Written by Karin Badt
Paris Voice
Julian Schnabel's new film, "Le scaphandre et le papillon" (The Diver and the Butterfly), begins with an excruciating and brilliant sequence: the world as seen by a paralyzed man who can only apprehend the outside through the slits of his eyes. The camera jerks around his hospital room attempting to gain focus as Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor of Vogue, learns that he has "locked-in-syndrome." Literally, he is trapped in his body as a diver in his suit.
Yet Schnabel's film is more about the butterfly than the diver. The film follows Jean-Do as he awakens his imagination, with memories of his past life as one of the "branche" of Paris. We experience his flashbacks of dinners, lovers, children and rides to the ocean. The film gives light and color to the pleasures of a life that Jean-Do poignantly notes he did not fully appreciate when he had them. |
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Photo: Etienne George Mathieu Amalric as
Jean-Dominique Bauby (left) and Director,
Julian Schnabel (right) in The Diving Bell and
the Butterfly, produced by
Kathleen Kennedy
and Jon Kilik
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However, aside from the brilliance of the first sequence, the movie operates on cliches. The branche editor is, even in his post-lapsarian fall into paralysis, surrounded by glamour: beautiful women nurses as well as his doting wife played by a sensuous Emmanuelle Seigneur.
Schnabel spoke from the patio of the Grand Hotel in Cannes. Full of verve, he took his sunglasses off and placed them on my face while I interviewed him...a moment to appreciate itself.
Why did you shoot the film in French?
Nobody wanted to make the movie in French except John Phillips who is always willing to go to hell with me. Most said: we want to make an American movie! If you see the film, you can't manufacture a landscape or an architecture like this in California, with an American actor, or send Americans to France and have French subtitles. That would be absurd.
A French man wrote this. His sexuality and his sensibility is French, even though the subject is obviously universal. Mathieu Amalric (who plays Bauby) is totally French. I don't think anybody could have done a better job than Mathieu
How did you do the amazing opening shot?
I took latex and put eyelashes on it and stuck it over the lens and had it sewn up by a guy who sews people's eyes for the opening shot. I put a nose on the camera, or sometimes my glasses on a camera.
What does this story mean to you?
I identify with this film as much as any author with their character in the novel. The extraordinary thing in this movie is that, although I don't know if my wife would agree that I understand women, I felt like I identified with the women. All these women are communicating with themselves, and they are addressing the same character. They have to fill in all the blanks...
I think this movie is the most autobiographical film of mine. I have been terrified of dying my whole life. My father died at 92, and my mother at 89 l/2, she was resuscitated so often, she was tired of coming back, but my father who had never been sick a day of his life, was terrified. He was such an energetic guy and two years later he was gone. I wondered what my father was seeing when he died, and I wanted to show that in a film, something that was not shown before...
Fred Hughes, my friend, who was a friend of Warhol, had MS, and he got sicker and sicker and just died. I used to live on rue de la Cherche Midi in Paris, and when Fred got sick, he had to go to the American Hospital, and I decorated his room. I went to visit him, and brought pictures he liked, from his house and flowers, and decorated his room...
What is the meaning of John-Do's journey for you?
I always thought what would be the worst thing that could happen to me, and that would be this, to be stuck in his body. John-Do said to his friends: I have been reborn as somebody else. He felt like he was selected. Before he was reborn in this extreme and impossible situation, there was no need to address any of this. He was successful. He had a nice job as a journalist. He was unconscious in a certain way. He thought that other people were superficial. He said: maybe some of the people I thought were superficial, I thought were superficial because I was superficial. He was talking to us from the grave. And he was talking about how to grab on to the present and make something of it. Because he was a writer, the ability to channel, he was able to create a self-help book guide for other people. If I could have shown this to my father, he would not have been so scared.
You do show John-Do's conscious awakening, but in some way this film is also a male fantasy. A paralyzed man wakes up to find himself doted on by all these extraordinarily sweet beautiful nurses and former wife.
Your imagination knows no bounds. This is why he is surrounded by beautiful women. And if you speak to the real women, the nurses, they say: Gee this was what it was really like. Ultimately, I think I made a movie about women... John-Do used all these women, but he needed them. As a painter, I am interested in the structure of the media of the film. In film, unlike painting, you can have parallel lives. Like Billy Wilder who has a narrator who says here I am dead in the pool. We know what John-Do thinks, but nobody else does. The audience feels like they are being let in on a secret. It is a storytelling device that I find very useful. I also work with color and shape. I was worried about the whiteness of the hospital, where people are usually bored and there is light from the Venetian Blinds. At first, he is terrified about being in his body, you are in his room, and what is a prison at first becomes home.
I also like to use white shapes in my paintings, like white rectangles, and I use white shapes in my films. A headlight is just to me a big white shape. I also like to draw attention to physicality in both my films and paintings. I like the difference between something that is physical and something pictorial. Making films made me think about framing.
The difference between painting and filming? When I am painting, I don't have to talk to anybody. I don't have to know if it is good or bad, or if I am communicating. I always think of new ways to shoot. I shot for example from the bottom of a convertible to show sky and trees and Paris.
About my art: I have an exhibit in Rome, at the Palazzo di Venezia. Three shows are going on this summer, while this movie is here. Another show will open in June in Germany. I also made a movie about Miles Davis playing in Saint Anne's Warehouse, that will be in Venice. And there will be a show in San Sebastian in July.
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