Still a soul rebel: the work of Young Soul Rebels director Isaac Julien, from his films to his video installations, is honored with a retrospective. (film).

I'm guessing that Isaac Julien does not need sleep, a great quality in a filmmaker (and artist) who crosses time zones with the kind of abandon he does. He recently landed in San Francisco--oh, for barely 36 hours--with charms intact and a Gaultier jacket still neatly pressed. No jet lag was visible as we settled into a table at Home, the Castro district's newest restaurant. He avoided the Evian and ordered a margarita to fuel the conversation.

Julien was in town to arrange two May events: a Frameline award from the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for his contributions to queer cinema and video and, simultaneously, a major retrospective of his video installations at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It's about time on both counts, for Julien has been dishing out inspiration ever since a certain spring day two decades ago when he popped out of St. Martin's School of Art in London, came of age, and decided to be a filmmaker.

I met him not long afterward, as he found his way around New York City in 1987 to research a film he wanted to make about the great Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. That beautiful classic, Looking for Langston, caused a furor, enraging the Hughes estate by blatantly depicting their hero as a black gay man with lusciously illuminated desires. It's the only film ever shown at the New York Film Festival with the soundtrack bleeped--the estate had the last laugh with this censorship through copyright withholding. "I was not exactly outing Hughes," reflects Julien. "The film was really about his closet."

Never one for closets, Julien went on to spend his entire career hauling skeletons out of them. When he got the chance to make a feature film in the early `90s, he went for it. Young Soul Rebels broke several taboos at once with its in-your-face romance between young men of different races (one white, one black) and different musical allegiances (one to punk, one to funkadelic). The Cannes Film Festival gave it a Camera d'Or Special Mention for a first feature--a prize that would look good on a video box, should anyone put it back into U.S. distribution--but Miramax had trouble figuring out how to market something that wasn't just black or white, that wasn't just queer (there's a straight couple too), etc. "Nowadays that's more acceptable," observes Julien. "It would just be an installment of Six Feet Under.'

I knew that one of the biggest influences on Julien's early films had been the late, great Derek Jarman, and I figured this was my chance to find out how they'd met. "In the bars, of course," Julien recalls, giggling. "Derek fancied one of my boyfriends of the time. It did not exactly endear me to Mr. Jarman. Of course, we knew instantly who he was. But it took me awhile to warm up to him after that!" Still, Jarman did become a friend as well as an artistic influence. "There was a whole culture, really, just in that one persona of his," says Julien, reflecting on the loss.

Julien began to turn away from film toward the art world in the mid `90s after Jarman's death. "Yes," he comments, "some people have suggested there was a connection." British film changed too, becoming more commercial. Ever since Rebels, all of his work has been commissioned either for television or for gallery settings. He thinks the art world has remained much more open to innovation. "In the film world now, people just want mainstream acceptance," he says. "Everything interesting has been ironed out of the New Queer Cinema, and it has become a bit boring--to be honest--and complacent. Before, it was always exciting because people were trying to say something that was new and were proud about being different. I think that's the thing that's been lost in the rush to normalization." He sees the art world as more receptive to queer issues as well. In 2001 his transition to the art world was sealed when his video installation, The Long Road to Mazatlan, was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. (It shows at Yerba Buena too.)

The notoriety of the Turner Prize "shortlist" in the United Kingdom cannot be underestimated. For a video installation to be nominated--one by an explicitly queer black artist, no less--is significant. The Long Road to Mazatlan, a three-screen video program on a continuous loop, totally deserves it: It's gorgeous, and it's sexy, as if Warhol's lonesomest cowboys have come back to tryst in the Technicolor heat of a Tex-Mex border town. The nomination made his mother happy too, in part because a certain celebrity was handing out the awards. "Yes, my mum enjoyed the night immensely," says Julien, laughing. "She bustled around, determined to get Madonna's autograph." And presumably did, as the Material Girl made her own tastes known by spending the entire evening with Julien and the other Turner Prize "losers."

It's been a good year. The Independent Film Channel will release his latest documentary, Baad Asssss Cinema, in the fall. It's a look at blaxploitation films--but is it queer? "Well, there are some very camp interviews," he says. "Para Grier, for instance. And Quentin Tarantino. He's awfully flamboyant, isn't he?" And then the tri-band cell phone rings again, and the ever-elusive, neverweary Mr. Isaac Julien is off for another nightcap.