Director Julian Schnabel's aware of the Oscar buzz circulating around The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and is excited about the possibility of earning a nomination. Schnabel's hoping the film will be considered for Best Picture, even though it's in a foreign language. "I don’t want it to be 'Best Foreign'. I’m an American. Sometimes an American has to go to France to make an American movie, even if it’s in French," explained Schnabel.
Based on the true story of French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric), the film follows the last few months in Bauby's life as revealed in his memoir. Bauby suffered a stroke which left him unable to move anything but one eye. Mentally, Bauby was still all there and so he was able to, with the help of a very patient and inventive therapist, describe how he was feeling by blinking out his story which was published shortly after he passed away.
Initially the movie adaptation of Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was an English-language project, but ultimately it was filmed in French. “First of all, this movie was set up at Universal originally,” said Schnabel describing how that transition came about. “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.”
Schnabel admitted he wasn’t set on making it in French from the get-go. “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. But, yeah 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.”
The actors were asked to help translate Ron Harwood’s English script into French, something Schnabel’s sure the screenwriter wasn’t that happy about. “I figured if they are going to say the words, it’s got to come out of their mouth, they are the ones standing on the screen,” explained Schnabel. “It was this way of freeing up the whole thing. After three days of me being in Paris, [the producer] finally realized that I was intractable in my attitude toward this. I said, ‘I want to make a French movie.’ And he said, ‘We want you to make an American movie.’ I said, ‘Well, listen, I’m born in North America and I’m an American, but the movie is going to be in French.’ He said, ‘Fine,’ and that was it. I never had a problem. Everybody went along with it and now everybody is happy that it is, even Ron Harwood.”
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a true collaborative effort between director Schnabel and two-time Oscar winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List). “I think that he understood what I wanted to do. I realized that in the other movies, I didn’t really have a DP before,” confessed Schnabel. “I was walking in, closing the curtains, opening the curtains, and seeing what a yellow curtain would look like - all of the stuff that he started doing. I said, ‘God, this is going to be easy. I’ve got some help here.’"
Staging the hospital room was very important as much of the film takes place from actor Mathieu Amalric’s point of view from the hospital bed. “When people talk to you and maybe they say something that you don’t want to hear, and you can’t move, maybe you don’t look at them,” explained Schnabel. “Maybe you look at the cup for a while. You look at the cup or you look up there at the smoke detector for a while, or somebody’s legs, so I built the room at the hospital. I put the curve up there, fluorescent light on the curve, and then decided there should be a window over there. Janusz said, ‘We should put a window in the door so the light will come through there.’ We had an extra window there, and we worked together in a very nice way. I think he really understood what I wanted to do. He was also very excited to use some different kind of things that he maybe couldn’t use in a more conventional film. He once said to me, ‘Is this going to be an experimental film?’ I said, ‘I hope so.’”
Schnabel had his actors look directly into the camera as if they were talking to Bauby right in front of his one good eye. “Usually you have another actor that you are bouncing off of or interacting with, but in this way you are just interacting with your own humanity. I think that these people really had a lot of that. I just think I picked people - because they never auditioned or anything - I just picked people that I thought had something going on and that were not going to act. I think they just tried to talk to this guy. The fact that everybody is talking to the camera, instead of just one person doing that… Normally that would stop a movie when someone stops to talk to that. In this one, since everybody is doing it, then it’s this convention. You don’t really, as you are watching it, think, ‘Why does this movie seem so odd? What is going on here?’ It’s all these people kind of coming in front of you, all this stuff is happening to you, and then you forget they are talking to a camera."
Schnabel had Amalric do the voiceovers, which reveal his thoughts and what he’s desperately trying to communicate, while in a room where he could see and hear the other actors. “They can’t see him [but] he is responding and saying things spontaneously to whatever they are saying all the time,” explained Schnabel. “We also went into it in post production and did more. But to have it right there, you can’t substitute for what happens immediately. It was a ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ situation. He needed to find a way to actually blink out his book and I needed to find a way to actually find a form to tell this story.”
