JULIAN SCHNABEL - SCHNABEL WANTS TO BRING PEACE TO MIDDLE EAST

Award winning director JULIAN SCHNABEL is bidding to bring peace to the Middle East with his next movie. The Diving Bell And The Butterfly filmmaker - whose movie about a paralysed man forced to communicate using his left eye has landed him a Best Director Oscar nomination - is turning a book written by an Israeli-Palestinian woman into a screenplay. And he hopes the project will inspire the two warring nations to settle their differences. Schnabel says, "It's based on a book by a woman named Rula Jebreal, who is an Israeli Palestinian. "She wrote a beautiful book called Miral. It's written in Italian and it's about Palestinian women under the Israeli state. It's about Hund Husseini who started the Dar El Tifl orphanage in Jerusalem. It's about a lot of things, it's about peace. "We need to fix things over there. That will be my next thing. Yes, I'm going to devote myself to try and make things better over there."