Julian Schnabel, right, on the set of Miral, his film that is to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival. (Art Gallery of Ontario)There's no direct correlation between creating a painting and creating a film, according to Julian Schnabel, the American artist who's a master at both.

Caught up in the process of hanging a new exhibit of his work, Julian Schnabel: Art and Film, which opens Wednesday at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the artist is non-plussed when asked to compare painting and filmmaking.

"When I make a film, it's another part of my brain — it's storytelling," he says.

"I was always interested in filmmaking. I came to films, but I don't have a career. I'm basically unemployable," says the director of Before Night Falls and the Oscar-nominated The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Schnabel admits he loves film and it was a significant influence in his youth. Film figures and images run throughout his paintings — there are references to actor Albert Finney, to friend and director Bernardo Bertolucci, to Mickey Rourke and Norma Desmond, to Platoon, and to his own films.

He has a recurring fascination with Marlon Brando, creating numerous images of the actor at the height of his career, even buying a collection of Brando photos dating from the late 1960s. The Godfather, a film Schnabel loves, turns up in the painting Ragazzo Padre ("the boy father," a phrase from the film).

"It's been my great privilege to create these paintings over the years," Schnabel said, in an introduction before guiding reporters around his exhibit. His meteoric rise to art darling in the 1980s, and the money he made at that time, have allowed him to do exactly as he pleases in both art and film.

Julian Schnabel's painting titled Portrait of Andy Warhol, 1982, is one of countless references to fellow artists he admires. (Hirshhhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Smithsonian)"If things were different I would have to do films that other people suggested or all my paintings would have to fit someone's house," he added.

Schnabel's portrait of Warhol, completed in 1982 when they were fellow movers on the New York art scene, is just one of countless references to fellow artists he admires.

"Warhol had bad skin and he was so elusive, but he seemed beautiful to me. He was so co-operative and vulnerable," Schnabel said of that painting.

"Somebody has all kinds of emotions inside, but they are still invisible at the time. It comes out in the painting."

Schnabel's passions, like his career, are eclectic, ranging from Cuban poet Virgilio Pinera, to American critic William Gaddis, surfer Malik Joyeux, and friend and fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. His films tackle subjects that mean something to him personally, without any concern for commercial appeal — a homosexual Cuban writer in Before Night Falls, a paralyzed French media personality in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Many of the paintings chosen for the AGO exhibit refer to specific films — including the 1961 Pasolini film Accattone, Coppola's Rumble Fish and Vittorio de Sica's Shoeshine, which becomes a four-metre-square painting with a disturbing image redolent of a prison.

Julian Schnabel's Resurrection: Albert Finney meets Malcolm Lowry, 1984. (Julian Schnabel/Art Gallery of Ontario)"The first time I saw the film Shoeshine, it opened up with an image of the sea, which for me is an image of freedom. The camera pulled back and what you see is people in jail," he said.

Schnabel is known for his innovative use of materials — his paintings incorporating ceramic plates, and his works created on velvet and sailcloth.

The exhibit includes St. Chuck the Apostate, painted on an old army canvas, the puckers still showing, found like many of his recent materials, while shooting one of his own films.

Thousand People Mountain is a sculpture, involving a steel pipe and a mummified horse discovered while filming his debut, Basquiat, about his friend, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988.

"I was shooting in a veterinary clinic… [and] found this baby horse, the pipe was on the side of my building. It's called Thousand Meter Mountain, which was by a Cuban poet who is in Before Night Falls," Schnabel said.

Julian Schnabel's Painting for Malik Joyeux and Bernardo Bertolucci (VI), 2006. (Julian Schnabel/Art Gallery of Ontario) Schnabel said he aspires to be like Basquiat, in that he never copies his own work and every piece is fresh.

He made an exception for his friend, Roman Polanski, who asked for a Schnabel painting to be used on the set of The Ghost Writer. The insurance costs were too steep to ship it, so Schnabel sent a digital reproduction of one of his works, printed on canvas.

When Polanski had completed filming, he sent the copy back — and Schnabel decided to paint over it. That painting was done just two weeks ago in his Brooklyn studio.

Schnabel worked with AGO curator David Moos in choosing works for the show.

One particular room, with 10-metre ceilings, struck the artist as perfect for an exhibit he created for the Maison Carée, a well-preserved Roman temple dating from the second century in the French city of Nimes.

The paintings are so large — about seven metres wide — he had to adapt his studio in Montauk, N.Y., to create them. Schnabel recalled visiting Maison Carée for the first time in the late 1980s and finding it full of "horrible" German art.

"I said 'Why do you have that here?' [My host] said, 'What would you do?' I'd make three big paintings and put a big Roman head in the middle. He said 'OK,'" Schnabel recalled.

"Those paintings were in the Maison Carrée for five years [1990-95]. They wanted to buy them, but I thought when the mayor got fired or got changed. The pictures being so big would end up in the bodega [stockroom], and so I didn't want to sell … so I get to show them," he said.

Schnabel sees the exhibit as a chance to get people to stand and look at his paintings. It is a return of sorts, the first major exhibition of his art in some years.

He couches the exhibit, a huge undertaking filling up an entire floor at the gallery, in terms expressed by Vito Corleone, the Godfather played by his icon, Brando.

"You don't always get the ball back in your court," he says, then quotes a line Brando delivers after he gets shot five times and lives.

"I say, if you get five bullets in you and you're still standing, you got to be worth something."

Julian Schnabel: Art and Film runs until Jan. 2. His latest film, Miral, about an orphaned Palestinian girl, will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival.