| Julian Schnabel Continues to Dive Into Filmmaking with "The Diving Bell and The Butterfly" - Page 2 |
| Written by Brad Balfour | ||||
| Thursday, 29 November 2007 17:15 | ||||
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Marie-Josee Croze as Henriette in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
Anne Consigny as Claude and Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Dominique Bauby in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Dominique Bauby enjoy his life in the fast lane in his younger days in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
Q: Filmmaking can be a frustrating process. Would you make more films if it were a less complicated process? JS: I think that I make the movies at the speed I like to make them. I would have made "Perfume" probably--that's the only movie I wanted to make. Seven years went by and it evolved into this movie. When people come out of the movie, there's some sort of spell on them. It sounds a little pretentious, but they walk out and they seem affected in some way, like they took a drug. I don't think I'm exaggerating? Q: It evokes a sensory reaction, I wouldn't call it a smell, but... JS: It doesn't have to be about smell but you are altered in some way. Q: The movie makes you feel differently about sensory perception. JS: The idea is that if art can make you see the world differently then it has worked. I thought maybe my dad could have included some of this information into his psyche and then went to that place and he could have come up in those glaciers just like Jean-Do [Bauby] did. Now I've shown this movie to some people who were paralyzed. Paul Cantelon, the composer [of the soundtrack], who from five to 12, was a child prodigy; then he was hit by a car when he was 12. He had total amnesia. The guy who trained him wasted seven years of his life with him other than the pleasure of playing with him. At 17, he's playing the piano one day, and he goes to his mother, who is a piano teacher, "Hey mom check this it, I just made this." She goes, "C'mon Paul, that's just Bach." It came back. Q: The respect and delicacy with which he was treated, was that in the book or was that your take on it--with the hospital milieu? JS: I felt that delicacy and compassion and love from the people who worked in the hospital. So I just took the high road and went with them. And any bickering that was among the women who all loved him--for example Sandrine, who was Henriette, and who probably wanted to transcribe his book but couldn't.... Interestingly, I showed the script to Isabel Huppert and she said she wanted to be--well she actually wanted to be Jean-Do [laughs]--Sandrine or Henriette and Claude [all three of the women]. The fact is one could not accommodate this, and he needed these real women in his life to accommodate his own desires. And whatever the truth was about the wife and the girlfriend—really the girlfriend spent more time with him and he left the book to his wife and kids so he wrote it like that—I included more stuff about how he really loved that girl. And he didn't live at home. I thought what he had to say to other people like my dad or people who were sick and in hospitals—I've had doctors and nurses who have asked to show this film in hospitals for the patients and themselves because they felt like somebody was understanding what was being communicated—was more important than the petty jealousies between them. So I thought, the true story—his wife was not at his deathbed, his girlfriend was. In the script she wasn't but I put her in there. But I also found out things about his death that were not in the script that I needed to know in order to tell the story the right way. If somebody asked me if I wanted to hear the reviews before I died of my show, I'd say no. But that's me and my life. Jean-Do wanted to be on that [TV] show "Apostrophe" and he wanted people to know he wrote that book and that they did that documentary about him. Matthieu said he'd say yes. I went looking into it and I asked Bernard [Chapuey] about the last day and he said, "We all went into the room at a different moment. And then there was one moment when I was talking and the doctor said, 'He's dead.' I said, 'What do you mean he's dead? His eye's open, he's breathing. The doctor said, 'It's the machine.' She's reading the reviews to a dead guy." So it just worked for the movie. It had just that irony. I don't know what the word is. But what I wanted to say in that he accomplished what he wanted to and it didn't matter what the reviews were. © Brad Balfour 2007 |
