Creation of Consciousness
Photograph by Ethan Pines
I expected the sarong but not the bed and the scotch.
When Julian Schnabel – painter, filmmaker, visual-field agitator (have you seen his deep pink, 17-story building in Greenwich Village?) – came through town a few weeks ago to promote his new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, his boisterous reputation of course preceded him. “Larger than life” is how the film’s star, Mathieu Amalric (Munich), describes him. “Julian is a man of large appetites. He never sleeps – he is always eating, drinking, talking, inventing … .”
So Schnabel isn’t asleep when his assistant escorts me into his quarters at the Four Seasons, but he is clearly tired. Too tired, it seems, to do this interview anywhere but where he is – in bed, under the covers, with sunglasses on. He lifts a large paw and motions to me to sit down beside him on the high mattress, where, unable to keep one foot on the ground, I struggle to maintain professional poise.
Then the Texas-born artist, clothed in the same plaid shirt he wore at roundtable press interviews two hours earlier – where he arrived straight from pool, with wet hair, flip-flops, and sarong (somewhat of a trademark for him these days) – removes his shades, rolls over to face me, and hugs a pillow like it's a teddy bear.
“Would you like a drink?” he asks. “What do you like? Scotch?”
Two minutes later, the assistant returns with a tray bearing three glasses of extra fine scotch on the rocks – one for her, him, and me. She leaves, we clink, and another of Amalric’s observations rings through my head: “Julian always tries to break professional habits.”
In the context of Diving Bell, for which Schnabel received Best Director honors this year at Cannes, such iconoclasm ranged from making the film in French – over the protests of bottom-liners who had planned it to be in English – to assembling his cast without auditions. During shooting, he regularly told his actors to improvise, and he never held rehearsals. To top it off, production wrapped two weeks ahead of schedule – something so uncommon, it’s practically scandalous.
The film tells the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle, who – in 1995, at the age of 43 – suffered a massive stroke and developed “locked-in syndrome,” which left him physically paralyzed save for one blinkable eye. Although “Jean-Do” couldn’t speak, his hearing remained intact, as did his memory, which allowed him to live – to paraphrase philosopher Gaston Bachelard – the immensity of his imagination. The movie is based on the best-selling memoir of the same name, which Bauby dictated to an assistant from his hospital bed by blinking out one letter at a time. The book took 14 months to complete, and Bauby died two days after it was published.
In Schnabel’s hands, the screenplay adaptation – written by Ron Harwood, who admitted he was overly cocky from his Oscar win for The Pianist when he agreed to what proved a huge challenge – metamorphosed from a straight-forward “triumphant spirit” story into a multi-dimensional canvas, with added sensuality and layers of humanity. Much of the film is shot literally from the point of view of Bauby, the camera lens approximating his one working eye. Other scenes place us in front of visual and emotional landscapes that, analogous to Bauby’s affliction, grip us wholly and urge us to move past our previous intellectual and spiritual capacities. This includes our constraints on what we find funny – the film is particularly miraculous in showing humor’s buoyancy in desperate times.
“The day I envisioned glaciers falling into the sea, that became my raison d’etre,” says Schnabel. “When I saw that, I knew I could tell this story.” He’s invoking one particularly dramatic and beautiful sequence in the film, which then plays backwards for new effect during the final credits. “Ice and cold; a castaway on the edge of life. I was thinking of things on the edge, that dire need to get out of there that we all feel.”
Schnabel had in fact known a man with "locked-in syndrome," but more relevant to his decision to make the film was the recent passing of his father, who, in his son’s care during his final year of life, desperately feared death. “The movie is about what is the soul, what is consciousness,” Schnabel says, before adding, “If only I could have saved my father from the fear of death. Making this movie was a way to deal with the death of my own parents, my own death, and taking the optimism of life and consciousness. Tarkovsky once said, ‘Art, unlike life, doesn’t contain death. Therefore art is optimistic.’”
The director, whose enormous success as a painter began in the ’80s, likes to discuss his varied artistic practice as if he were a farmer rotating crops – “one year it’s potatoes, the next year it’s something else” – but says that, since his youth, “movies have always been part of my identity as a member of the world.” He cites Tarkovsky, Truffaut, De Sica, Visconti, and Japanese films as his greatest inspirations, and not the least for their cinematic innovations.
“I wanted to see a new way of looking at a movie,” he says, explaining his approach to Diving Bell. “I’m bored with watching stories told in the same way. People don’t try very hard to find their own personal selection of language. Maybe because I didn’t go to film school … I see the whole screen as a sculpture.”
A painter’s strokes, certainly, are on Diving Bell, as it alternates between actual events and artistic interpretation, much like moving in and out of dream state. Schnabel also digs deep into his bag of aesthetic tricks to try to fool our senses of taste, smell, and touch, since movies, like “locked-in syndrome,” inherently deprive their viewers of such luxuries. (Schnabel had once wanted to make the film of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, and here we get glimmers of how he would have done it.) An imagined feast at famed eatery Le Duc, a windy day at the beach, the sewing shut of Bauby’s non-working eye (an agonizing shot taken from Bauby’s p.o.v.) – are ways Schnabel takes us into Bauby’s body while tingling our own. We are, in effect, both inside and outside. Schnabel also used a swing and tilt lens that kept only parts of images in focus, giving the film a “texture, it had a body, there was skin to it. The screen is like a skin, and that’s how I see painting.”
And then there is the matter of sex. “Incapacitation didn’t rob Jean-Do of his desire,” says Schnabel, taking another sip of his scotch. “Even in that state, he was able to have a sexual life.” Filmed on location in the exact hospital room where Bauby resided, Diving Bell is unquestionably vivified by an array of compelling females, who in turn vivified Bauby. Two therapists, two girlfriends, Bauby’s translator, and the mother of his children are all here, lifting the focus out of the realm of heroism or sainthood and into a haven of honest contradictions.
“He was constantly seducing, even from his bed,” says Amalric, inhabiting the role accordingly. Marie-Josée Croze (Munich, The Barbarian Invasions), who plays Bauby’s primary therapist, says she was certain, after meeting her, that the real therapist had indeed fallen in love with her patient. Then there’s the exquisite scene in which Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), Bauby’s former longtime partner and mother of his kids, must translate Jean-Do’s words when he receives a phone call from the mistress for whom he left her. So pure and fraught, it’s no wonder Harwood calls this “the best scene I ever wrote.”
“It’s a movie about the imagination. And I think if you take him at his word, you can go on that trip with him,” Schnabel says, himself becoming increasingly alert and active as we speak. When I ask him about the moments of magical realism in the film, such as one involving Bauby standing up and stealing a kiss, and say these scenes may be the only ones hard to buy into, he warms even further.
“Look, we don’t expect this guy to ever get up, so I thought, fuck it,” he says. “Besides, I liked that this guy with greasy hair and who looks like that gets to kiss a beautiful girl.” Schnabel’s eyes are twinkling now, brimming with life. According to the cast, the director created an environment on the set that was extraordinarily familial and generous. So after the first take of that scene, he knew exactly what Amalric was about to ask. “‘Go ahead, kiss her again,’ I told him. ‘It’s OK.’ But that’s the way I work: There’s a lot of love in there.”
Published: 11/29/2007
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