Julian Schnabel Interview, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel sat down with us at the Los Angeles press day to talk about his new film, “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.” Winner of the Best Director’s award at Cannes 2007, Schnabel (“Before Night Falls,” “Basquiat”) has crafted another remarkable film that pays tribute to the spirit of the imagination and its ability to triumph over tragedy.

“The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” is the moving true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a successful and charismatic editor-in-chief of French Elle, who believes he is living his life to its absolute fullest when a sudden stroke paralyzes him. While the physical challenges of Bauby's fate leave him with little hope for the future, he begins to discover how his life's passions, rich memories and newfound imagination can help him achieve a life without boundaries.

Based on the highly lauded book by Bauby, which was adapted for the screen by Ronald Harwood, “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” also stars Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, Patrick Chesnais and Max Von Sydow. Produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Jon Kilik, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a visual artist in his own right, magnificently evokes Bauby’s disorientation and transformation.

Julian Schnabel was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1951. Schnabel is an acclaimed artist whose first solo painting exhibition took place in 1979 at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Since then, Schnabel’s work has been exhibited all over the world. In 1996, he wrote and directed the feature film “Basquiat” about fellow New York artist Jean Michel Basquiat. Schnabel’s second film, “Before Night Falls,” won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival 2000 and earned Javier Bardem an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

In order to collaborate more closely with his remarkable cast, prior to production Schnabel himself dove into intensive French lessons, spending months becoming more proficient in what would ultimately become his directing idiom. “I knew if I was going to make this movie in French I didn’t want to be a tourist,” he says. “My French isn’t perfect, but I would know my text. I broke it down and worked with every one of the actors and I went over the scenes and asked them, ‘What would you say in such and such situation?’ Because the words have to come out of their mouths. Ronald Harwood had given us a beautiful script in English, but I reworked it in a way, with all the French actors in the film.”

Schnabel also invited many of the real people who had worked with Jean-Dominique Bauby in the hospital more than a decade ago, including his assistant/lifeline, Claude Mendibil, to become part of the production. They too added their own memories to the collective process. In this way, between the screenplay, the actors and those who had been there to witness Bauby return to life a transformed man, the story began to come alive with a very immediate and dynamic intimacy.

By necessity, “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” is an intensely visual film, by turns dizzying and ravishing, saturated with images that move from shaky and out-of-focus to arrestingly colorful and alive. A large part of Julian Schnabel’s fascination with the story lay in the intriguing stylistic questions of how to viscerally convey both Jean-Do’s imprisoned reality and the exhilarating freedom of his dreams, even as the line between the two grows more and more blurred.

For Schnabel who creates films much as he paints – close to the skin, deeply emotive, unabashedly subjective, rife with bold colors and tactile sensations – it was essential to encapsulate Jean-Dominique Bauby’s completely unique point-of-view as conveyed in Harwood’s script. From the opening moments of the film, through the first half of the narrative, the camera remains in a riveting first-person POV, allowing the audience to directly experience a skewed universe entirely out of Jean-Do’s single working eye. The audience is literally dropped into the wild depths of Jean-Do’s inner world, one unlike anything most people have experienced, yet which soon explodes into provocative fantasies, imaginary travels and life-like remembrances that hit at the core of human experiences. Then, when Jean-Do begins to communicate with the world again, the camera pulls back at last, to reveal how he begins to find dignity, ecstasy and the connections he never made before in his newly transformed life.

To create the shifting, sinuous cinematography, Schnabel brought on board one of today’s most masterful directors of photography:  two-time Oscar winner Janusz Kaminski, who is best known for his long-lived collaborations with Steven Spielberg, including “Schindler’s List” and Saving Private Ryan,” as well as the recent “War of the Worlds” and “Munich.” “Janusz Kaminski is a great DP, he’s inspired,” says Schnabel. The two proceeded to collaborate on the overall look of the film. Schnabel continues, “A particular treatment of the image was necessary to sublimate the interior life. We used a swing and tilt lens, which means that part of the image is out of focus and part of it is in focus. So it made the whole film feel like it had a texture, it had a body, there was a skin to it. The whole screen is like a skin and that’s how I see painting.”

Julian Schnabel begins our interview with a loud grumble:

Q: Is that a good grumble?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: I’m happy to see everybody. I’m happy. I feel like everybody likes the movie.

Q: We loved the movie. It’s gorgeous.

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Isn’t it wonderful. Just imagine if everybody hated it and wanted to throw daggers at me right now.

Q: [teasing] Oh, we’ve done those too.

JULIAN SCHNABEL: I remember you from last time.

[Laughter]

Q: How difficult was it to make this film in French?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: First of all, this movie was set up at Universal originally and it was green lit. Johnny Depp was going to make the movie with me or Johnny wanted me to direct it and he came to me and we were going to do it and I guess he got very busy with the Pirates thing and then time went by. I always had trepidations about this movie being in English and many agents called me to see their actresses, American actresses, early on and I said to everybody I’m going to surround Johnny with French people, but they didn’t know I was going to have him speak French also.

Q: So you wanted to translate it into French from the beginning?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Not the first day I walked in there. Everything is a process you know. If you try to build your house and you don’t just put one brick up at a time, it’ll seem like a daunting undertaking but yeah, I mean I had to come to understand how it was. 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’re French, have French people read French subtitles in France. I just couldn’t do it in a sound studio here. I need somebody else to do that.

Q: Was that the German producer, Jon Kilik’s idea too?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Jon Kilik has always been -- that’s what Jon does -- he protects me and he works with me to help me get what I want and he and I basically, morally have to agree on what we’re doing.

Q: “Before Night Falls” was in English.

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Well it was in English and it was in Spanish and it had a different convention. He spoke English when he was in Cuba and he spoke Spanish when he was in the United States. Because when you go to a country that’s foreign to you, you speak your mother tongue. And he actually wrote the book after he could speak English so since he was telling everything in retrospect, I thought he could speak English and then he could speak Spanish. It was interesting because I was sitting in the movie theater and there was a lady there and we get to the part of the interview and he says, “Mi nombre es Reinaldo Arenas y no tengo ningun sitio como…” What did he say? He had stamped on his passport literally “I don’t exist. I’m a homosexual, I’m anti-castrista. Tengo todos los elementos para ninguna publicar una novella in ningun sitio.” So basically he was saying I’ve all the qualities to never publish a book anywhere. And then the lady leans over to her and says, “I think he’s gay, isn’t he?” and she thought that’s really the guy. You felt like it was him. There’s a distance. I also made a Cuban dub of this thing where all of the… I’m the only person in the history of the Brill Building at Sound One to dub their own film into Spanish which also cost $200,000 instead of $40,000 and my wife was bringing in kids off the street on 45th Street and Broadway if she could hear that they had a Cuban accent because I didn’t want somebody to be from Venezuela or Mexico. All of the accents are Cuban in the dub that I actually paid for and put on the DVD.

I knew I had to be in Paris and I knew it had to be in Berck in the hospital and Pathe actually came in and bought the rights from Universal and they wanted me to make it in English. Yes. And I said that’s a form of counter chauvinism against yourself. You’ve got a writer who’s writing beautifully in French. Well why do we want to lose that? I don’t think Ron Harwood liked the idea at all that I was going to translate his English script into French and I translated the script with all of the actors because I figured if they were going to say the words, it’s got to come out of their mouth. They’re the ones standing on the screen you know. And it was a way of freeing up the whole thing. After three days of me being in Paris, Jerome Sacerdot finally realized that I was intractable in my attitude toward the script. I said I want to make a French movie and he said we want you to make an American movie. So listen, I’m born in North America and I’m an American but the movie is going to be in French and 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.

Q: It feels very French. It doesn’t feel American at all.

JULIAN SCHNABEL: It is French and my editor is French and any French person would see it with all the colloquial expressions, all the nuances.

Q: The color and the lighting and the cuts and the style of it also feel very French.

JULIAN SCHNABEL: I made it in France.

Q: Your editing was amazing, how did you work with your editor?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: When I did “Basquiat,” it was more like I shot everything and at the end I tried to make whatever I could out of the material I shot. That was my first movie. But in this one I knew what I had to do. I had it pretty clearly in my head from the beginning. I had seen Juliette Welfling’s work in the Jacques Audiard films. She did “Sur Mes Levres.” She did also the remake of Jim Toback’s film, “Fingers,” called “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.” And I saw this Niels Arestrup in that film who blew my mind totally and I thought I need that guy in my movie. He played the father in…

Q: He plays Roussin in this movie, right?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Yes, the guy looks like he’s been in a glacier for 13 hours. All these actors just showed up, whoever I asked to be in the movie -- Patrick Chesnais, Anne Consigny, even Max von Sydow – all these people. Anne Alvaro played a little part. She played the publisher. I mean all these people showed up and they just said yes and that was the biggest compliment really that they would want to do that. So anyway, yeah, I learned how to speak French. I had pretty good restaurant French and I just started speaking French. I speak Spanish, Italian.

Q: Can you talk about your collaboration with Janusz Kaminski and how you brought such a unique story visually to the big screen?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: He is very… I think he understood what I wanted to do and I realized that in the other movies I didn’t really have a DP before. I was walking in closing the curtains, opening the curtains, seeing what a yellow curtain would look like and doing all the stuff that he started doing and I thought god, this is going to be easy. I’ve got some help here. He had a crank up camera where he could shoot on top of the film that he was shooting, rewind, and that’s when we were making those superimpositions. Those were done in the camera. The whole beginning is one take with the light going on and off. I’ve got the cameraman putting his finger over here [demonstrates]. It blinks. You start doing things that people have never done before and they’re very natural, normal things to do. I put a piece of latex over the lens and sewed it up or I had part of a nose stuck on there because if they sew your eye up, you see part of your nose and then if you’re going like that [demonstrates] and that, this doesn’t really move. So you start to think well that looks a little fake so with the swing and tilt lens you can darken part of the edge of the frame and then you get that shot which is your nose. And the swing and tilt lens was really the key because you feel… Look at your own sight. Is everything so crystal clear here? Everything looks pretty blurry to me. And it’s interesting when the light gets burnt if we look at Heather [demonstrates with journalist], the light behind her, there are these burn outs in the light and you start to really look at how you look at sight. Also, 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. Maybe you look at the cup for awhile or you look up there at that smoke detector for awhile or somebody’s legs or their foot. So I built the room at the hospital and put this black and green… I put the curve up there and 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. We worked together in a very nice way. I think he really understood what I wanted to do and he was also very excited to use some different kinds of things that he maybe couldn’t use in a more conventional film, because he once said to me is this going to be an experimental film and I said I hope so.

Q: You mentioned earlier that this was a deeply personal film. You also talked about fear of death and how this film deconstructs a person’s life right down to the word and the letter. Was that something you found yourself doing when your father was dying?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Actually my father died before this was made. The script arrived when he was sick, but the day he died, the night before he died, I put him in the bathtub and I wrapped him up and the next morning I called Darren who was up there with him and I said how he is and he said well he had a rough night but he’s okay and then about 5 minutes later he said you should come up here right now and I ran upstairs and my father had bile coming out of his mouth and his eyes were flickering and I didn’t know if he had any air left in his brain and I just said “Dad!” I thought maybe he could see me. We were very close. So 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. And 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 there was… they could accept the transition instead of… He just wasn’t prepared in any way and I think Jean-Dominique Bauby was definitely prepared because he was in some place between life and death and he was reporting back from that place and because it was 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. In fact, he got to relive his life in that year and 3 months and he actually stayed alive long enough to finish the book because he died 10 days after the book was published.

Q: In a way, the book is kind of a healing experience for the audience.

JULIAN SCHNABEL: I believe so. Yes.

Q: Do you feel your experience as a surfer and being a man of the water played into the cinematography?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Absolutely.

Q: How difficult was it to have the actors interact with the camera lens and how did you work with them?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Obviously Mary Joe was more terrified of it than Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle just did whatever I asked her to do. I think she was a little bit shocked the first day at how it was. But I think the whole thing is like Stockholm syndrome really because first you get kidnapped and then you fall in love with your kidnapper. So at first you’re in that room and the room seems terrifying in a way, but the room is kind of the color of a swimming pool and also the jackets are painted to be… Everything is sort of that color. So in a sense it’s like a bluish, turquoise womb that this guy is in and when you actually go out into the hallway, it’s more terrifying and cacophonic. But there, there’s a kind of simplicity and when one person keeps talking I think that they get into this… Usually you have another actor that you’re bouncing off of or interacting with, but in this way you’re just interacting with your own humanity and I think that these people really had a lot of that. I just think I picked people, because they never auditioned or anything and we never rehearsed. I just picked people that I thought had something going on and that were not going to act. So I think they just tried to talk to this guy, and the fact that everybody is talking to the camera instead of just one person doing that, normally that would stop a movie when somebody starts to talk to it. In this one, since everybody’s doing it, it’s this convention and you don’t really as you’re watching it you go why is this movie so odd, what’s going on here. There’s all these people kind of coming in front of you and all of this stuff is happening to you and you kind of forget that they’re talking to a camera because he is in a sound box and he can see them and he can hear them and they can’t see him and he is responding and saying things spontaneously to whatever they’re saying all the time which is like – we also went into post production and did more, but to have it right there, you can’t substitute for what happens immediately and so, you know, I just think it was necessity is the mother of invention. He needed to find a way to blink out his book and I needed to find a way to actually find a form to tell this story.

Q: How do you feel about the Oscar buzz that’s going on around this film?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: How do you feel about it? What do you think about it?

Q: I personally feel pretty excited about it.

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Why? Do you think we have a chance?

Q: I think this is a beautiful movie. I think the only thing that makes it difficult is that it’s a French movie but it can’t compete for Best Foreign Film. How you feel about that?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Well I don’t want it to be Best Foreign. Sometimes an American has to go to France to make an American movie even if it’s in French. I mean I’ve gone to Spain before to paint a Spanish person’s face because I couldn’t find somebody that looked like that in the United States. But I think that we ought to get rid of all the boundaries between France, Spain. They have the Euro now, right? I think the whole idea of getting rid of all these countries and getting rid of all the boundaries wouldn’t be a bad thing. Everybody could stop fighting about the land and maybe we could …

Q: You seem much more confident about filmmaking than you were in your first two movies. Do you feel that everything was more in your command with this film?

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Well obviously the first movie I made I wasn’t familiar with the materials. The second movie I was and I also had a team of people that were willing to put up scaffolding in electrical storms because I shot 60 days in the rainy season in Mexico without stopping once for weather except in the middle of a shoot for a couple of hours. And so when I came to France to shoot this movie, it was very easy because I get to go to the set, come home by 8 o’clock, and I was actually home every day and I finished two weeks early.

Q: Congratulations on your film.

JULIAN SCHNABEL: Thank you very much.

Miramax Films opens “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” in New York and Los Angeles on November 30th followed by a national rollout.