Olmo Schnabel’s directorial debut is everything you could wish for in a film, from a man with such an impressive background — artist and filmmaker Julian is his dad and mom is Spanish actress Olatz López Garmendia — but also someone who is perfectly at ease with both his American and Spanish sides. And refreshingly believes life is best when lived outside the boxes of convention.
I remember watching Giants Being Lonely in Venice in 2019 and thinking that was a cool film, one made by a team of visionaries. American artist Grear Patterson helmed it, yet it was the presence of Olmo Schnabel as producer on that project that really drew me to it. Julian Schnabel’s oeuvre occupy a special place in my soul and that last name carries a sense of brilliance within its very sound vibrations. While I interviewed the group, which included Olmo’s longtime friend Jack Irv (short for Irving, another famous last name), I secretly hoped Schnabel would one day direct a film of his own.
Fast forward to four years and a worldwide pandemic later, Olmo’s move to Mexico, my own move to London and at the 80th Venice Film Festival that wish came true. Schnabel’s directorial debut Pet Shop Days, based on the story by Jack Irv and a script written by Irv with Schnabel and Galen Core, premiered in Orizzonti Extra, a special sidebar which was established in 2021 and showcases films by cool artists — that’s my very own definition of course!
‘I knew about the story, but nothing was a certainty,” Schnabel tells me, when I inquire if he already knew about this project when I first talked to him in 2019, “I think I wanted to make it but there was a lot of convincing Jack at the beginning.” Even though Irv is Schnabel’s best friend, “I think he was very precious about the project and wanted to control it as much as possible and hold on to it,” he admits, “so it took me a long time to convince him.” But thank the cinematic gods he did, convince Jack that is, as the film turned out to be a personal favorite in Venice.
Pet Shop Days is the story of two men whose paths cross by accident. Alejandro, running from a failed suicide attempt and resulting manslaughter in his native Mexico and Jack, a New Yorker from a multi-cultural family in crisis, forge a relationship that transcends the typical, what Schnabel perfectly calls avoiding putting “things in boxes,” in favor of something nonconformist and sexually fluid. In fact, when I ask him whether telling this adult story, within the shades of grey of the younger generations was always how he wanted to push the envelope, he explains. “Part of it is also experimenting,” he says in his natural, unaffected tone, “I think there are certain notions and ideas that I want to explore that were more clear during our process, and other things that I’m also just playing with.” He admits, “I want there to be a conversation, I want there to be disagreement, I want to have that dialogue. And I think if we’re talking about the sexuality [in the film] it’s young and impulsive.” When you meet someone as the two protagonists meet by chance, Schnabel admits that “love at first sight, you don’t know who that’s going to be, and the laws of attraction are pretty vast. I wanted to movie to encompass that. Alejandro bumps into Jack on the street, you know. It’s his luck, they are fated for each other.” He then adds “the whole thing is fate. And fate can take you to places that you wouldn’t necessarily want to go to.”
Schnabel has grown into his natural good looks since 2019. He exudes an air of self assurance but is never arrogant. He also seems serene, content, which is such an elusive quality to discover in someone these days. At one point, I tell him that I’m still going over his film in my head, several days after watching it, and he chimes in “that’s great, that is a huge accomplishment in itself — I think if we watched the movie together, me and you, we could probably sit around and talk about all kinds of ideas. And I’d probably learn a lot about the movie watching it with you.” See what I mean? Cool should be his middle name.
In his director’s statement, Schnabel admitted “I wanted to write a love letter to a New York that no longer exists, where chance encounters are everywhere and the possibilities are endless.” Having grown up in NYC, I often wonder if that City ever existed, or if it’s an imaginary place we all carry within our heart to survive the chaos and creativity of the Big Apple. New York is a city of promises and yet, so often it is not until we leave it that those promises are fulfilled. I don’t think it is an accident that Schnabel has tapped so perfectly into a New York story while living in Mexico. When he writes, also in his statement which is part of the Pet Shop Days press kit that his “is a film about confronting life’s disappointments. Everyone is alone in their own way, and we are drawn to each other through a strong feeling of isolation. And when we’re desperate to escape our own isolation, sometimes the unexpected can change us in an irreversible way -- for better or for worse,” that also resonates deeply with me, as a former New Yorker.
But Jack Irv is ultimately who created the story of Alejandro and Jack — played by Darío Yazbek Bernal (of Netflix’s The House of Flowers fame) and Irv himself respectively — and “my love at first sight moment was from this thing that he sent me,” says Schnabel. The original script was a very different “wild, wild story,” according to him but one that made him think “holy shit, you have a sensibility towards writing!” about Irv’s work.
Julian and Olmo Schnabel on the red carpet for the premiere of ‘Pet Shop Days’ in Venice — photo Giorgio Zucchiatti
“Then for a year I had to convince him,” Schnabel says, referring to getting Irv on board and he was “working on it, proving to him that I was the right person to direct the movie.” Eventually Irv caved in and “we’re all happy” says Schnabel, “but at the beginning, you know, you don’t want to give something that is precious to you away — Galen [Core] and I wanted to help make this movie, help this movie get made — I don’t know who else would have made this movie.”
It does take a special kind of sensibility to make a film like Pet Shop Days. The perfect storm of understanding New York City but also Mexico, the multicultural background of both characters and the complicated relationships of and with their respective parents. Was all that in the original screenplay or did the three writers bring their own autobiographical experiences to the story? “I think we were all trying to identify with the movie as much as possible so that when we were making it we could all believe it. Because this had a lot of moving components,” Schnabel admits. “We are pulling from experiences, relationships, stories we heard, dynamics with our parents and I think you feel it in the movie because I also think the dynamics of the families are kind of original.” He adds that “I haven’t seen a lot of movies where an American kid who is fully American has a foreign mother. And basically that is also a disconnect.” Schnabel’s mother is Spanish actress Olatz López Garmendia who, he admits, “never identified with being American and I think that the only reason she was around was because she was raising a family, obviously. But I think if you gave her the choice of living in New York, or being in Mexico or Paris, or Madrid, she’d prefer that because she relates more to Latin people.”
This cultural flavoring, what each character brings to his own story by means of their background, is something that makes their dynamics in Pet Shop Days very edgy and fresh. “What was important to me was to tell two stories, to focus on two backgrounds and people from two different parts of the world. I think when you’re Latin you are a certain way, you have a certain sense of humor, when you’re German you have a certain way of being — the society we come from influences our values,” Schnabel explains.
The third leading character in the film is New York City and I tell Schnabel my thoughts. “I felt that this movie had to be a New York story. Also the challenge was to create an original New York story,” he explains, “it’s obviously the most famous city in the world, it has been in plenty of films and I thought that was one of the challenges — how do we do this our way? How do we make this movie and not another movie.”
Mission accomplished, I say. While one smart critic who reviewed the film for Variety spotted the visual clues of Schnabel senior’s Basquiat, shown briefly in Pet Shop Days, the look and feel of Olmo’s film is all his own, with hints of the best US indie filmmaking of the 70’s and 80’s.
In closing, I ask Schnabel about the casting. “We were pretty certain, about casting,” he admits, “when we thought about roles, like Alejandro’s mother, Maribel Verdú, we knew from the beginning; Jordi Mollá [who plays the dad, Castro] also.” More roles included the henchman Walker, played by Louis Cancelmi. “This guy really was a friend of the production and came in, day in and day out and was an ally who would help us work with our schedule. We got lucky with surprises from an actor like Cancelmi,” Schnabel confesses. Peter Sarsgaard, a personal favorite, dons gold teeth for his cameo as a strip club owner and Schnabel says “he was also a surprise, came in two weeks before,” to help out. Willem Dafoe and Emmanuelle Seigner play Jack’s parents, a couple nurturing a toxic relationship while bringing up two adult kids in NYC. Schnabel is candid when talking about his luck in getting this phenomenal cast together. “I think the casting process, it wasn’t like we were confused, we were pretty direct and we knew exactly who we wanted to cast,” he says and “we would get excited about the prospect of it — there wasn’t an alternative.”
And finally, last but not least, what about Darío Yazbek Bernal who is Gael García Bernal’s brother in real life? “He came in and he’s nothing like that guy [Alejandro] at all — zero,” Schnabel confesses, “he’s the nicest person in the world, a little gentle person and I asked him to basically turn into a monster.”
Photos courtesy of the filmmakers, used with permission.