'Diving Bell' director says there's hope within film's darkness

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After he finishes with the film-festival and awards-show circuit, director Julian Schnabel could make the rounds of hospitals or rehab centers with "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.""Neurologists want me to show this," he said. "Nurses want me to show this. They want to show this at stroke centers. ... They feel like it would give the people working with the sick people hope and the disabled people hope."After all, once they see Jean-Dominique Bauby, a 43-year-old who can communicate only by blinking his left eye, they might reconsider their own plight. Or be inspired to realize that communication is never out of reach, no matter how severe the limitations.In 1995, French Elle editor Bauby suffered a massive stroke that left him with "locked-in syndrome," with his mind intact but his body paralyzed from head to toe. He couldn't speak, but he could blink one bloodshot eye.For the first 30 or so minutes, Schnabel puts moviegoers in Bauby's place, and we watch the world from his hospital bed or wheelchair and experience life as he did."I think you end up having an extremely subjective relationship with the film, so you're not really watching it, it's really happening to you and, at first, it's scary and, later, it's liberating," Schnabel said by phone during a publicity stop in Philadelphia.Bauby, played by Mathieu Amalric, eventually found his "voice" thanks to a therapist who recited a list of the most frequently used letters in the French language, and he blinked to signal the building blocks of words. He used this method to write a book, and he sought refuge in that task, just as he mined his memories and fanciful imagination."I was interested in the claustrophobia of it," Schnabel said, "but I was also interested in how somebody could escape that and how somebody could free themselves, and the fact that by making art -- by actually transporting or transmuting his situation into a book -- he created a job for himself, and he filled his days with activity. And he actually constructed this thing that was beyond death."Schnabel, a painter and sculptor who also directed "Basquiat" and "Before Night Falls," filmed at Berck Maritime Hospital in Pas de Calais, where Bauby received care, and some of his nurses and therapists appear in the film."The first person you see is Virginie, who was his nurse. The man who holds him in the swimming pool is Daniel, his physiotherapist, and the guy who turns his TV off worked on him. The one who looks at him with the penlight is his nurse. ... At the hospital, when people are singing 'Happy Birthday' to him, a lot of those people are patients, and a lot of them are nurses and physiotherapists."To play Bauby, Amalric underwent a series of small but effective changes to his face: A patch over his right eye, a contact lens in his left to make it appear bloodshot, a piece of plastic in one nostril, a bite plate on his bottom teeth and the gluing of his lip to his face to pull it to one side.Amalric stayed in character and, as he told the director, became invisible."It's a very selfless, brilliant performance," said Schnabel.Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Pianist," adapted Bauby's book, but Schnabel made a few changes, based on dramatic license and things he learned at the hospital. He gave Bauby three children, rather than two, which wasn't a problem for the offspring or their mother.In fact, they sat behind him at the Cannes Film Festival, and Schnabel recalled, "The son said to me, 'Now I can get on with my life.' "Asked about the reception to "Diving Bell" at a time when filmgoers have snubbed movies deemed too dark or depressing, Schnabel said, "It is very serious, but it's extremely helpful, and it's a lot of fun to watch. I mean, it's heavy but at the same time ... one person wrote, 'For a guy with one eye, he sure does get around.' " And David Denby enthused in the New Yorker that the birth of Bauby's soul is like the rebirth of cinema itself.Schnabel said: "I think there are a lot of things that are the topic of this film that are not about a guy who is sick. It's more about what somebody can imagine and everything that one could imagine that somebody might be attracted to, is in this film."I think it's also about the relationship between men and women and how people can be compassionate for each other. At the same time, it's funny and it's like (Fellini's) '8-1/2' in a weird way. I'm just talking about the way that the women function for this guy, the way the imagination sort of takes him out of the structure. It's just radically different from other movies because everyone's talking to you."And you are listening, as a doctor sews one of Bauby's eyes shut, a scene that provokes a universal shudder."It's terrifying and that's important. I think you need conflict to make a movie, and there's a lot of conflict in here."(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)