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MillimeterFade to Black: Julian Schnabel, Director
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Pictured: Janusz Kaminski (left) and Julian Schnabel (right)
Jean-dominique Bauby, the Editor of French Elle, had a Massive Stroke in 1995 that left him completely and permanently paralyzed. He went on to write a memoir with his left eyelid. That's right, his eyelid. Another iconoclast, painter Julian Schnabel, has made a film of the story, shot mostly from Bauby's point of view by Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. The film from the book is titled The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Schnabel won best director at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
“I made the hospital room, painted the walls, dyed the outfits of the doctors and nurses, and picked all the colors of what everybody wore,” Schnabel says. In fact, Schnabel had the room built with no angles in the walls and one seemingly floating fluorescent light, so that Bauby might appear to be looking into infinity.
Indeed, the first half-hour of the film is shot from Bauby's POV as the hospital staff tries to determine his capabilities. Kaminski's camera is blinking, out of focus, and blurry. This was achieved with the use of a swing-and-tilt lens. “That's really the way you get a sense of seeing — of him seeing,” Schanbel says. “That was key. What it does is it lets less light in one part. It depends on how blurry you want to make it — how out of focus. You can have that without racking focus. It's the kind of lens you can have both at the same time. I don't know how your eyesight is, but you can see the texture of seeing. A lot of these lenses that are really crisp, it looks like photography — it doesn't look like life.”
The focus and framing were manually controlled, with Schnabel using a monitor or the camera to make sure he was getting what he wanted. Kaminski used Fujifilm Eterna250 tungsten stock.
The film was shot in the French naval hospital where the indomitable Bauby lived until his death, just days after his memoir was published. A speech therapist developed an alphabet based on the frequency of the letters. She would run through the alphabet until Bauby blinked, painstakingly spelling out his needs, then his memoir. Most of the actors speak directly into the camera, which in turn reacts with joy, boredom, disbelief — and blinking.
“You start thinking about blinks. How many different kinds of blinks are there?” Schnabel asks. “First, if you think each one is like that, it's sort of black and white. But that's really not how you blink. And if you think of how it corresponds with him blinking, he doesn't really close his eye all the time. So, when people talk about cutting being like a blink, you can think that at first, but once you realize you want it to be naturalistic, there might be 50 different blinks.”
In one of the early scenes, Bauby's unresponsive right eye is sewn closed — from his POV. A props man had worked in a hospital, and he sewed latex over the camera lens. In several instances, Schnabel bolted his own glasses over the lens to replicate the skewed vision of Bauby's twisted face. “If he looked up, he'd have a depth of field like that. If he looked down under it, it was different. I had about five pairs of glasses I would screw onto the camera and get them into the right place to do that.”
Schnabel finished Diving Bell under budget and ten days early. This gave him time to root around in a property next door to the hospital on the Norman coast. Inside, he found a stack of x-rays dating from 1905 to 1911. With them, he made the most beautiful title sequence you will ever see.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
