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 19 July 2008 15:52 BST

Schnabel: I couldn't use Clooney

Friday, 26 Oct 2007 16:37
Schnabel won best director at Cannes this May
Director Julian Schnabel is renowned for his unorthodox approach to moviemaking, but surely most helmers wouldn't go so far as to say "I don't want people to act"?

Yet the Before Night Falls director says conventional methods weren't a priority in making his latest movie.

InTheNews' Lewis Bazley caught up with the artist and filmmaker at the UK premiere of his astounding new film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and asked him how he translated a famous French bestselling from the page to the screen.

An adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir, the film saw Schnabel awarded the best director prize at this year's Cannes film festival for his deeply moving, consistently uplifting picture of a life irrevocably changed.

When charismatic magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Amalric) suffers a massive stroke at 43, he is left with a rare condition known as 'locked-in syndrome', leaving him paralysed from head to toe, with his left eye the only functioning physical feature remaining.

Yet Jean-Do's fierce intelligence and droll wit are still in tact and as he struggles to escape the titular diving bell of claustrophobia in which his condition has encased him, he develops an alphabet of blinking and painstakingly dictates his story in the form of a novel.

As the film received its UK premiere this week as part of the Times BFI 51st London Film Festival, Schnabel explained the choices that created his magnificent picture, though the vaguest of questions received the most cursory of replies.

One unfortunate journalist was harshly dealt when her not having seen the film emerged, as Schnabel answered every hopelessly generic question with monosyllabic replies and sarcastically said the biggest challenge in developing the film was "making it good".

Some slightly more substantial probing elicited some more expressive answers from the 56-year-old Brooklyn native, however, who explained the importance of location in the film.

"You had to make the movie in this hospital, you couldn't have made it in Hollywood… I shot it in the actual hospital where Jean-Dominique Bauby was," Schnabel told InTheNews, "so a lot of the people you see dealt with him, his nurse, his physiotherapist.

"So I would ask them 'How would he move his hands, how would he be sitting?', things like that.

"The first person you see in the film is his actual nurse, Virginia," he confirmed, adding that many of the hospital staff seen in the film had cared for the real Jean-Dominique Bauby during his dramatic stay in the late 90s.

Working with non-actors didn't pose a problem for the director, though, who admitted: "I don't want people to act."

He explained: "I just tell people what's happening in the scene and let it play out. But there are real actors alongside the real actors alongside the non-actors but it's the same principle."

Casting remained a crucial choice while adapting the autobiography, the director said, revealing that Johnny Depp and Eric Bana had both been linked with the project.

But in a Q and A session after the premiere, Schnabel admitted: "I couldn't have made it with George Clooney. I think he's a fine actor but it had to be a French actor playing Jean-Do.

"This was a French man in this hospital and he felt he was on the edge of the world."

Yet nationality had initially proved no barrier for Depp's links with the project, with plans for the popular actor - who lives in the south of France - to brush up on his dialect before taking the role.

A spanner in the works emerged, however, with the advent of a phenomenally successful franchise, Schnabel said.

"When Johnny Depp got involved with these Pirates, I said I'd like to make the movie with a French actor," he commented.

Though the movie's producer suggested Australian actor Eric Bana for the part - with Schnabel highly impressed by Bana's performance in Munich - the suggestion of Mathieu Amalric seemed heaven-sent, a notion confirmed by his outstanding performance.

"I saw Mathieu Amalric a long time ago," Schnabel confirmed, admitting that he was blown away by the actor's astonishing ability to switch seamlessly between the paralysis of the bedridden author and the rakish flamboyance of his former incarnation.

But UK audiences have a criminally long wait to see this most memorable of films - it doesn't get released here until February 8th 2008.

Lewis BazleyEnd of story


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