing. So yeah, do I feel like is somebody not going to get it? Well, you know what? It takes time to see something. I mean, do more people know about my paintings in 2026 than they did in 1980 when I supposedly became famous? Yeah, they do. And the thing about art is it can always bring you into its present. If you see a Caravaggio painting now, and you stand in front of it, [it] brings you into that present. I think that this film operates like that.

Martin Scorsese in ‘In the Hand of Dante’©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

This is such a meaty story to tell. How readily did this film tell you how long it needed to be? Was there a lot of work involved in wrangling it into, let’s say, a digestible length?

Well, it’s two hours and 31 minutes, which is really not that long. I mean, how long was “Lawrence of Arabia” or “The Ten Commandments” or “Spartacus”  — and you didn’t want the movies to end either. And who’s in a rush? I’m not. So obviously editing is super important, but it’s important not to cut out the essence of what it is in order to make something shorter. And I think it goes by pretty quickly for many. I can’t tell you how many people said, “I’d like to just sit here and watch it again.” It’s a kind of movie that you can watch many times. It’s not like, “Oh, I know the story. I’ve seen it. I don’t need to see it again,” because it functions like a painting in that way. And the locations are amazing — the shootout occurs at the fort of Sant’Andrea that nobody really knows anything about in Venice. That place of the carbon dating machine, that was in Padua. It wasn’t in the University of Arizona, but to go all through Italy and explore, because obviously Dante was in exile, and he was traveling around doing dispatches and things like that.

Even though as you said, Nick wasn’t really dealing with reincarnation.

The thing is that I liked the idea that we showed Gemma in the 14th century and then we had heard a voice on the telephone [in the contemporary scenes], but we had no idea who that person was in Ravenna. It’s the same person, and you get that she was reeling him in. And so [the movie] is a lot of things. It’s a love story. It says also that it took the guy 700 years to figure out he was with the right woman. He’s writing about this nine-year-old girl that he saw, and his wife and children have to listen to this their whole lives, but what he’s really in love with is his description of this person. So they’re all different prismatic perspectives on art in this way, whether it’s treated as a substance that’s a commercial thing or it’s something that’s making Dante sick when he’s lying on that millstone. The fact that this guy Marty plays is the only person he’s interested in thinking that could judge his work, so when he finally says, “You’ve entered the sigh, you’ve become the poem,” and he actually says, “My name is Jacob,” it’s the best review he could ever get. So being an artist and living with, I mean, you’re a critic. I mean, would you call yourself a critic or a journalist?

Yeah, I’m a journalist and critic.

You wonder, whose opinion do you care about? Obviously, to get that review made him feel like he got the ball back in his court. Lou Reed was one of my best friends. One of the things I loved about him is if I said something to him, I’d get the ball back in my court, and we loved that about each other. In fact, he sat with me when my father died. He lived across the street and we sat and looked at my dead father together for a couple of hours and just sat there together. We’d made this film called “Berlin” based on his 1973 record that I always loved, and two days before [Lou] died, we sat on the couch in his house in Springs [New York], and as we’re watching the film, we screamed, “Who paid for this? The authors.” And he forgot that he was sick at that moment. But I said to him, because I’d been working on this movie for such a long time, that you’ve lifted the veil on the inexpressible, you’ve become the poem. I actually said that to Lou, and I think he was happy with that when he went out.

‘In the Hand of Dante’©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

You talk about prismatic perspectives, but this is also filtered through Nick Tosches’ writing. What is it about his approach, his style, or storytelling that you wanted to capture in your adaptation?

Well, one, I was super impressed with the fact that he could write in the most vulgar, violent, gangster-ish street language and also write like he was writing in the 14th century with this flowery old English. Juxtaposing those things from one chapter to the next was very impressive to me. He also talks about how there won’t be a baby that’s hidden in the bullrushes that’s going to come and lead us to God, because this new God of mass commerce is going to take all the children, not just the firstborn of the ones of Israel. [His writing] addresses all sorts of stuff. I feel like probably all the films that I’ve made lead up to this in some way or speak to it, and it’s really uncompromised, and that I have to thank Ted really for his belief in this thing and thinking that, yeah, you can make all the money in the world, but you want to make something if you want to make art. And there’s no reason why art can’t be successful either, but there is a difference between art and commerce and why I don’t do it for the money.

Notwithstanding that statement, how much did this story let you play a little bit in the sandbox of some more conventional genres? You even get to play “Jumping Jack Flash” over a crime story. Was this in any way an exploration of something more commercial than you previously had done in your career?

Well, no. I had the Rolling Stone “Beast of Burden” in “Basquiat,” and Van Morrison and all of the musicians gave me the music for “Basquiat” for $5,000 and for the master and $5,000 for the publishing. It was a favored-nation thing. The movie cost $3.6 million to make, but they all gave me the music because I guess they felt like I was an artist in the same way that Gary Oldman and Chris Walken and Willem Dafoe played in that film. But when you see the movie in black and white, there’s a couple different things [it makes you think of]: one, you could think of “The Killers” by Stanley Kubrick. You could also think of Michelangelo Antonioni or Alberto Lattuada, or actual Italian film. But Nick had in the book “Jumping Jack Flash.”

I recently rewatched “Basquiat” myself.

Did you see the black and white remastered version?

No, no. I saw the one that was on Criterion, in color.

You should watch it in black and white. It’s much more sad. It’s better in black and white. And at the end, you get to see a painting in color, like in “Andrei Rublev.” It took me 20 years to think about that; I watched it [that way] because somebody made a mistake and they didn’t know how to project it on the wall in Montauk. But I thought, “God, it’s much better in black and white.” So I went back and remastered it. But I’m sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt you, but I just go on.

‘Basquiat’ in black-and-whiteJanus Films

That’s a movie very much about an artist trying to square what people perceive of him with what he wants to be true to himself. It feels like this movie mirrors a lot of those ideas. Have you figured out how to navigate the world’s assessment of you compared to what you want to be and create?

Yeah. I mean, I wish I didn’t have to die. But my way of dealing with that is doing something that transgresses death and making something that stays. I don’t think I could ask for anything more than this. When I showed the movie in Sonoma, Tom Waits and his wife came and sat next to me. Marty playing Isaiah [is similar] — the compliment and the honor of these people feeling like I’m speaking to them is a big deal to me. My friendships with Jean-Claude Carrière and Max von Sydow and a lot of these people are gone now, but they honored me with paying attention to what I was doing, and it spoke to them. So it transgresses time. I was going to say about “Perfume,” you know the book by Patrick Suskind?

Sure.

Well, at the end, [the main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille] looks at that flacon of the perfume and says, “They really don’t know how good this perfume really is.” The point is, do they really know how good this really, really is? I could say to you, “I know how good it is.” But the point is, who is the audience? I think you have to make things for yourself and make things for people that you respect, that you could communicate with, and you ask them what they think. If I get on the telephone, and I talk to John Malkovich and he says, “Yeah, I’m there,” or Oscar, well, that’s about as good as it gets. The fact that Cy Twombly loved my paintings or Andy Warhol and I traded paintings, I mean, what do you do? William Carlos Williams said, “The truth is in things.” You end up with stuff, you live with it, you look at it and the humanity of whatever is embedded in those things and you connect with those things. And that’s what I guess I try to do when I’m making something, whether it’s a painting or a movie. And so if asked, “Would you change a note, would you change a thing?” No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t change anything in any of the movies.

I’m sure it helps when you have final cut, as you said.

That was part of my contract with Netflix, and they accepted that, and Ted believed in that, and that was great. Obviously, it was a bit difficult at the beginning to navigate through all of this stuff because people didn’t know what they were looking at, but as time goes by and people get acclimated and they realize that this is finished work of art, this is something and I believe in this, then other people go, “OK, I’m game.” I know people that have seen this film — and I’m not talking about people that worked on the film — that have seen the film three, four times. Laurie Anderson’s going to do this Q&A with me tonight at the Paris Theater, and she’s seen the movie three times. There are people that want to watch it because maybe they missed something, and it’s there if you’re interested. So I’m happy about that. And I have to sit [through it too], because it’s nice to sit in the audience and see how they respond.

I imagine it’s a little nerve-wracking as well.

When you’re the director, you hear the plumbing in the walls, you hear a pin drop. I mean, I remember when I was in Cannes when I won best director for the “Diving Bell,”  and I was so nervous and hearing all these sounds and if somebody moves or whatever, and I took a lorazepam. I woke up near the end of the movie — it was just the right time to wake up, actually. But I think that there’s no real distance that I have to [my work] where it’s not really a career or a job. Maybe it’s a job to have to go and talk about it. But I think that if you put something in the world, you need to be responsible for it and stand by it — and follow the bliss, if it exists.

“In the Hand of Dante” is now streaming on Netflix.