Director Julian Schnabel has been doing press for “At Eternity’s Gate,” his Vincent Van Gogh biopic, which is about to be released in the U.K. In one particularly noteworthy interview with The Guardian, the eccentric and controversial filmmaker of such impressive films as “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “Before Night Falls” had a few choice words for the notion that only a black filmmaker can tell black stories:

“Why can’t a white person tell the story of a black person?” he asks. “I made a film about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Was I exploiting him by making that movie about him? I think I did him a solid by making that film. My daughter Lola says: ‘Everyone is pink inside.’

“Robert Mapplethorpe had a show at the Whitney Museum and there were guys with their dicks out or whatever,” he continues. “Now it seems if you’re transgender you have a better chance of getting an exhibition in a museum,” he continues. “All of these kind of political, kind of topical trends about things are …”