Julian Schnabel's Oscar-nominated movie about a paralysed man who communicates using only one eyelid is honest and unsentimental, a device that can help you handle your own death, the director tells Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent.
A classic example of truth being stranger than fiction, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells a story that nobody could have invented. In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine in Paris, suffered a massive stroke that paralysed his body. He was 43.
Julian Schnabel's film of his story begins in a hospital when Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric) comes out of a three-week coma. "Keep your eyes open," is the first sentence he hears, before being told he had a stroke that caused the extremely rare condition of "locked-in syndrome", which compromises the stem between the brain and the rest of the body.
Schnabel immediately places the viewer in Bauby's position, observing everything from his point of view, which is blurred until one of his eyes adjusts to light again. We cannot but share his shock and anxiety at realising that his body is paralysed from head to toe and that he cannot be heard, even though his brain is in perfect working order. That extended sequence is so powerful and so convincingly recreated that it takes on a suffocating intensity beyond claustrophobia, as if one had been buried alive.
"That's one of my big fears," Schnabel says when we meet at his London hotel. "Remember that movie, The Vanishing? That was heavy. Of course, it happened at the end of that film, whereas it comes right at the beginning of mine. I didn't feel the need to have any voiceover or flashbacks to explain what happened. You don't need to say anything. It starts, and you're there." The only relief comes with the discovery that Bauby has one remaining form of communication, by blinking his left eyelid. With the encouragement of a dedicated young speech therapist and her use of a re-ordered alphabet that priorities the most commonly used letters, he expresses himself by blinking when the correct letter is pronounced aloud.
Bauby's instinctive response is terse: "I want death". Within the severe limitations of his altered existence, however, he finds a reason to go on living, and to deal with the guilt and regrets that shroud his thoughts, by dictating the book that over a year later becomes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby died of heart failure two days after the original French edition of his book was published in March 1997.
'HE IS IN such a strange place and he's reporting back from there," is how Schnabel describes Bauby's painstaking process of writing a book with the blink of an eye over the course of a year. "In his case, necessity is the mother of invention. He has to create this job for himself, which will take up his day each day. He enjoys doing that because he really comes alive in his work.
"The metaphor he picked, the diving bell, is no accident. When we were shooting, I was down there with Mathieu while he was inside it. I couldn't go in there. I couldn't imagine going in there. In fact, when the camera operator was filming and Mathieu started freaking out inside it, he didn't know Mathieu was acting and tried to pull him out of the water. Mathieu was furious when he came out. Everyone knew the hand signal Mathieu would give if he was in distress, but this guy wasn't paying attention."
The film is moving, thought-provoking, yet never sentimental. "There was no time for sentimentality," says Schnabel, "and anywhere I found any of that in the script, I removed it surgically. This is the story of all of us who will face sickness and death, but if we look, we can find meaning and beauty there. I wanted the film to be a tool, like Bauby's book, a self-help device that can help you handle your own death. That's what I was hoping for, and that's why I made the film."
Schnabel says he was intent on making a movie that would be honest about every aspect of Bauby's life, not least in his relationships with his wife and his lover. "Some people think the film is too honest, that it presents him as cruel, but I think that when you are so sick, there's no room for euphemisms, no room for lying. We hear the brutal truth of what he's thinking, but when he's speaking to other people, there's no editing in his choices of what he says. There's nothing more to lose. I think people wish they could be that honest, but they can't because they fear they are going to lose something all the time, so they hold themselves back.
"One thing I'm very proud about in the movie is that none of the characters is described in a superficial way. The book is very unlike the movie because it's written in vignettes. I was very interested in Bauby's line in the book where he says that swimming up from the mist of a coma, you don't have the luxury of having your dreams evaporate. He takes you to a place where the lines are very fuzzy, between what is conscious and what's a dream. There's really not a difference because he's living in his head. People are always trying to compartmentalise and separate between things, but it's not really like that. People say to me that I'm a painter but now I'm making a film. But I just get up every day and do whatever I do, and then I start again the next day. If I'm trying to tell a story and I'm using a camera and actors to do it, that's part of a long-range plan to make a movie."
Schnabel, who is 56, was an internationally recognised painter long before he made his film debut as a director in 1996 with Basquiat, dealing with the rise and early demise of a fellow New York artist, Jean Michel Basquiat, who died of a heroin overdose when he was 27. Schnabel's second film, Before Night Falls (2000), charted the life and untimely death of the poet, Reinaldo Arenas, persecuted in his native Cuba because of his homosexuality and memorably played in an Oscar-nominated portrayal by Javier Bardem.
When the opportunity arose for Schnabel to direct The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as his third film, he was put under pressure to shoot it in English with a movie star in the lead. "But this is the story of a Frenchman," Schnabel says, "and I felt it had to be made in French. Why should we rob it of its essence? That took a lot of persuasion, but I was determined that I would make the film in France and in French." It helped that Johnny Depp wanted to play Bauby and was willing to play the role in French, given that he spends much of the year in France with his singer-actor partner Vanessa Paradis and their two children. When Depp became caught up in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, there was talk of casting Eric Bana as Bauby, but Schnabel wanted versatile French actor Mathieu Amalric and he finally got his way.
"Mathieu came to my place in Montauk and he spent Thanksgiving with me," Schnabel says. "He's a gifted man. He was a concert pianist when he was a kid. We read through the script and got on very well. I decided we would not rehearse anything for the movie. Mathieu kept a patch taped over one eye and in the other eye he had a contact lens that had all these veins on it. The guy could hardly see while he was lying there in the bed all that time. And he had a prosthetic like a bi-plate inside his mouth, and we glued his lip down. He was lying there like that for so long that sometimes I actually forgot that he could move. Of course, it was also very difficult for him as an actor to be acting but not speaking or doing anything. I thought it was a miracle what he could do with his eye."
SCHNABEL BROKE SEVERAL formal rules of film-making to show events from Bauby's constrained point of view. "Some people have said to me that they've never seen a movie like this," he says, "because it doesn't conform to how films are supposed to be shot. I'm not thinking of any of that when I work. The fact is that this guy can't move his head. That means if he's looking in one direction, we might have to cut the heads of the people he sees because he can't pick his head up. The audience has been told the guy is paralysed, so they don't think the director doesn't know how to frame the movie because he's cutting the heads off people. So people think they're seeing something they haven't seen before, but it's just a different arrangement of forms. As a painter, I try to break everything down to the fundamentals, and I approach movies in the same way."
Did Schnabel encounter any French resistance to him as an American filming Bauby's celebrated book? "I think everybody was very happy that I was doing it," he says. "I've spent a lot of time in France. I had a show of my paintings at the Centre Pompidou. I think they know my work there, and they didn't regard me as a typical American director. However, when the Cannes Film Festival asked to include the film, they didn't want it to be in competition at first. I said I would not agree to that, so they allowed it into the competition." And the Cannes jury gave Schnabel the award for best director. "That was amazing," he says. "Awards are not really my thing. I'm usually one of those guys who would not like to be in any club that would have me as a member, but this was a good club. A lot of people I respect walked up those steps, so I thought it was really cool.
"But I knew the French would not pick a movie by an American director as their entry for the foreign-language film award in the Oscars, and they didn't. I think the rule about national entries for that award should be changed. Why not have two or three good films from any country?" Although Schnabel's admirable film was ineligible for that award, it received four Oscar nominations: for best adapted screenplay (Ronald Harwood), best cinematography (Janusz Kaminski), best film editing (Juliette Welfling), and for Schnabel as best director.
The Diving Bell and the Butterflyopens on Friday