Beyond the Multiplex

In this interview and podcast, Julian Schnabel hangs by the pool in his pajamas and talks about his inspiring, triumphant film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

By Andrew O'Hehir

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May 23, 2007 | CANNES, France --

On the day after his big triumph here with "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Julian Schnabel received a small group of reporters poolside at the Hotel Martinez, probably the most deluxe of all the overpriced hotels along the Croisette. He wasn't wearing his trademark bathrobe. It was pretty hot for that here on Wednesday, so he was just in pajamas.

Schnabel is a theatrical, larger-than-life character who invites a degree of dislike and ridicule, and even seems to thrive on it. He stays in fancy hotels (while rarely dressing in actual clothes), makes and spends large sums of money, and has become a controversial but unavoidable artist in two different media. When the hordes of paparazzi and gawkers outside the fence began screaming at some celebrity entering or leaving the Martinez during our interview, Schnabel stood up and called out at them, "Shut up! Fucking cocksuckers!" (Click here to listen to a podcast of the interview.)

Earlier, he had told us that his wife had given him a Xanax before the Tuesday night premiere, so that he could barely stay awake through his own movie, and actually fell down during the 20-minute standing ovation that followed it. That's vintage Schnabel, following the urge to play the buffoon at the apex of his directing career. During the interview, he recalled a memorable critic's quote from the '80s, when his oversize, crockery-encrusted paintings first made him famous: "Julian Schnabel knows how to make garbage out of garbage." ("I thought that was pretty good!" he crowed.)

Whatever you make of Schnabel as a painter or a self-invented celebrity -- his previous jobs have included short-order cook and New York cab driver -- it's time to consider the once-unlikely proposition that he's a really important filmmaker. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," based on a remarkable memoir of severe paralysis written by the late Jean-Dominique Bauby, formerly the editor of French Elle, is definitely not garbage out of garbage. It's an exhilarating, heartbreaking, wonderfully visual big-screen translation of an inherently uncinematic premise: a man so trapped in his own body he can only control one eye.

Many of the things one could say about Schnabel's film border on hackneyed phrases, but the movie itself never does. It's about the prodigious mystery of being alive, and about facing the terror of death with honesty and integrity. It's about the impossible, alchemical magic of artistic creation, and about the ways all of us, like Jean-Do (who is amazingly played by elfin French actor Mathieu Amalric), are trapped in our own subjectivity and yearn to communicate with the world outside.

Bauby's title ("Le Scaphandre et le papillon," in French) stemmed from his realization that while his body had become a prison, like a deep-sea diving suit in which he was permanently trapped, his imagination and his memory could fly wherever he wanted to go. Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski begin the film from Jean-Do's stringently limited point of view as he wakes from a three-week coma, unable to move his head and seeing the world through one blurred eyeball. He begins to talk to his doctors, only to realize: They can't hear him! Gradually, as Jean-Do comes to grips with his radically transformed body and self, and with the fact that his interior monologues can't come out, the movie opens up like a newly sprouted plant finding the sun.

There's a severe kind of poetry to Jean-Do's long struggle to communicate, thanks to a special alphabetic system devised by his speech therapist (played by Marie-Josée Croze). But we've seen that kind of thing in other films dealing with severe disability. Schnabel balances Jean-Do's nearly unbearable diving-bell reality with his colorful dreams, fantasies and memories, which assume an explosive, liberatory, sometimes terrible power. As in Schnabel's earlier films, "Basquiat" and "Before Night Falls," he's put together a wonderful soundtrack, ranging from Nino Rota's classic film scores to U2, Tom Waits and the Velvet Underground.

Next page: "Talking to us from the grave"