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Julian Schnabel Talks The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
By Fred Topel | Image property of Miramax Films.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
"First of all this movie was set up at Universal originally," said Schnabel. "It was green lit, Johnny Depp was going to make the movie with me. He wanted me to direct it and they came to me, we were going to do that, but I guess he got very busy with the Pirate thing. Then time went by. I always had trepidations about this movie being in English. Many agents called me to see their American actresses early on. I said, ‘You know I’m going to surround Johnny with French people.' What they didn’t know is I was going to have him speak French also."
It wasn't like Schnabel tricked the studios into getting into development on a foreign film. He found the right style along the way. "Everything is a process. If you try to build your house and you don’t just put on brick up at a time, then it will seem like a daunting undertaking. 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 are French. Have French people read French subtitles in France.' I just couldn’t do it in a sound studio here. I just need somebody else to do that."
The screenwriter wasn't too big on the idea either. "I don’t think that Ron Harwood liked the idea at all, that I was going to translate his English script into French. I translated the script with all of the actors. I figured if they are going to say the words, it’s got to come out of their mouths. They are the ones standing on the screen. It was this way of freeing up the whole thing."
The story of Jean-Dominique Bauby's paralyzing stroke was important for Schnabel to get right. Shooting the film from Bauby's point of view allowed Schnabel to work through his own feelings about his father's death.
"Actually, my Father died before this was made. The script arrived when he was sick. The day he died, the night before he died I put him in the bathtub, and I kind of wrapped him up and the next morning I called and said, ‘How is he?’ and [the caretaker] said ‘Well, he had a rough night, but he’s okay.’ About five minutes later he said ‘You should come up here right now.’ I ran upstairs and my father had bile coming out of his mouth and his eyes were flickering. I didn’t know if he had any air left in his brain. I just said, ‘Dad!’ and I thought maybe he could see me. We were very close. 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. 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, to feel that they could accept the transition. He just wasn’t prepared in any way. I think that Jean-Dominique Bauby was definitely prepared. He was in some place between life and death. He was reporting back from that place. Because it was a such a particular vantage point that he had, I don’t think anybody ever reported back from that place, and that I think became very comforting for him. He lost his self pity, he had the work to do, and he in fact got to relive his life in that year and three months. He actually stayed alive long enough to finish the book."
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opens to theaters on November 30th.
For the trailer, poster and more movie info, go to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Miramax Films.
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