French magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric, left) suffers a debilitating stroke in Julian Schnabel's film adaptation of Bauby's memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. (Miramax/Alliance Atlantis)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a portrait of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former bon vivant editor of French Elle who suffered a debilitating stroke while driving his sports car through the countryside in 1995. The film version of Bauby’s hospital bed memoir is directed by American painter and director Julian Schnabel. Though the two men have never met, they seem to mirror each other somehow, both people who fly high and live large. During an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, Schnabel cemented his reputation as a man of Falstaffian appetites by hoovering boxes of Chinese food as he lay on the floor of a hotel room, wearing pajamas and yellow sunglasses. Had he not died in 1997, Bauby might have been delighted.
Bauby’s stroke left him with an extremely rare disorder called “locked-in syndrome.” The condition is as terrifying as the name implies: the sufferer’s mental faculties are intact, yet he is totally paralyzed. Bauby could communicate with only one eye — to show Bauby’s other eye being sutured shut from his perspective, Schnabel put latex over the camera lens and sewed it with a needle and thread — but he managed to blink out a bestselling book from inside the “diving bell” of his illness. An unlikely optimist, Bauby learned to set free his inner life.
Schnabel, now 56, has been a fixture of the New York art (and party) scene since a loud arrival in the ’80s. A neo-expressionist painter with a theatrical strain, he’s famous for borrowing from Kabuki theatre and painting on smashed plates. But while his reputation as a painter has waned, Schnabel’s credibility as a filmmaker has ascended. He’s earned accolades for the films Basquiat (about street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat) and Before Night Falls (Cuban poet Reynaldo Arenas); it’s notable that all three of his films are original biographies about deceased artists imprisoned by their circumstances. Schnabel’s epic poetry is in evidence in Butterfly, which is told from the depths of Bauby’s perception, with a shaky, blurred camera and awe-inspiring visual metaphors: icebergs crashing; pods cracking open in the sun. Emotional without being sentimental, the film earned Schnabel the best director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and Schnabel is a front-runner for an Oscar nomination.
In person, Schnabel’s ego proves as outsized as his girth, but he is also gracious and charming, prone to asking as many questions as he answers. Between bites at the Toronto festival, the director talked about Sean Penn, how the film taught him not to fear death and what’s wrong with the triumph of the human spirit.
Director Julian Schnabel, third from right. (Miramax/Alliance Atlantis)
Q: You’ve said that in your paintings you tell your life story. What part of your life story are you telling with this film?
A: I’m telling the story of my regrets, of anybody’s regrets about the things that they didn’t do. I’m telling the story of not waiting until you’re paralyzed to decide that you want to look into your interior life. Making this movie helped me deal with my father’s death. His death really f---ed me up. He and I were very close. My mother died when she was 89, my father died when he was 92. I was one of those people that think his parents are going to live forever.
I loved that line when Jean-Dominique said, “Had I been blind and deaf, would it have taken the harsh light of disaster for me to find my true nature?” We’re looking for some logic to explain death to people but the truth of the matter is that I look for things that are not necessarily logical. Like, what did the glaciers mean? I thought, Okay, that’s my key. If I put glaciers in the movie, I can tell this story. Go figure. Why would that do it? Because glaciers are sort of beyond logic, and I think the story is beyond logic. How do we deal with infinity and nothingness and how do we realize that what is here is worth something? And — did you see Sean’s movie? Sean Penn’s movie?
Q: Into the Wild? [The film about Chris McCandless, the young American who went into the Alaskan wild on a secular vision quest and died.] Yeah, I did.
A: Beautiful, no? I realized how American Sean really is, and how non-American I am in a way. At the same time, I’m a New Yorker. [Schnabel’s assistant enters with bags of Chinese food.] Hi, there. Great. Wow. We ordered a lot of food. [To me:] You want to eat something with us?
Q: I think I should stay in listening mode, but thanks.
A: Okay. I realized it was so beautiful, what Chris McCandless was saying and looking for. When he says, “Life has to be shared,” I loved that. I think that Jean-Dominique Bauby ultimately shared his experience with us and he saved a lot of us because of that. I really do feel less scared about dying, for some reason. Movies can make you feel like there’s this other life, like you can live forever, like when you see William Holden lying in the pool in Sunset Blvd. And he’s, “Here I am lying in the pool,” and you’re like, “Wow, that guy’s talking to us and he’s lying in a pool. We don’t really have to die, either!”
I went to a screening [of the Diving Bell] near the French-Spanish border and doctors and nurses came from this hospital that treat people with locked-in syndrome. This lady got up and said, “This is so useful for us, for the patients. How did you know how to communicate that, to show what it’s like? We feel like somebody knows now, and we can show this to patients.”
You think of that, and then there’s Bauby’s son, who did not want to see the movie. He was crying. I went out of the screening with him and said, “You have got to go through this. I know it’s painful, but you’ve got to see this.” And he went back in. He saw it again in Cannes and he was sitting behind me and he said, “I can get on with my life now.” So that’s why somebody should make a movie. You don’t know you’re going to be such an altruist as you’re doing it. [Looks down at shrimp rolls he’s eating.] These are really good. This is my favourite place in Toronto. Dynasty. Right on Blur Street. Is it Blur Street?
Q: Almost. Bloor Street.
A: Is there soy sauce? These are pretty hot. You want one? Take what you want. [To assistant:] Can I have a napkin?
Q: You very deftly avoid turning Bauby’s story into an exercise in sentimentality, a “triumph of the human spirit” movie.(HarperCollins Canada)
A: I have to make sure they don’t write that shit on the f---ing trailer. I didn’t put it in the movie. This movie is not a cliché. This guy went to the edge of the world to somehow tell this story. That’s why I had to go to that hospital [in France] to do it, to shoot it there with his nurses. The first person you see is his actual nurse, that’s her face, and the guy that’s holding him in the pool is his physiotherapist, Daniel.
[Holding a giant coffee given to him by his assistant:] Is there milk? I guess there’s no milk for this big, black coffee. [Stares at the coffee, sighs.] I don’t need it. I don’t need anything, in fact.Q: How was the language barrier?
A: I needed to speak French, so I spoke French. But I didn’t speak French before I made the movie. It’s no harder than anything else. I translated the movie into French with each actor separately because I wanted to hear what they would say, what would come out of their mouths. I spoke a bit of French. I lived in France in 1987. My wife [Olatz Lopez Garmendia], who plays the nurse who sticks her tongue out, she lived in France for the first 10 years of her life because her parents were split up and her father was against [Spanish dictator Francisco] Franco, so he lived in exile. She’s very good in the movie. She has a manner about her. Ah, the compassion that these people had.
Q: How does filmmaking work for you as a means of expression in contrast to painting?
A: Different audience. It’s just using a different tool for a different need. If you’re going to nail a painting on a wall, you get a hammer. If you want to get a license plate off a car, you get a screwdriver.
Q: But painting seems like such a solitary act, and filmmaking is so collaborative. Do you find it hard to work with others?
A: It’s frustrating when people are resistant. Mostly the technical people get resistant. I think the cameraman thought I was crazy. I stuck my glasses on the camera [to get a blurry effect], and I was going to use this swinging lens for a very long time and everybody thought that people were going to get dizzy. But they all came along. They had to. It was frustrating sometimes. But I never had to wait once for an actor. The actors were total believers from the beginning. They gave me everything they could. The cameraman ultimately was extremely proud of what we did and thanked me for being so patient and not strangling him.
I know this is disgusting, watching a guy in his pajamas eat this crap off the floor.Q: I have two little kids, so I’m not easily disgusted.
A: What are their names?
Q: Judah and Mia.
A: I knew you had girls.
Q: Actually, Judah’s a boy.
A: Uh huh. I have five: Lola Montez, Stella Madrid, Vito Maria, Cy and Olmo Schnabel.
Q: Good names. Cy for the painter Cy Twombly?
A: He’s a good friend of mine. What else are we talking about?
Q: I think I’m getting the signal from the publicist that I have to leave.
A: Why don’t you take some food with you?The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Dec. 25.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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