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Urbane cowboy: Julian Schnabel's movies are frontier tales for a metrosexual age.

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The most important and original Texas filmmaker to have emerged over the past decade does not hail from Texas. He speaks with a New York accent. He lives in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, in a bright pink high-rise that he designed himself (not too many of those in Dallas or Houston). His sartorial trademark-silk pajamas worn in public--is probably not one that would be looked kindly upon on the streets of Tyler or Lubbock.

Yet Julian Schnabel spent nearly a decade living here, first in Brownsville, where his parents moved when he was fifteen, and later in Houston, where he studied art at the University of Houston--and formative years they must have been. That's because each of the 56-year-old's three features reveal an unquestionably Texas-flavored cinematic sensibility. Schnabers work displays an unabashed brashness and swagger (who else would create a two-hour movie told largely from the perspective of a blinking eyeball?). He seems deeply concerned with geography and especially with how the landscape of a man's home can also be a reflection of his...

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