Depth Perception

With help from an assistant, Bauby blinked out his thoughts one letter at a time. A year later he had a memoir. Published just days after Bauby died in 1997, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was praised for its necessarily spare, segmented beauty. Bauby (played in the film by Mathieu Amalric) likened his paralysis to being encased in an antique diving suit, descending helplessly. Yet his mind was the metaphorical butterfly, able to flit among his most sensual memories and perceive his surroundings anew.

Kathleen Kennedy, the Hollywood producer behind such Spielbergian hits as "War of the Worlds," the Indiana Jones and "Jurassic Park" series and "Schindler's List," among many others, bought the movie rights to the book.

She hired screenwriter Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist") to puzzle out a way to make an interesting movie from a story so hauntingly interior. Johnny Depp was interested in starring (he dropped out because of that pirate gig), and insisted that his friend Schnabel direct.

And here is where "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" began to depart seriously from most weepy Oscar bait. Bauby's story could easily have fit into the current American craze for catharsis, where cancer survivors get their homes made over on TV and everyone is feeling everyone else's pain, or wearing the rubber bracelet to honor it.

"I knew anything was possible with Julian," Kennedy says. "He can have this side that is fairly self-congratulatory, and that can put you off . . . or you can be captivated. You get to know him, and then you see that it's a very childlike thing. . . . He's very close to that definition of genius where you just don't know what you're getting."

Which is what she got.

She paired Schnabel with the much-revered cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who, with Schnabel, devised a way to use a hand-cranked camera to create the gauzy effects that make the audience feel as if they are paralyzed, in bed. It is some time before we fully view Amalric as Jean-Do, with his alarmingly expressive good eye darting to and fro, and his lip super-glued to the side of his face.

"It's a funny movie," Schnabel insists. "Jean-Do had this terrific sense of humor that I wanted in there. I didn't want to make some movie about a hospital room." (Still, though -- what a hospital! Bauby awakes in the postcard-perfect Berck-sur-Mer, a 19th-century hospital on the French coast, and the movie was shot there, too, providing surf-nut Schnabel ample opportunity for his favorite visual: waves.)

Early on, Brooklyn-born Schnabel insisted on making the movie in French with English subtitles, with an almost all-French cast, even though the producers begged him not to. He cast parts without auditions -- including his gorgeous wife, Olatz L¿pez Garmendia, as a physical therapist, and Bauby's real-life doctors and nurses in bit parts -- and filmed rehearsals directly, to keep things raw.

He departed at times from Harwood's screenplay (which he found too stiff), and even changed some of Bauby's own details.

Example: Bauby writes in his recollection that "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles was playing on the car stereo when he had his stroke. That was just too obvious for Schnabel, even if it was true: " 'I read the news today, oh boy? About a lucky man who made the grade? He blew his mind out in a car?' " Schnabel says. "That was one of the notes from Kathy [Kennedy] -- she said, 'Why don't you put this music in there?' But it's terrible music for that scene, it's too much." (Instead, Schnabel put in "Chains of Love" by the Dirtbombs, "because some skater left [the song] on a CD in my studio in Montauk, and that worked great for this movie.")

To show Jean-Do's image of himself, pre-stroke, Schnabel dipped into his personal stash of stock footage of alpine skiers, matadors in the ring -- even photos of Marlon Brando clowning around, which Schnabel purchased from the big Brando estate auction in 2005. ("That's Marlon Brando, not me!" Amalric's Jean-Do scoffs, in an aside to the filmmaker.)

Did they ever meet?

"Who?" Schnabel asks.

Jean-Dominique Bauby. Did Schnabel ever meet him, back when, before the stroke, before he died? They seemed alike somehow.

Yes, they sat near each other at a bullfight in Spain in 1991. It came back to Schnabel as he was preparing to shoot -- that guy was Jean-Dominique Bauby. He wasn't as suave, Schnabel says, as the words he blinked out about himself portrayed him to be. It was another lesson in seeing.

* * *

Schnabel is wild about the movie's interludes, of glaciers cleaving chunks of ice into the sea. It happens early in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," and again at a triumphant moment at the end, when the footage is shown in reverse. It's very much like some random detail in a Schnabel painting. It means everything, and if you have to ask, you're not getting it.

"It's the key to the whole movie. For me, without [the glaciers], I never would have made the film," he says.

Really?

"Really."

And he more or less sneaked the glaciers in, telling only the editor as a cut was being assembled. The glaciers are stock footage he acquired years ago. He desperately wanted to use the glaciers in "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer," which he wrote a screenplay for and longed to direct. (Schnabel is not at all shy about bad-mouthing the movie that got made instead, by another director.)

Then he realized his glacier shots were going to be even better in Jean-Do's story. That's how images work for him.

"When you're a painter you think, okay, I didn't do it in that painting," he says. "But I can do it in this one."