Arts & Culture
Butterfly collector
Published 24 January 2008
With his stunning aesthetic sense and love of storytelling, Julian Schnabel has become one of world cinema's most visionary directors.
It is an unfortunate truth that most artists who turn their hand to film-making just can't help making the work a bit, well, arty. Just look at Andy Warhol's unrelenting images of sleeping poets, actors receiving oral sex, and Edie Sedgwick smoking, not to mention his eight-hour-long single shot of the Empire State Building. Beautifully composed scenes only get you so far; often such films are better suited to the gallery than the cinema.
Julian Schnabel's new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is an exception. Best-known as a visual artist for his gigantic paintings made out of broken plates - and having gained notoriety in the Eighties as a New York scenester - Schnabel has now cemented his status as one of world cinema's most visionary directors. Not only is every frame of his latest screen offering aesthetically immaculate, but the film is also highly watchable.
Despite his relatively new role as a director, however, Schnabel, now 56, has retained all of his artistic idiosyncrasies. The most evident of these is his penchant for wearing pyjamas at every opportunity. Even when giving interviews. Today's pair is purple with white piping, worn with clashing, bright red socks. When I arrive at the hotel suite to interview him, I find him sprawled on a sofa and staring up at the ceiling through yellow-tinted glasses. His outfit is an expressionist work of art in itself. When he notices my presence, he listlessly raises his right hand in greeting. But when I comment on how comfortable he looks, he suddenly leaps up with all the youthful exuberance of a toddler, pushes two armchairs together and insists that I kick off my boots and recline with him. "This will be the most laid-back interview ever," he says.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based on an autobiographical novel of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor of the French magazine Elle, who, at the age of 43, suffered a massive stroke that left him with a rare condition called "locked-in syndrome". His mental faculties remained intact, but his entire body was paralysed, except for his left eye. It was only by blinking his left eyelid - with the aid of a letter chart and a very patient interpreter from his publishing house - that he managed to communicate with the outside world and dictate the story of his life before and after his stroke. The diving bell of the title symbolises Bauby's incarceration inside his practically lifeless body; the butterfly is his imagination, which learns to roam more freely than ever before in his new state.
Schnabel first heard about the novel while visiting his friend (and Andy Warhol's business manager) Fred Hughes, who was confined to his bed with multiple sclerosis in 2001. Hughes's nurse gave him the book, but it wasn't until 2003, when Schnabel's father became ill with prostate cancer, that he decided to film the story. "My father was very afraid of death," explains Schnabel. "And it was his fear that made me confront my own fear of death. That's why I wanted to make this film."
Despite its tragic subject matter, Bauby's story is surprisingly life-affirming. "I think the fact that he transmuted his experience into this book saved him," says Schnabel. "The act of writing that every day - I think that was satisfying. I think if you're satisfied with yourself in your life then your death is OK. If your death is an unrequited, unconscious roller-coaster ride in between sex and chaos and nothingness, then you might have a problem."
The film is a moving tale that, according to Schnabel, "makes people want to run home and hug their kids". And yet his artist's stamp remains firmly on the screen. When viewed independently, many frames, especially in the first half of the film - which is shot entirely from Bauby's paralysed point of view - resemble expressionist paintings. We see only abstracted parts of people's bodies, the decorations in the hospital room and the refracted light as Bauby sees it. This gives the film a fresh and unique perspective, as if we, too, were seeing the world anew through Bauby's good eye.
It is largely due to this unconventional style of filming that Schnabel was able to translate the inner monologue of the novel into an engaging viewing experience. He also uses some truly innovative camera techniques. For instance, he simulated Bauby's blurred vision by attaching a pair of his glasses to the camera; the impression of blinking was created by the cameraman opening and closing his fingers scissor-like across the lens; and the disturbing scene in which Bauby's right, unmoving eye is sewn up or "occluded" was created by sewing a piece of latex across the end of the camera.
Schnabel also preserved the integrity of the novel by insisting, against the producers' wishes, that the film be shot in France and in French. He even learned the language in order to be able to work effectively with French actors and talk to the people who had known Bauby, or "Jean-Do" as his friends called him.
"I couldn't have shot it on a sound stage in LA," he says. "It just wouldn't have been real. I spoke to [Bauby's] girlfriend and the mother of his children and his best friends, and I shot it in the hospital where he was with his nurse and his actual therapists, so I did everything I could to find out more about him.
"The people who knew Jean-Do like the film. His kids told me they loved me and thanked me that they can now get on with their own lives."
Although Johnny Depp was originally supposed to play Bauby, Schnabel is delighted with the performance given by Mathieu Amalric, to whom the role eventually fell. And he is right to be so. Using only his voice, Amalric manages to convey Bauby's confusion and frustration on waking from a coma to discover that he cannot move or speak except inside his head; then, in the second half of the film, the actor trains himself to appear paralysed, his face fixed in a permanent, lopsided grimace. Interspersed with this are a series of flashbacks and flights of fancy in which he oozes charm and vitality as the able-bodied, womanising, sports-car-driving Bauby.
This is only Schnabel's third film, the first being Basquiat in 1996, about his friend and fellow New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, which was followed in 2000 by Before Night Falls, about the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. With The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he has chosen yet again to deal with an artist's struggles. "I'm sure that it's because I'm an artist that I knew, or at least I thought I knew, something about the topic. But all of these stories are universal. They're not just about one group of people.
"I think the first two movies are about freedom. Maybe this one is, too, but it's about the sort of freedom that people can have if they just let themselves live inside of their heads."
His first two films gained him critical acclaim, as well as Golden Lion nominations and a Grand Special Jury Prize at Venice, and an Academy Award nomination for Javier Bardem as Arenas.
But 2008 could well be Schnabel's year at the Oscars. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has already won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival (2007) and this month it received Golden Globes for Best Director and Best Foreign Film. With characteristic confidence in his own abilities, he agrees he's in with a chance, though he admits there will be stiff competition from the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men and Sean Penn's Into the Wild.
"There are a lot of good movies out right now. But I think that my film is about something so radically different from all those other movies. Formally, it is so radically different that it's almost like it's not a movie. Actually, Sean [Penn] said to me, 'I wish I'd thought of that.'"
In fact, Schnabel believes his film is so powerful that it can transform people: "I think it gives a lot of people hope. It makes you think, 'Hey, what am I complaining about?' And then people really appreciate what they have."
Whether it really has quite the dramatic effect Schnabel describes or not, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an insight into the art, in the strictest sense, of film-making. And even if it fails to achieve Oscar glory, it deserves to go down in cinematic history as one of the boldest and most heart-warming films ever made.
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (12A) is released on 8 February
From canvas to celluloid
1951 Born 26 October in Brooklyn, New York. The family moves to Texas in the mid-Sixties.
1969-72 Studies fine art at the University of Houston.
1973-74 On the young artists' programme at the Whitney Museum, New York. Works from this period include slides of his paintings sandwiched between two pieces of bread.
1975 Travels around Europe dressed in pyjamas, slippers and a robe. Inspired by Antoni Gaudí and Joseph Beuys, he returns to New York to work as a cook/cab driver and part-time artist.
1979 His first solo exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York is hailed by one critic as "a bonfire over Manhattan".
1981 Schnabel's "plate paintings" command up to $1m. "I'm as close to Picasso as you're ever gonna get in this day and age," he says.
1987 Aged 36, he publishes a voluminous illustrated memoir, CVJ: Nicknames of Maître D's and Other Excerpts From Life.
1996 Schnabel's first feature film, the biopic Basquiat (left), is released to critical acclaim.
2000 Before Night Falls, another biopic, traces the life of the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas and earns the lead actor, Javier Bardem, an Oscar nomination.
2006 Adds yet another string to his bow by designing Ian Schrager's lavish Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan.
2007 Wins Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
2008 Accepts Golden Globe Best Director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
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