Depth Perception

"I've said over and over that this movie was a self-help device for myself," says Schnabel, who went into the film still grieving his father's death. "I've always had this problem with the idea of nothingness [after death]. I think it's about fixing something, this movie. I think that's why I'm a painter in the first place, because when you're painting something you're -- "

He stops, and points to the far end of the restaurant, a 15-foot-high wood-paneled wall upon which is hung a large painting of a river at night -- the Potomac perhaps, or maybe the Delaware -- with fireworks shooting off a small, wooded isle. (It is called "Nocturne in Green and White for A.H. Gorson," by Stephen Hannock, 2003.) Schnabel seems to want to get up, remove it, and replace the wall itself while he's at it. It sends him into a stream-of-consciousness tangent:

"It's funny the way the painting is on the wall, uh, and the way this wall here ends with that kind of, uh, right angle and this thing is sitting with the, uh, it's very . . . um. You know there was this guy named Jack -- what the hell was his name? -- he committed suicide. He used to make work that looked like that . . . nightscapes with light coming out or explosions. . . . Obviously the person who made this painting knows this guy's work. Hunh. Hmmmm . . .

"Like, if you look at my building, if you ever come to New York, every detail, from the balustrades that are cast in bronze that are different from one side of the building to the next," Schnabel goes on. "[To] the doorknobs, the materials that things are made of, it's all considered. I live in a Stanford White house [the 19th-century architect] in Montauk, and I notice every day when I look at all the things, I appreciate it. He's communicating with me, so I would never want to rob somebody of the communication and leave them with this generic kind of . . . uh. Hmmm. It's amazing when you walk into a Four Seasons Hotel, isn't it, I mean, what style is that supposed to be?"

He is seeing a room unlike it is now, and ready to rearrange it if he could, and you get the feeling this is how he made his movie, too, a deliberate way of seeing each tiny thing.

When asked if there is anything about "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" that he had to compromise on, some detail that still isn't right in his mind, he instantly says yes. There was a Glenn Gould recording of a Bach piano concerto and it was too expensive to license it, so they used another pianist's recording.

"It doesn't sound the same," Schnabel says. "Only I would notice it."

It drives him ape, you can just tell.

* * *

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" ("Le Scaphandre et le Papillon") was an international best-selling memoir a decade ago by a man named Jean-Dominique Bauby. Once the editor of the French edition of Elle, 43-year-old Bauby -- "Jean-Do" to his friends -- was out for a drive with his son in December 1995 when he keeled over from a stroke.

He awoke in a hospital three weeks later, unable to move or speak or even grunt, but fully aware of the sounds and sights around him, his mind completely intact.

A therapist worked out a system where she would recite an alphabet arranged in the most commonly used letters in French -- the "hit parade," Bauby called it -- and he would blink when she got to the right letter. Letters became words, which became sentences. Everyone in Jean-Do's life learned to recite the order of letters, and in the film version, the sound of them becomes a repetitious, lovely sort of song.