BY New York Daily News

Julian Schnabel doesn't do things the normal way. When the painter-turned-filmmaker was planning to make a movie based on the best-selling memoir "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Schnabel invited French actor Mathieu Amalric to come to New York.

"I looked at the [airplane] ticket and I thought I was just going to meet him in a hotel and then I'd have four days to walk the streets of New York," says Amalric.

"In fact, the car that came to fetch me at the airport was going out of New York," says Amalric, who was given the script by producer Kathleen Kennedy on the last day he worked on Steven Spielberg's "Munich." "I asked, 'Where are we going?' To Julian Schnabel's place in Montauk. And that's when I understood: I was going to spend four days with him.

"It was just normal life: cooking, going to the shops, he showed me where he painted, surfing points and things like that. And yeah, the script. ... He was looking for people he wants to make the journey with."

Almaric has been showered with acclaim overseas and at film festivals for his portrayal of French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, after a stroke, finds himself trapped in his own body, paralyzed and reduced to communicating by blinking his left eye. Using a complicated Morse code-like system of blinks, Bauby dictated his story - how he got to that point, what was going on in his head - and saw the book published in 1996. He died two days after publication.

"Butterfly," opening Friday, follows Bauby in the final year of his life, thinking back on his wife and mistress, flirting with the nurses via his blinks, spending days with his children and generally behaving as wittily, caustically and with as much joie de vivre as he did prestroke.

For screenwriter Ronald Harwood (an Oscar nominee for "The Dresser" and Oscar winner for "The Pianist"), the journey began long before the movie was announced.

"I had read the book two years before Kathleen Kennedy offered the movie to me," says Harwood. "I was the first person on board. I remembered this absolute extraordinary triumph Jean-Dominique had over this terrible condition. So I said yes without rerereading it, which is a terribly rash thing to do.

"Then the deal was done, and I thought, 'Well, I better start work,' and I read it again and I thought, 'Oh God, what am I going to do with this? He can't move. Where do I go?' I used to go to bed at night and tried to wonder what it would be like to blink out every letter of the alphabet. Then I had this idea that he should be the camera. Once I got that idea I was free.

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