Depth Perception
Julian Schnabel, Shedding Light on Dark Subject Matter

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2007

In the obligatory press blitz he's doing to promote his eerily beautiful, nearly critic-proof movie, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," the painter and film director Julian Schnabel made one reporter lie down with him on the floor to contemplate the ceiling. (She didn't want to, but according to her story, she did it, and she liked it.) Others he's thrown into his convertible for a quick ramble around his neighborhood by the sea in Montauk, N.Y. Others get to go to his studio and watch his art minions do his bidding.

For us, it seems far too clinical: a late lunch in a deserted Fahrenheit restaurant in the Georgetown Ritz on a Wednesday afternoon. Schnabel, 56, arrives tired and famished. His movie is the true story of a debonair Frenchman trapped inside his own body, paralyzed by stroke, able to only blink his left eye. (Our movie is about a reporter able to only do interviews in hotels. It is quelle tragique.)

Schnabel's neo-expressionist paintings -- admired, derided, retrospected and, most of all, collected -- have always been expensive and huge, and so has he.

According to legend, Schnabel is a pompous perfectionist, demanding of attention in the nicest possible way. His talk about New York in the 1980s makes it seem like the Stone Age. He just built a 17-story Italianate palazzo as a new home and studio in New York's West Village, and painted it bright pink (the neighbors are still howling), and he's sold apartments in his building to the likes of Richard Gere. (Other potential "schneighbors" come and go in the real-estate gossip pages.)

Schnabel is a constant name-dropper, but that's because those names are the only people he knows. He assumes you've read your French philosophers, that you can follow along as he quotes W.H. Auden's "Mus¿e des Beaux Arts," and that you probably know Christopher Walken and Tom Waits just as well as he does. He seems easily bored, distracted.

He's made three movies in 11 years, each meticulously chosen, each about artists who died. One of them, "Basquiat," was perfectly fine art-house fodder and starred all his new friends playing all his old friends. The next one ("Before Night Falls," the 2000 adaptation of exiled Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas's memoir) was even better. This one, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (opening Friday), is just so sit-there-through-the-credits good, so fully realized, Schnabel can hardly stand it.

"This movie . . . it heals people," he says.

Since its debut at Cannes in May (where Schnabel took the directing prize), people have come up to him to spill forth stories of loved ones who suffered strokes or other paralyzing events that left them immobile or incommunicative. Hospitals are booking special screenings for patients and doctors. The ultimate claustrophobia of "locked-in syndrome" turns out to be a universal nightmare. People are going to need to talk to him.

He's trying to be open to that sort of outpouring. "I can do it," he says. "It's a big deal to people. It is something that everyone is terrified of. . . . I was terrified of death before I made this movie."

He has every reason to feel satisfied.

For us, today, he's Gentle Ben, a grizzly giant at feeding time. He's as interesting as a big tube of paint -- you want to squeeze him and see what raw color oozes out of his copper-curled head. He is wearing his trademark pajamas (they are the faded purple, with enough buttons open to display a lush jungle of chest hair) and a tweedy sport coat. From his head and his pockets he collects and sets on the table three kinds of eyewear: Buddy Holly horn-rims for seeing and two pairs of sunglasses for being seen.

He is always correcting the picture in front of him: "Wait, you said you were super-hungry," he interjects when we order tomato soup, and so it's a cheeseburger and fries instead. Schnabel has the hanger steak and we split a seafood scampi salad. The entire interview is the sound of two men interrupting one another, talking about death and hospitals while smacking and chewing.

"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.

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."