A glimpse into the mind of the genius behind The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls) has a reputation as a bit of an eccentric, and upon meeting him it is immediately clear why. The painter/writer/director walks into the hotel room at the Four Seasons where we are to meet him looking for all the world as though he was just taking a dip in the hotel pool—wearing a wrinkly button-down, open and stretched across his barrel-like torso, a sarong around his waist, cheap, scratched sunglasses (that he kept on the whole time), and hotel slippers on his feet. In other words, quite a get-up. And yet, Schnabel’s newest movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is simply one of the most gorgeous and moving films I’ve seen all year, and possibly ever. So as far as I’m concerned, he can wear whatever heck he pleases.
Adapted by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist, Love in the Time of Cholera) from the memoir of the same name, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the true story of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Beauby, who suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of 43 that left him completely paralyzed save for one eye. Although Schnabel is from New York, he made the film on entirely in French and with a French cast, but it wasn’t originally supposed to be that way. “This movie was set up at Universal originally,” he explained, with Johnny Depp originally cast in the lead role. “Johnny wanted me to direct it and they came to me, but I guess he got very busy with the Pirate thing.” (The role eventually went to french actor Mathieu Amalric.)
Schnabel “always had trepidations about this movie being in English,” but he didn’t exactly know the direction he wanted it to take from the start. “Everything is a process, you know? If you try to build your house, and you don't just put one brick up at a time, it will seem like a daunting undertaking,” he says. “But, yeah. I had to come to understand... I thought, I have to go to this hospital and shoot this movie in France, in that place, and I'm not going to have American and English people make believe they're French, have French people read French subtitles in France. And I just couldn't do it in a sound studio here. They need somebody else to do that.”
The trouble is, when the French company Pathé bought the rights from Universal, even they wanted it to be in English. And Schnabel doesn’t think Ron Harwood was delighted with the prospect of having his script translated, either. But the powers that be finally realized he wasn’t budging. “Now, everybody is happy that it is. Even Ron Harwood,” he quips.
Further adding to the movie’s pedigree is Janusz Kaminski, the lauded cinematographer behind movies like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. “I think he understood what I wanted to do,” says Schanbel of Kaminski. “I realized that in the other movies I didn't really have a [Director of Photography] before. I was walking in, closing the curtains, opening the curtains, seeing what a yellow curtain would look like and doing all this stuff that he started doing. And I thought, 'God, this is going to be easy. I've got some help here.'”
“I also think he was very excited to use some different kind of things that he maybe couldn't use in a more conventional film,” Schanbel continues. “He once said to me, 'Is this going to be an experimental film?' And I said, 'I hope so.'”
Schnabel, whose father died shortly before he made the movie, drew on the experience to try to understand what Beauby was going through. “What I tried to show was what my father was seeing when he was dying, not what I was seeing when I was looking at him,” he explains. “The fear that he had was something that I thought, if somebody could have a tool to look into their interior life to find peace in that...they could accept the transition. He just wasn't prepared in any way. And I think Jean-Dominique Beauby was definitely prepared, because he was in some place between life and death, and he was reporting back from that place.”
“It was such a particular vantage point that [Beauby] had, I don't think that anybody ever reported back from that place. And that, I think, became very comforting for him,” Schanbel continues. “He lost his self-pity, he had the work to do. He, in fact, got to relive his life in that year and three months and he actually stayed alive long enough to finish the book, 'cause he died 10 days after the book was published.”
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is out in limited release now.
Check out ReelzChannel.com’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly page for clips from the movie and more!