The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

[MacGuffin]

Filmmaker confronts mortality with "Diving Bell"
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Filmmaker Julian Schnabel says he did not pay much attention when he was given a copy of the extraordinary memoir "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" about six years ago.

The slender volume was written by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor who had been almost entirely paralyzed by a stroke at the age of 43. Yet he managed to dictate "The Diving Bell" while lying in a hospital bed, communicating with his caregivers by blinking his left eye.

A few years afterwards, as Schnabel was coming to terms with the imminent death of his father, Bauby entered his life once more in the form of a screenplay drafted by Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of "The Pianist."

Producer Kathleen Kennedy had offered Schnabel the chance to direct, and the story of Bauby's suffering affected him so profoundly, he ultimately agreed.

"The thing about my dad is, he was never sick in his life, but he was very, very scared to die, and I couldn't help him," Schnabel recalls. "I couldn't take away his fear of death, but through this film, I thought I could speak to people that were sick, that are scared to die. I could talk to someone about what consciousness is about, what it is to be alive."

BATTLING HURDLES

Schnabel's drive to communicate his feelings about one of mankind's most primal fears led him to overcome hurdles that might have felled a less determined director. Along the way, he insisted that the film be shot in French, rather than English, as it originally had been conceived. He convinced the financiers to accept a relative unknown, Mathieu Amalric, in the lead, instead of Johnny Depp, who first had been attached to the project. He persuaded the hospital where Bauby had been treated to allow the production to film there. And he badgered a sometimes skeptical crew to accept his experimental notions about how the project should be shot.

Perhaps surprisingly, it was that last challenge that proved the most difficult for the auteur. "I feel I lost the faith of the people who worked on the movie for a little while," he says. "They thought I was crazy, (and) I was thinking, 'How many times do I have to prove myself to these people?"'

The 55-year-old New York native certainly had established his cinematic credentials in the critical community with his previous films: 1996's "Basquiat" and 2000's "Before Night Falls." He had met Depp on the set of the latter film, and it was the actor who recommended him as the right man to tackle Bauby's harrowing story to Kennedy.

Kennedy had fallen in love with Bauby's story after reading an English translation of "Diving Bell," but DreamWorks had already bought the rights to adapt the story for the screen. The project languished, however, and when the rights lapsed, Kennedy snapped them up and took the film to Universal, hiring Harwood to pen the screenplay.

"You get one shot at these kinds of stories because studios and financial partners are not usually willing to do draft after draft," Kennedy says. "That was one of the things that got me the most nervous, but I sent (Harwood) the book, and he responded to it the same way I had and said, 'I think I know a way into this."'

TOUGH ADAPTATION

But adapting the memoir proved much more difficult than Harwood had anticipated. "I started to work on it, and then I thought, 'How the hell do you do this?"' he remembers. "I must have been at it four or five weeks without knowing what to do. I was desperate. They sent me (Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1997 Bauby documentary, 'Assigne a residence'), and it was an appalling visual image: this lovely man, 43, attractive, virile, energetic, reduced to this human zombie. I thought, 'You can't go through two hours with him like that.' I was in despair."

And then, weeks in, Harwood found a solution: He would show the world entirely from Bauby's point of view, only permitting the audience glimpses of the man as he passed by a window or saw himself in a mirror. Schnabel later modified that concept -- allowing us to see Bauby in his ruinous state -- but it was the central notion that drove Harwood's writing. "When I came up with this idea, it just went," he says.

Thrilled with the script, Kennedy showed it to Schnabel. "I went to Julian's studio," Kennedy recalls. "He has these giant ceilings, and it's set up so he can work on these huge canvases. We were sitting in this room, with all natural light streaming in, and it turned out that his father, who was fairly elderly, was dying, and he was in the room adjacent to where we were meeting. I spent almost five or six hours sitting, talking to Julian, and he clearly was very passionate about this screenplay and had read the book. He talked a lot about what it meant to him and what he was going through.

"He took me in to meet his dad and was writing down lots of things that his father was saying in the last several weeks," Kennedy continues. "That really informed so much of Julian's point of view on how he was going to approach the film because he was experiencing something so deeply personal at the time."

Intrigued, Schnabel eventually agreed to make "Diving Bell" his next film, bringing in another producer, Jon Kilik ("Babel"), to join Kennedy.

DEPP DROPS OUT

Quite soon, it became apparent that Schnabel's initial link to the project, Depp, would not be available because of his prior commitments on Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" films. "He didn't have much time, and he'd have had to cut his beard," Schnabel says. "We are very close friends, and it seemed like added pressure on him. I didn't want to do that to him."

Depp exited the movie, and Schnabel turned to Amalric, a respected French actor whom Kennedy had cast in Steven Spielberg's 2005 drama "Munich." At the same time, he recruited some of the finest actors in Europe -- everyone from Max von Sydow to Niels Arestrup and Emmanuelle Seigner -- for supporting roles in the film.

Unfortunately, when Depp left, he took with him the picture's financing. Universal withdrew from the project, leaving it with no financier and several million dollars in costs.

"Once it became obvious that the top list of (Tom) Hanks and (Russell) Crowe and Depp and a few others were not going to do it, it became clear that with a lesser-known actor, it would not be something the studio could move forward with," Kilik says. "It is a risky enough movie even with a well-known actor, but without somebody at that level, it was not something (the studios) were going to do."

Well, maybe not the U.S. majors. French distributor Pathe agreed to fund the film's EUR10 million ($14 million) budget, but executives there wanted Schnabel to shoot "Diving Bell" in English -- a notion he flatly refused. "The book was written in French, by a Frenchman, in a French hospital," Schnabel says, "and I'd be damned if English and American people were going to make believe they are French. It felt like it needed to be authentic."

Pathe relented, and Schnabel says the firm was "extremely supportive through the whole process."

BLURRED REALITY

Schnabel began an investigation into Bauby's life, watching Beineix's documentary, visiting the hospital where he had been treated and meeting with some of the key people he'd known. That investigation led Schnabel to modify Harwood's script -- he reworked a sequence where Bauby encounters a former colleague who had been held as a hostage for four years in Lebanon -- and to abandon historical fact in service of the story.

In one of the most emotionally devastating scenes in the film, Bauby confesses to his lover, who has refused to visit him, that he still longs to see her every day. In actuality, Schnabel admits, "The girlfriend came and then stopped coming and then started to come again," but he hesitates when asked about the conflict between reality and the movie. "The (larger) point of this film is much more important than the dynamic between that woman and (Bauby)."

What was more important, Schnabel says, was the way to visually represent Bauby's "locked-in syndrome," as it is referred to in the film. "I needed to figure out how to shoot it," he says. "Where do you put the camera? How do you make this work? How long can people accept (seeing the world from Bauby's point of view)?

"You start thinking about stuff that you never thought about," he continues. "How many kinds of blinks are there? When somebody blinks, is it black or is it gray? Is it translucent? Is it red when it's in the sun? Is it going to look mechanical?"

Schnabel worked closely with two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (1993's "Schindler's List" and 1998's "Saving Private Ryan") to answer those questions with some innovative techniques that sought to make the art film palatable to a broad audience.

Not everyone was quite as taken with the experimental flourishes, however. Schnabel remembers one crew member who, during the course of the shoot -- which got under way in Calais, France, last September -- asked him, "'How long are you going to do this?' I said, 'The whole movie! We are never going to lose his point of view."'

The shoot was relatively trouble free, however, and even came in eight days ahead of schedule. The finished product, too, seems to be enjoying a charmed life: "Diving Bell" earned Schnabel the best director award following its world premiere at Cannes in May.

It also became the subject of a bidding war, with Miramax shelling out roughly $3 million for North American rights to the project, and is headed to the Toronto International Film Festival next month. Miramax will open "Diving Bell" in limited release December 19.

For Schnabel, though, the most remarkable thing about this experience is the way it has impacted his own thinking. "I have always been very scared to die," he reflects. "Somehow, through making this film, it has diminished my fear. I am less scared to die than I was before."

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: November 30th, 2007 (limited)

Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Consigny, Emma De Caunes, Max von Sydow

Directed by: Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls; Basquiat)

Premise: Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind.

[Pubrick]

haha, for the longest time i thought javier bardem was in this, and i thought it was weird that he kept playing invalids, so while watching the trailer i was like "that doesn't look like him... ohh kinda, there here is, no wait that's not him, still that other dude.. hmm. he's not in this movie. "

so much POV in there, schnabel musta been watching a lot of Peep Show. i still don't understand the title or what the hell happened to the dude. but it looks awesome and boldly cinematic and brilliant. the kinda movie w/o horse would love.

[MacGuffin]

[Pubrick]

2007 = 1999

[©brad]

totally. this looks amazing.

[Pubrick]

it's between this and cmbb for best adapted screenplay.

i wonder if it has a chance at foreign, being in french. might not cos that category has been a fuck-up lately. also i'm probly not the only one thinking of mar adentro, at least superficially, the voters will think "didn't this win already?". it's easy to make the association..

schnabel --> before night falls --> bardem --> mar adentro --> wheelchair --> diving bell --> schnabel

hardwood also adapted cholera, which stars bardem. now that i think about it, schnabel's changes to the script and visual choices and his general chutzpah seem to be the real highlight here.. as recognized in cannes. i look forward to writing more about movies i haven't seen, and won't get to see until after everyone else.


it's my way of compensatin..

[JG]

this is good.  i haven't seen schnabel's other movies.. sometimes he's a little too showy and some of the imagination sequences fall a little flat as a result, but there's a lot of pretty things going on here.  i read it in a synopsis so i dont think its spoils - but the first 40 minutes is from his left eye.  its rly effective and they do a good job of characterizing bauby.   

i think its important that they tried hard to not be too sentimental, but obviously given the subject matter it was.. there's a super pretty piano piece playing throughout that sort of counterbalances the lame rock n' roll 'look how cool this guy's life use to be!' moments. 

i want to check out the book. 

[MacGuffin]

Don't Call Him a Filmmaker, at Least Not First
Source: New York Times

THE paintings on broken plates that made Julian Schnabel an art-world star in the early 1980s seemed to announce their importance not just by their retrograde swagger but also by their sheer weight. Hanging one on a wall was like suspending a cabinet full of Buffalo china.

Julian Schnabel, with Tina, in his studio in Brooklyn. His latest film, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," opens Nov. 30.
The other day in a former smelting factory near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn a bunch of new paintings that he had hanging on the walls seemed by contrast to be almost weightless, looking as if skeins of smoke had settled on the canvas. But they were actually digitally printed blow-ups of antique French hospital X-rays that he had come across last year in northern Normandy. And as such they were pieces not simply of art but of argument, Mr. Schnabel's pointed way of saying that while his life as a filmmaker may be threatening to eclipse his life as a painter, he still has his palette firmly in hand.

He found the X-rays in a building near the naval hospital at Berck-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, where he had just finished directing "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," his movie based on the best-selling memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor in chief of Elle magazine in France. In 1995 Mr. Bauby suffered a stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome, conscious but paralyzed, with only his left eye remaining functional, and he composed the memoir painstakingly by blinking that eye to select letters on a chart.

The movie, which will open Nov. 30 in New York and Los Angeles, has proved to be a kind of hat trick for Mr. Schnabel, whose first film, "Basquiat" in 1996, got a respectable reception considering his inexperience and his share of detractors in the art world, where it was set. His second movie, "Before Night Falls" in 2000, about the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, established him solidly as a filmmaker, earning an Oscar nomination for its star, Javier Bardem. And "The Diving Bell" has been even more widely praised in the early going, winning Mr. Schnabel the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival and fueling Oscar dreams on the part of Miramax, its American distributor.

The only problem with this track record, of course, is that it has a lot of people describing Mr. Schnabel as a director who paints, and not the other way around. This development does not always sit well with a man who has made thousands of paintings — and millions of dollars from them — over the last 30 years and who once declared that he was the "closest you'll get to Picasso in this life."

"I'm a painter; that's what I do," he said in his Brooklyn studio, adding that a failure to acknowledge this properly was ultimately the result of ignorance.

"I don't think that people know too much about painting," he said. "I don't think that they really understand what it is. I mean, I don't want to put anybody down. I just think more people understand the language of movies than of paintings."

While "The Diving Bell" seems like the kind of movie that was conceived with him specifically in mind — another biopic about suffering and art, albeit this time about an unintentional artist — the movie fell into his lap almost by accident during the unsuccessful pursuit of another project, a film version of the Patrick Süskind novel "Perfume: The Story of a Murder," about a murderer with olfactory obsessions. (That movie was released last year by another director; Mr. Schnabel pronounced it "very bad" and "just a tragedy.")

The rights to "The Diving Bell" had been bought by the veteran Hollywood producer Kathleen Kennedy, who planned to make the movie with Universal Pictures and with Johnny Depp as the star. Mr. Depp, a friend of Mr. Schnabel who played two roles in "Before Night Falls," was interested and said he wanted Mr. Schnabel as the director. But then Mr. Depp fell out because of his commitment to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise — "that pirate thing," as Mr. Schnabel describes it.

And so instead of making a movie aimed at a broader audience, something of a Francophile "My Left Foot" (the movie's jokey nickname on the festival circuit has been "My Left Eye"), Mr. Schnabel and Jon Kilik, his longtime producer, along with Ms. Kennedy, put together one that all but manufactured its own hurdles. It has a mainly French cast with no bankable stars, a story witnessed in many scenes through the blurry lens of a single camera serving as Bauby's eye and — quelle horreur, at least for the American market — it was made entirely in French by a director whose grasp of the language was not good. "Now it is," he reports. "It was sort of fancy restaurant French before that."

Even the film's other backer, the French company Pathé, wanted the film to be in English. "Their concern," said Mr. Kilik, who last year produced "Babel," another heavily subtitled film, "was that this is a hard enough subject to tackle and a hard enough subject to find an audience for, and 'You're going to make it even harder by making it in French?'"

But the filmmakers insisted, and Mr. Schnabel set about translating the script by Ron Harwood (who won an Oscar for "The Pianist") with the help of his actors.

Perhaps because of all these box-office challenges, the tone that Mr. Schnabel achieves in a movie with such a grim plot — Mr. Bauby, who was beginning to recover some of his vocal abilities, died just two days after the publication of his memoir — is anything but grim. It is often, like the memoir, very funny and in many passages has a kind of Gallic elegance, as if it were telling the story of a paralyzed Tintin with a script written by Françoise Sagan.

As with his previous two films, it was also another chance for Mr. Schnabel — a film fanatic with an Antonioni fixation — to deploy many of the visual set pieces he has been carrying around in his head. In one scene, for example, in which a younger Bauby visits Lourdes with a religiously inclined girlfriend, the camera lingers for an unusually long while on a close-up of the girl's long brown hair flying back and dancing as she sits in the back of a speeding convertible. It was an image he had wanted to shoot for years, Mr. Schnabel said, and the first one he shot in the movie, though it was not in the script.

He achieved it only by having the actress, Marina Hands, sit in the back of a moving flatbed truck with fans blasting at her. "Somebody's hair doesn't go like that so easily just out of a car," he said. "I mean, you have to agitate it a bit."

In conversations with Mr. Schnabel you get the idea that the movie ended up with its visual and emotional lushness in part because he views Mr. Bauby as a man more fortunate than tragic, struck by a lightning bolt of fate that robbed him of his body but granted him an afterlife in literature.

The fate of Mr. Schnabel, who recently turned 56, seems to be one in which such existential tradeoffs have not been required. His reputation as an artist might not be as secure as he would like. He still, for example, has no painting in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. But he is in other museum collections and shows regularly around the world, and many of his works have sold at auction recently for several hundred thousand dollars, sometimes respectably higher than their estimates. He is handsomely wealthy and recently unveiled a castlelike expansion of his West Village home and studio, which he calls the Palazzo Chupi — now 17 stories tall, with condominiums added for investors. And he is married to a former model, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, who also stars in "The Diving Bell."

Interviews with Mr. Schnabel, and there have been many dozens since he first became well known, tend to take a familiar form. Remarks about his dislike of encumbering clothing and penchant for sarongs and bathrobes. (The other day in Brooklyn, where he has been painting during the renovation of his studio, he was wearing plain old pants and a shirt and purple-checked Vans sneakers.) His celebrity cortege. (Mr. Schnabel does not so much drop names as carpet-bomb them: Mr. Depp, Laurie Anderson, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel; he was with Mr. Keitel in Cannes years ago, he said, when he got the idea for the convertible-hair-whipping scene.) His bombast and volubility. (At one point during the interview he asked an assistant for a cigarette but was talking so intently about a painting that when the cigarette came, prelighted, he did not notice that it was handed hot end first, and he burned his hand.)

But one thing that also becomes instructively clear in a visit to his studio is that his painting life resembles nothing so much as a movie set, churning with people and noise and a bull terrier named Tina and Mr. Schnabel's phone, which he keeps at hand even during interviews, chirping constantly. (He interrupted himself to take a call from one of the movie's other actresses, Anne Consigny, who was in China. "What time is it over there?" he asked. It was 4:30 in the morning.) He has lived his entire adult life in a crowd and seems most comfortable at the center of one, issuing orders. In that light his movie life seems less like empire building than like an inevitable career development.

The actors who have worked with him say this aspect of Mr. Schnabel often gives him the ability to think decisively on his feet and react in the moment to capture energy that can easily dissipate on a set. Marie-Josée Croze, who plays one of Bauby's speech therapists, described a pivotal scene in which she asks her imprisoned patient to spell his first words, and they are: "I want death." The script called for her to reprimand him, but she felt, having talked to one of Mr. Bauby's real-life therapists, Sandrine Fichou, that her character would never have had such an unprofessional reaction. Mr. Schnabel told her tersely to follow the script.

"He said, 'I need this scene, I need the emotion — it's not a documentary, it's a movie,' " she recalled in a telephone interview. Ms. Croze was upset and channeled the emotion into the scene, which ended with her fleeing the room in tears. Mr. Schnabel kept the camera rolling and yelled at her to come back in and apologize to the character of Bauby for her outburst. She did, in character, and the powerful scene was kept in the movie.

"It was in real time, we didn't cut," she said, "and that scene for me just built all the other scenes I had play."

Such a seat-of-the-pants philosophy "was a bit stressful in a way," she said. "We thought maybe we could do more and do better if we shot it again, but he'd say, 'Yeah, yeah, O.K., that's all I need.'" (Mr. Schnabel also likes to point out that he brought the movie in on budget and ahead of schedule, which gave him time to prowl the vicinity of the naval hospital, where the movie was filmed, and come across the old X-rays, which he also put to use as a backdrop for the opening credits.)

It is the kind of Julian dictatorship, benevolent by turns, that seems to prevail no matter what Mr. Schnabel is doing. As the interview in his studio was coming to an end on a muggy late-summer day, an assistant brought a reporter a glass of water. Mr. Schnabel asked a Miramax publicist sitting nearby if she wanted some too. She said no, thanks.

"You want to give her some water too, please?" he said to the assistant. The assistant said he did not think she wanted any.

"She'll take it," Mr. Schnabel said. "She needs it."

Need it or not, she took it.

[MacGuffin]

Janusz Kaminski makes it look picture perfect
The cinematographer could win a third Oscar for his work on 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.'
By Susan King, Los Angeles Times

POLISH-BORN cinematographer Janusz Kaminski has shot every Steven Spielberg film since 1993's Oscar-winning "Schindler's List," for which the visual artist won his first Academy Award for the atmospheric black-and-white cinematography.

Five years later, Kaminski picked up his second Oscar for bringing the invasion of Normandy to life in "Saving Private Ryan."

And the two collaborators just completed next year's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

Somewhere in between all that, Kaminski managed to produce some of his most evocative, expressionistic work -- in Julian Schnabel's haunting drama, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," which opens Nov. 30.

Based on the bestselling memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a.k.a. Jean-Do, the film revolves around the jet-setting editor of French Elle, who at 43 suffered a massive stroke and thereafter was able to communicate only by blinking his left eye. Kaminski's camera becomes Jean-Do's blinking eye, giving audiences what the man's life and impressions were in his paralyzed state.

Is collaborating with Julian Schnabel, who is an artist turned director, different than working with a traditional filmmaker like Steven Spielberg?

Julian, because he is an artist, has a totally different point of view and interests.

Such as?

He is as much interested in what's happening with the texture of the scene while the actors are talking as he is interested in what the actors are saying. Because he is an artist, there is a certain lack of patience or disinterest looking at the same thing over and over again. We never did the same take twice. If we did one take where we were panning the camera off to the right, the other take we would be panning off to the left or tilting down. . . . That was very liberating to some degree.

I am always interested in what happens when a person is talking [on screen]. While you are talking, I may go from your face to your hand or maybe you will touch something and I'll follow that and then I'll find your face again. Working with him was just an extension of my desires. When I was in film school, I shot a tremendous amount of film for younger filmmakers, classmates. I would always start at the face, then look around and come back. The camera is subjective in the movie because it reflects what Jean-Do sees.

How did you achieve that?

The camera became, as you know, almost an actor. When the actors are performing, they are performing to the camera and I happen to be reflecting what the actor [Mathieu Amalric, who plays Jean-Do] is feeling and what he is seeing. We did a series of tests where I would play with various devices that would allow me to deconstruct the image to make it out of focus, allow me to come in really close and be sharp and then go out of focus. A lot of that happened in preproduction where I would sit [he covers one eye] and see what would happen. What is the world looking like [through just one eye]? So how do I do it? What is the technique?

There's an optical system called swing and shift borrowed from still photographers and used frequently in commercials. I started playing with that. You can focus on a wall straight on and selectively choose what you want in focus. So as I am looking at you, I can focus only on your eye and then everything else can go out of focus. It is a brilliant innovation. You are twisting the lens and you are twisting the perspective and thus you can focus on very specific places.

How did you achieve the blinking and the stark flashes of white light when Jean-Do emerges from his coma?

Sometimes, as you are blinking, you blink real fast and sometimes you do it really slow. So all that stuff contributed to what Jean-Do must have been looking at in terms of his inability to focus, his brain not functioning at first really fast and the colors blending. What I would do is I would put a little Vaseline on the lens and would play with the shutter degree and camera speed . . . and the image would get a little bit smeared.

Can you talk about the color palette?

I felt the movie should be a little bit de-saturated, kind of almost turquoise like the ocean. Julian actually did a beautiful job choosing the color of the hospital room. He dressed the room. He wanted the walls to be covered with memoirs of his life. He chose the pajama colors of Jean-Do. [In the flashbacks] the colors are warmer because that is kind of his memory. It was more vivid.

[MacGuffin]

Julian Schnabel dives right in
'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' director uses his painterly eye to make a film about a man who can communicate only with one eyelid.
By Paul Brownfield, Los Angeles Times

THE tented breakfast area at the Hotel Bel-Air was mostly empty on a cool, gray morning earlier this month. A well-dressed man sat in a booth. In an adjacent booth was the Golden Globe-nominated director of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Julian Schnabel.

Schnabel, famous as a painter from the early 1980s Warhol-ian New York art scene, is a bear of a person. He arrived from his room ensconced in two shirts, an overcoat, pants with sneakers but no socks. He has a reddish tangle of hair and matching beard, mixed with gray. His eyes were obscured by the sort of horn-rimmed sunglasses that are part of Jack Nicholson's uniform at Lakers games.

"What would you like? Do you like Mexican food?" was one of the first things he said. In the next hour he would talk movingly of his father's death, say that "The Diving Bell" is "all about my relationship with women" and become distracted by ambient cellphone chatter -- that other guy, in the next booth -- all while negotiating the delivery of chilaquilesfor breakfast.

Schnabel was in town to attend a GQ party at the Chateau Marmont -- the magazine had named him "Visionary of the Year" -- and to continue to talk up "The Diving Bell."

The movie is based on the mordant, spare memoir by the late Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle magazine who, at 42, suffered a stroke that left him intact mentally but unable to move or feel any of his extremities. From this existential state, Bauby managed to report on his experience by memorizing what he wanted to write each morning before a translator arrived to take down his thoughts, Bauby blinking the letters from a special alphabet. He had only the use of his left eye.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" opened a month ago to insanely glowing reviews but limited viewership -- just three screens, two in New York and one in Los Angeles (it opened in wider release this weekend). And though the movie was made in French, with a French cast (and was Golden Globe-nominated as best foreign-language film), it is ineligible for best foreign-language film at the Oscars because its screenwriter is British and two of its producers are American.

As for Schnabel, he's from New York and Texas.

"So you know, I love this film," he said, once it had been determined that the chef had a ranchero sauce as opposed to a tomatillo for the chilaquiles. "For me, it was such an important thing to do, just in regard to my father's death."

Schnabel moved his father into his West Village home and studio, dubbed the Palazzo Chupi. (He recently finished a high-rise expansion over his own living space, the addition done in a shade of reddish-pink, with condos.)

Schnabel, 56, lives there with his second wife, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, who plays one of the nurses in "The Diving Bell." His father died of prostate cancer in 2004, at age 92, sometimes sleeping and eating in the couple's bed, Schnabel said.

This ideal of filial connection produces "The Diving Bell's" most intimate scene, when Bauby, seen in flashback, shaves his elderly father, who is played by Max von Sydow. Though Schnabel makes sure to say that Ronald Harwood "wrote a beautiful script," it is clear that he made the film in ways that touch on his own narrative.

There are, for instance, Bauby/Schnabel's women, played in the movie by a parade of French actresses, each one as stunning as the next. Bauby's memoir is discreet about all of this, but in the movie the protagonist is loved by the mother of his children, loved by the lover who can't bring herself to come to the hospital, loved, perhaps, by the nurse who teaches him the new alphabet, loved by the woman sent to take his dictation.

Schnabel says the gaggle of women jockeying for position was "like a nest of hornets" around the paralyzed editor, based on information Schnabel said he ferreted out from several Bauby intimates, including his girlfriend.

Bauby's girlfriend told Schnabel they'd once sat behind him at the bullfights in Nîmes, France.

Schnabel said that for several years he had some paintings displayed there in the Maison Carrée, a Roman temple. "So I was sort of a resident of Nîmes."

Mexican food aficionado

By then, the chilaquileshad arrived. Schnabel, who has been going to Mexico since he was a teenager, surfing there, was a little crestfallen at the result.

"You know what I'm gonna do?" he said to the server. "You know what, I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna eat later. Actually we can save this. I think they're very good, I'm gonna give him another chance, but I'll order them later."

As he talked about the movie, though, he continued to eat.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is Schnabel's third film; he also directed 1996's "Basquiat," about the up-from-the-streets New York painter Jean Michel Basquiat, and the 2003 film "Before Night Falls," about the Cuban poet and novelist Renaldo Arenas.

Basquiat died of a drug overdose and Arenas died of AIDS. Bauby is less a martyred artist than a person who gave witness, sometimes wittily, sometimes movingly, about his absurd fate by means of a painstaking, lonely process that, to Schnabel, mirrors life for people who make art.

"You don't understand that until you realize, 'OK, Mathieu's lying there,' " Schnabel said of Mathieu Amalric, who plays Bauby in the film. "He's got a patch over one eye, he's got a contact lens that's bloodshot in the other, a piece of plastic in his nose, a bite plate in his mouth, his lip's glued to his face, he's lying there with his hands on the foam, and he is not moving. So people act like he's not there. He is invisible. Now at first he's angry that people don't notice him. Later, he can really have a sense of humor about it, because he can have conversations with himself.

". . . That world," Schnabel added, "particularly if you close your eyes, gets quite large. If I didn't go do this, I never could have said that to you. I never could have thought about it like that. And then you start thinking about, what is the present?

"Close your eyes," Schnabel suddenly instructed. The director, too, closed his eyes.

"So we're talking, you and me, we're not seeing each other. And I'm in a car right now and you're on the phone with me. And so, you're interviewing me. Say we're doing an interview and it's over the phone, OK? You know that I'm in a car in New York -- hey, I just passed. . . ." He paused. "Hey, David how are you?"

David Linde, co-chairman of Universal Pictures, had dropped by the table.

"Good to see you," Linde said.

"Have you seen the movie yet?" Schnabel asked. "See it."

Linde moved on.

"He was working for Harvey Weinstein when we did 'Basquiat.'

". . . so anyway, our eyes were closed, right. . . ."

Not 'lost in the wash'

If every Oscar season seems to produce a latchkey movie -- a film with an almost unimpeachable pedigree but otherwise destined to be forgotten by Oscar -- "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a leading contender. There are, after all, no stars in the movie, to go along with its difficult subject matter and non-English tongue.

"We just didn't want [it] to get lost in the wash," said Miramax chief Daniel Battsek of the initial three-screen release amid a tide of end-of-the-year Oscar contenders like "Atonement" and "No Country for Old Men," another Miramax film.

Speaking by phone the morning of the Golden Globe nominations, which recognized Schnabel for best director and Harwood for best screenplay, Battsek said of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. recognition: "It basically says what we have been saying from Day One, which is, this movie exists outside boundaries of language."

Regardless, Schnabel said he plans to be in L.A. around Oscar season. The Gagosian Gallery now wants his work to be part of its Oscar-week show in Beverly Hills, he said.

The breakfast, by then, was winding down. Schnabel had the complimentary fruit plate and the refried beans sent to his room. "I hate to throw food away," he said. A room service call was arranged and Schnabel laughed. "I feel like Jack Nicholson," he said, referring to Nicholson's infamous chicken salad sandwich order in "Five Easy Pieces."

Schnabel returned to the subject at hand -- the difference between the filmmaker's imperative to sell his film and the painter's imperative not to sell his painting.

Schnabel has been accused of doing both.

"People, they always criticize paintings. Criticism, they call it . . . but people love to love movies. And they love to love actors. And movie directors," he said. ". . . It's a language that's more accessible.

"Painting, the people that like it walk up to it, they don't know what it means necessarily, they don't know how you made it. But . . . they like the mystery of that. . . . It's speaking in this other language."

He gets asked, he said, how his filmmaking has influenced his painting. "I would say my painting has influenced my filmmaking. I mean, I've been a painter all my life, so the way I approach making a movie is more to do with being spontaneous. . . . Setting everything up until I get to that moment. Or not having a hierarchal view of things. Like, something that might be a word might not be more meaningful than just a sound, or the lack of a sound. So it's like a Whitmanesque sort of plane. Which is something I've thought about as a painter my whole life -- my conscious life as a painter."

Still, in this world of David Lindes and chilaquiles at the Bel-Air with your eyes wide shut, there is room to wonder aloud, as Schnabel had: "I could win the Oscar, I guess, for what, best picture. Do you think that's going to happen?"

[hedwig]

nobody saw this but me and JG? 

ok i checked the top 10 2007 thread. w/o horse and cinemanarchist saw it and loved it. good. either nobody else has seen it yet, or this is the most underrated movie of 2007.

schnabel is a fucking genius. basquiat, one of my favorites many years before i even became obsessed with movies, perfectly captured its subject and the way he perceived the world. everything and everyone in the movie was colored by this sense of basquiat's vision. with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, schnabel has taken this idea even further by enabling the audience to LITERALLY see from bauby's unique perspective. his state of paralysis awakens a world of fantasy and memory to help him cope with the reality of the present. it amounts to a simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting film.

and it's funny! i wasn't expecting such humor in a film about a stroke victim. bauby's inner-monologue narration provides some good laughs. oh well, it's too bad schnabel didn't get to do Perfume. his work is full of spirit and rapturous beauty and i can't wait for whatever he does next.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

[Ghostboy]

Yeah, this is a really amazing film. It's actually quite shocking when it switches to an objective perspective for the first time - the subjective material is just entrancing. The iceberg footage is such a strong and effective visual metaphor as well...

[matt35mm]

I saw this last week, and was slightly worried that it might have been over-hyped, but all thoughts of hype disappeared just a few minutes into it.  This was absolutely one of the best movie experiences this year for me.  It casts a distinct spell that transcends just the idea of the point-of-view storytelling--the specific visuals (and sounds/music) are so strong and intelligently used.

And as Hedwig said, it's funny.  It's an honest kind of funny, rather than the saccharine, manipulative kind of funny that might go with this sort of material.  It's pitiless.

So bravo, and go watch it if you've been thinking about it and have just been waiting for my review to help you decide.

[godardian]

It's actually quite shocking when it switches to an objective perspective for the first time

That was completely brilliant, so seemingly simple yet so effective and dynamic. I loved this movie. And if this is anyone's first Schnabel film, and you liked it at all, you'll also appreciate Before Night Falls, which I'm dying to revisit. I've never seen Basquiat, though I do have a copy of its delightful soundtrack. Any thoughts on the début of Schnabel?