Early audiences who have seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly find it uplifting, inspired by Jean-Dominique Bauby's ability to create despite total paralysis. The stroke victim wrote his autobiography through a communication system where he blinked each letter of each word. It affected the actors equally, though Emmanuelle Seigner felt it already coincided with her worldview.
Emmanuelle Seigner Talks The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
"For me it didn't change because this is my philosophy of life," she said. "Be in the moment and believe in what's inside of you as a strength. Be courageous even if the situation is really hard. So it didn't change my philosophy."
Seigner plays Bauby's wife Celine, who he'd left six months before his stroke. The real Celine must have had her own reasons for returning, but Seigner created her own. "I was able [to meet her] but I didn't want to because she's quite a famous person in France in the kind of world that she works in, TV. I heard a lot of things about her, negative and positive, but I didn't want to meet her because I wanted to do it my own way. When the movie came out, she called me and she was crying. She said, 'Thank you for me and the kids.' Then her own mother wrote me the nicest letter telling me how much she recognized the pain of her daughter and the love she had for him. For me I was very happy because it means I didn't betray it. It's very tenuous when you play somebody that is alive because you have a tendency to do an imitation of something like that. I just didn't want to."
The actress was close to the Bauby story herself, as a European film star. "I read it because I knew Jean-Dominique Bauby. At that moment, he was editor of French Elle and it was the moment where I did Frantic and Bitter Moon. I was very often on the cover of Elle. So I knew him socially, not intimately, but socially. I remember when it happened to him, I had a lot of friends that were visiting him in the hospital. So when I was cast in the film it was for me sort of a responsibility in a way to be in that film but at the same time, I was very proud and it was great."
She says the film captures the Bauby she knew accurately. "He was very clever, a womanizer, very much like in the film. A lot of humor but also very arrogant and cynical but bright, like clever and sophisticated."
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is out in theaters now.
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