BY Harp Magazine

When The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (or Le scaphandre et le papillon) unfolds this holiday season, it will be painter /sculptor/ director Julian Schnabel’s third biopic on the distresses that befall the modern artist. But while Basquiat (1996’s film on painter/friend Jean-Michel Basquiat) and Before Night Falls (2000’s story on gay writer Reinaldo Arenas) found themselves in a state between workmanship and wonder, The Diving Bell’s take on French magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir on is a magnetically surreal and emotional reportage on the life of the mind. Or rather the eye; as after suffering a massive stroke Bauby (felled by locked-in syndrome) had but one means of communication: blinking his left eyelid.

Rather than find this to be something like a My Left Eye, Schnabel has created a gorgeously unique portrait of the artist is struggle and joy. I caught up to Schnabel in Philadelphia. I had met him on few previous occasions: art openings, his Basquiat party. He’s bigger now – a heavy set gent with wild hair, yellow-lensed glasses and an untucked shirt who happens to be very direct, in his address and turning off lights in the hotel suite due to glare.

HARP: How do you think you’re previous films have held up?

SCHNABEL: What do you think?

HARP: I think Before Night Falls is sumptuous. I think some of Basquiat falls flat not so much in the looks department – though it’s very cool in its cinematography. But some of the performances…eh. But that wasn’t your doing.

SCHNABEL: I think it’s all me. I’m responsible for everything. I did what I could with the material. I never thought Basquiat was a great movie. But it was rescue mission. I had no idea what a producer was, but here was this guy I knew who had a Basquiat story he needed help telling. Turned out he was a tourist. I took the material back. Rewrote it, paid him off and directed the movie. I think people like it more than I do - young people in particular. They tell me they came to NYC because of that film. I knew what it looked like for Jean Michel to be painting. I don’t think there’s another film that shows a guy painting like that. I know that New York. Also, when Christopher Walken interviews Jean Michel… I knew that feeling of not only having to make the work, you have to explain the work. The cinematography may be limited but I think that’s a good thing. I think Benicio del Toro was great and that David Bowie did a wonderful job as Andy Warhol even though he had that funny English accent. It didn’t matter.

It’s like Josef von Sternberg said when somebody pointed out that what he did wasn’t reality. He said “Of course it’s not. It’s much better than that.” And, remember that part of New York doesn’t exist anymore, so it’s great to see. Before Night Falls? The artists who worked on that saw Basquiat and liked it and really appreciated the promise of it. So I had a lot of people helping me shoot for 60 days in the rainy season of Mexico putting up scaffolding. Each film offered me more freedom. Especially this one. I had more control over the instruments.

HARP: Was that control – that next level freedom – part of how you chose a next film?

SCHNABEL: I wanted to make Perfume by Patrick Suskind. Wrote a script, a great one. But it didn’t happen. So I didn’t make a movie for seven years, just like the guy in Perfume. Climbing in a tower for seven years. The fabric of his dreams started to fall part. He woke up. And discovered his scent was the scent of fog. Happened to me too. My father started dying. My friend Fred Hughes got MS and I stated reading to him. One of his nurses gave me Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But it wasn’t until my father started dying that I read the book. The same day I started reading the book is when someone sent me the script. Some of the same elements of Perfume came to me for Diving Bell: seeing ecosystems falling apart, smelling all the way to Egypt. The stories felt similar. So I put some of the same elements into Diving Bell…

HARP: What sort of actor do you look for – be it this film or previous outings?

SCHNABEL: Someone who is real smart. Seriously. Mathieu Amalric is very smart. Everyone’s nominating me for all these awards. But no one understands that it’s he who is making them feel like that while becoming so invisible that you don’t know he’s there. He was lying so still for so long even the people making the movie forgot he was there. For an actor to accept a role to become invisible – that’s a huge commitment. Sean Penn is a great actor Benicio del Toro is a great actor. Javier Bardiem, Gary Oldman, Daniel Day Lewis – great actors. Mathieu Amalric – great actor.

HARP: Do you feel as if you’ve been selected or is it down to force of will?

SCHNABEL: I don’t know. I don’t believe in human will in that way… We are nothing. Everything is destined in a way. All of time exists simultaneously. When you see a movie like My Left Foot – you admire the guy. In this case it’s about us. We’re all like him. We’re all going to sick sometimes and we’re all going to die… some sooner, some later. But while we’re here…. this teaches you how to live.... how to tell people how to grab onto life. For those who are well, go home and grab your kids. For those who are sick, don’t feel so alone – they feel a part of a bigger thing. It’s almost a Buddhist movie in that respect. Though I know nothing about Buddhism

HARP: Do you think you’ve transcended art with this film?

SCHNABEL: People in stroke centers, doctors and nurses who deal with people who can’t speak… they’re asking me if they can show this film in hospitals. They have hope because somebody understood that space… somebody who has this can feel not so all alone. Doctors and speech therapists want to know how I know this.

But I don’t this anymore than I do being a gay Cuban writer. I was so terrified of death my whole life. My father was too. I wish I could’ve finished this before he passed. Life contains death but art unlike life is a representation. It is a denial of death. There are no pessimistic artists there’ll all optimists. There can only be mediocrity and talent. Bauby transmuted his life into art… he made that book. At first I felt this claustrophobia: as if what if that happened to me. Later I found out. He told his best friends that he felt as if he had been selected somehow. Do you want to be a regular guy with a body or a great artist who writes a work that affects everything and everyone in its wake?

That changed my take on the condition. Rather than look at it like a downer. I rethunk it. The writing of the book became what the movie was about.

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