Heatseeking filmmaker Olmo Schnabel has signed for representation with WME, and with Black Bear for management.
Schnabel’s breakout directorial effort “Pet Shop Days” played both the Venice International Film Festival and SXSW this cycle, scoring distribution from Utopia for a 2024 theatrical release. Starring Darío Yazbek Bernal, Willem Dafoe and Peter Sarsgaard, the film tells of a drug lord scion on the run from his powerful family. Slumming it in New York in a haze of sex and drugs, he seduces an equally lost young man and pulls him into the city’s underbelly.
The provocative debut also hit festivals in Chicago, Montclair, Morelia, Santa Barbara and Sarasota. Schnabel was also awarded the Leffest Lisboa Film Festival’s TAP Revelation Award.
Schnabel just wrapped “In the Hand of Dante” for production shop Twin, which stars Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Gerard Butler and Gal Gadot. The film is a dual narrative involving the life and work of Italian philosopher Dante Alighieri. Martin Scorsese will reportedly make a cameo playing Alighieri’s mentor. Schnabel will next produce Alex Russell’s thriller “Lurker,” starring Théodore Pellerin, Archie Madekwe (“Saltburn”) and Havana Rose Liu.
Schnabel’s father Julian is the noted filmmaker and painter behind “Basquiat,” “Before Night Falls” and the Oscar nominee “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Olmo got his start in show business on the 2018 Vincent van Gogh biopic “At Eternity’s Gate” starring Willem Dafoe. He then produced his first feature, “Giants Being Lonely,” from writer-director Grear Patterson.
Schnabel continues to be represented by Frank PR.
