Acclaimed artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel will be honored for his work at this year’s Lucca Film Festival, received a Lifetime Achievement Award, Lucca announced Friday.
Schnabel will attend the festival in Tuscany and take part in a public masterclass. Lucca will screen a retrospective of this films, including his latest, In the Hand of Dante.
Schnabel will receive his award at the Hand of Dante screening. The Netflix feature, adapted from Nick Tosches’ 2002 novel, features an all-star cast led by Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler and features Jason Momoa, Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese. The film premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival last year.
Schnabel first rose to prominence as a painter, becoming a star of the 1980s New York art scene for his “plate paintings” large scale canvases covered with shards of broken ceramic plates. He made his debut as a director in 1996 with Basquiat, a biopic on the late street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, with Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat and David Bowie as Andy Warhol. The film premiered in Venice and was a sleeper hit, earning more than $3 million in domestic release.
Schabel’s follow-up, the literary adaptation Before Night Falls (2000), also premiered in Venice, winning a special Jury Prize and the Best Actor Silver Lion for lead Javier Bardem, who would go on to secure a Best Actor Oscar nom for the same role. Before Night Falls was also an indie success, earning more than $8.6 million worldwide.
