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 the diving bell and the butterfly interview
watch julian schnabel on to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Portrait of the artist as a filmmaker. Is the brilliant The Diving Bell And The Butterfly the moment when Julian Schnabel finally stops being considered a painter and becomes better known as a filmmaker? The Brooklyn-born creative has made two films before: Basquiat, which delved into the life of the graffiti artist who helped put Schnabel on the map, and the lovely-looking Cuban-set political biopic Before Night Falls. While both had their relative merits, neither film was a match for his giant canvases.  Now, in bringing Jean-Dominique Bauby’s extraordinary biography to the screen, Schnabel has matured as a director and he’s got a clutch of awards to prove it. He says of the difference between filmmaking and painting, “I think filmmaking has a narrative to it that is particular to filmmaking, you can have parallel lives running alongside each other and people can speak to you from the dead. In painting you can stop things and everything is seen at once and it is infinitely regenerating itself. You don’t have to sit there for two hours to figure out what is going to happen. People who look at paintings, they like to be surprised, they don’t mind not knowing the answer. They like the mysterious quality of it.”  In telling the story of the former editor of French Elle, who wrote a biographical novel while paralysed from the neck down by the rare “locked-in syndrome”, the director has had to let his creative juices flow in order that the story is told in a visually exciting way. For the first half, he succeeds in making us see the world from behind an eyelid. The 56-year-old argues, “Extreme situations give birth to extreme solutions. That metaphor of the Diving Bell was no accident. I’ve been under the water and seen Matthieu Amalric in that Diving Bell costume; it is medieval and claustrophobic. This man really picked this metaphor because he was stuck in there. Like, death is something that is coming for us and I think the Diving Bell is like death. We get this reprieve from death when you meet someone nice, or you are having a nice dinner and you forget that you’re dying.” Indeed those moments are when we feel like a butterfly. But for now it’s Schnabel who is flying.
Kaleem Aftab
The Diving Bell And The Butterfly is on national release.
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