NYFF: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

By Katey Rich

Marie-Jose Croze plays Jean-Dominque Bauby's first nurse in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

"I'm not going to ask everybody to raise their hand who took LSD in this room. I'll spare you that embarrassment. I did."

You can't say Julian Schnabel doesn't know how to work a room. Dressed in a flannel shirt with four top buttons undone, sporting unruly hair and colored glasses, Schnabel brought a casual air to the press room following the screening of his film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The film earned Schnabel the Best Director prize at Cannes--though, Schnabel insists, "Probably if I was French I would have won the Palme d'Or." Schnabel's third film about a real-life artist, Diving Bell tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of France's Elle magazine who had a stroke at age 43 that paralyzed his entire body except his left eye. After some resistance Bauby learned to use a system devised by his nurse in which he could blink out, letter by letter, whatever he wanted to say. Using this system he wrote a memoir about his time trapped within his own immobile body, which was published 10 days before his death.

In a flashback, Bauby (Amalric) shaves his elderly father (Max von Sydow).

Schnabel, who has also made films about American painter Jean Michel Basquiat and Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, figures there's a good reason he's made so many films about artists: "I guess I know more about being an artist than I know about being a stockbroker." Schnabel first learned about Bauby's story thanks to a nurse who was caring for Schnabel's father, on his deathbed with prostate cancer. "When my father died, he was terrified of death. I felt like I had failed him because I couldn't help him through that. I really made this movie, I think, as a self-help device. I couldn't help my dad, but I thought I could help somebody else."

Schnabel originally planned to write the screenplay in English and have Johnny Depp play Bauby; a behemoth in the form of a pirate ship got in a way, though, and Depp was too caught up with the Disney trilogy to play the part. Schnabel always planned to film in France, however, and soon the script was rewritten in French and Mathieu Almaric took the part.

Amalric jumped eagerly into a role that required him to be still for vast lengths of time. "He's an extraordinary person," Schnabel observed. "He said, 'I don't really need to be an actor, I just need to be a human being to do this.' That's not really true. He is a great human being, but he's an incredible actor."

Schnabel shot several scenes with Amalric inside the diving bell of the title--a clunky, old-fashioned scuba-diving suit that epitomizes the word "trapped." "I didn't go into the diving bell, but I know why Jean-Dominique Bauby picked that metaphor, because it is terrifying in there," Schnabel said. "There was one moment where he was acting like he was freaked out and the guy who was photographing him stopped photographing and pulled him out. This made Mathieu furious, he had to tell the guy, �Listen, I'm acting.'"

Bauby flashes back to his time as a fashion editor.

In his memoir Bauby explains that, with his imagination, he is actually limitless; he can imagine whatever he likes, regardless of being trapped in his diving bell. In the film Schnabel, who was a visual artist in the 1960s and 70s before turning to filmmaking, represents this imagination--the butterfly of the title--with hundreds of visual images, from Marlon Brando on the set of Candy to, breathtakingly, glaciers collapsing into the sea. "I could put anything in this movie that I wanted to, and that was very liberating," Schnabel explained.

The film's most daring technique, however, is to film the first 30 minutes entirely from Bauby's point of view, from the moment he awakes from his stroke to the beginning of his language training with his nurse. "The crew thought I was going to abandon that at certain moments. How long, they thought, can people take this thing? Is this going to get in the way of the storytelling?" Schnabel said of the POV style. "I felt like his POV was him, was us, I didn't want to lose that." Schnabel employed various tricks, from using a skewed-focus swing-and-tilt lens to actually screwing his own glasses into the camera, in order to create the proper perspective. The effect is remarkable, transporting the audience into Bauby's groggy, disoriented state, and letting them learn the stakes of his newfound condition along with him.

And as for the LSD? As with many of Schnabel's anecdotes, the story of his bad trip on a surfboard in Texas doesn't have the closest relation to the point he's making about the film. "Maybe death is not horrific for everybody in this room, but in this case it was this thing coming back like a bad trip. He was in that bed, he was in that bed all the time. What he was able to do for himself was figure out a way to escape."

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is so much less a story about illness and hospitals than it is a story about art, the effort and perseverance it takes to make any work of art come to life, regardless of circumstances or perhaps even because of them. A talented writer though he was, before his stroke Bauby was, as Schnabel put it, "quite superficial and normal�[After the stroke,] all of a sudden this guy was put at this vantage point that was very unique. He was able to speak back from that place, and I think he reported back some things that are able to help all of us."