Schnabel Won't Cut a Frame of His Netflix Epic
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- Julian Schnabel refused to alter 'In the Hand of Dante' after polarizing reactions at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, telling IndieWire: 'If you start modifying your work for the lowest common denominator, what's your goal?'
- Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos personally championed the film and granted Schnabel final cut, the director said — a rare arrangement the filmmaker cited as validation after mixed Venice reviews from critics including IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio, who called the film 'epically miscalculated despite sequences and stretches of grandeur.'
- 'In the Hand of Dante' weaves two parallel stories — 14th-century Dante Alighieri composing 'The Divine Comedy' and a 2001 plot in which fictionalized Nick Tosches helps gangsters steal and sell the only known copy of Alighieri's original manuscript — with Oscar Isaac playing both leads opposite Gerard Butler, Gal Gadot, Louis Cancelmi, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa, and Martin Scorsese as Isaiah, Alighieri's mentor.
- The film arrives on Netflix on June 24 following a two-week theatrical run, running 2 hours and 31 minutes.
- Schnabel explained the film's unusual palette — 14th-century sequences in color, 21st-century scenes in black and white — by arguing that Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel frescoes prove the medieval world was vivid, while 'we're living in [black and white] purgatory in the 21st century.'
- The film's thematic core, per Schnabel, is the gangsters' pursuit of the manuscript as 'a commodity': '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.'
Why it matters: Netflix's Sarandos personally greenlit a 2-hour-31-minute Venice-divisive auteur film and preserved final cut — a counterpoint to streaming's algorithmic content strategy that positions the platform as a haven for directors who refuse to dilute their vision. The film's central plot, literally about stealing and selling Dante's original manuscript, gives the commodity-vs-art tension an unusually explicit edge.
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