On the blank canvas of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Julian Schnabel's first stroke was an image of glaciers falling into the sea.
"For me, I needed that key to open up this Pandora's box of memory and imagination," the painter-filmmaker says in an interview. "I needed that. If those glaciers are not in the movie, I don't have a movie."
The reason the film needed such a visual (and many others) is because it's largely from the perspective of a man paralyzed by a stroke, left with full consciousness but only the use of his left eye.
Jean-Dominique Bauby was a 43-year-old editor of French fashion magazine Elle, a success and a playboy before a sudden stroke left him immobile and without speech in what's called "locked-in syndrome." Instead of allowing it to defeat him, he wrote a best-selling memoir by blinking out the letters, one by one.
"He traded his body, essentially, in order to be a great artist," says Schnabel.
In Bauby's memoir, published just two days before his death at 44, Bauby calls his submerged state the "diving bell."
He writes: "My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set off for Tierra del Fuego, or for King Midas' Court."
For the movie version of these "bedridden travel notes," Schnabel who rose to fame in the '80s as a painter also decided to take flight. The film begins with a roughly 15-minute section from Bauby's blurry perspective, just after awaking from a coma.
Later, as Bauby's imagination travels through the past, Schnabel portrays it with the disjointed images of a lifetime from melting glaciers to a woman's hair blowing in the wind of a convertible. Like Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," the movie is less about death than life.
"I don't really think it's a movie," Schnabel says. "We call it a movie for shorthand so somebody will know you can go into a movie theater so you can see it. Somewhere in all of that and in the book `Perfume,' I found some kind of a meditation on the interior life."
Schnabel is referring to the Patrick Suskind novel that he had wanted to be his third film following 1996's "Basquiat" and 2000's "Before Night Falls" both largely acclaimed films about the survival of an artist.
Instead, Tom Tykwer directed "Perfume," released last year. Schnabel was inspired to change course and make "Diving Bell" after watching his father die, particularly affected by seeing his father's fear at the end.
Schnabel envisions his film as a "self-help device" for death: "Art is a utilitarian thing, not a decorative thing."
"In general I kind of dread making the movies," he adds. "It upsets my life as a painter. The schedule is different, all of sudden I'm flying somewhere. But when I'm making the movie, it's like painting."
"Diving Bell" arrives with an odd collection of talent, including Steven Spielberg's producer and cinematographer, a French cast and a script originally written in English.
Kathleen Kennedy, who has produced most of Spielberg's films, bought the film rights after they lapsed under its first owner. Initially, Johnny Depp was to star, but when "Pirates of the Caribbean" became a franchise, he withdrew.
"I thought there was a real potential for a real art film," says Kennedy, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. "This was certainly not a book that I picked up and immediately thought, `This is a movie.'"
She turned to screenwriter Ron Harwood (who won an Oscar for the script to 2002's "The Pianist") to pen the screenplay.
"He was the first screenwriter to come back and say, `I know how to do this,'" Kennedy relates. "He wrote an extraordinary first draft, so that's what really created momentum for the movie."
Harwood's script which included the subjective point-of-view opening was in English, but Schnabel wanted to make the film in French and in France to be faithful to Bauby's life. He eventually convinced the studio (French studio Pathe) of the language change, despite its obvious impact on potential box office.
Mathieu Amalric, mostly known to American audiences for his role in Spielberg's "Munich," was cast as Bauby after spending four days with Schnabel at his Long Island house, cooking, surfing and discussing the screenplay.
"He's not looking for actors," Amalric says of Schnabel. "He's not looking for a (director of photography). He's not looking for a professional sound engineer. The only thing he wants is to make a journey with people. He immediately tries to break professional habits."
The film has gotten nearly unanimous raves. Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski both won awards at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The New Yorker film critic David Denby praised the vision of inner life by writing:
"The birth of Bauby's soul feels like nothing less than the rebirth of the cinema."
Many who have had a stroke or been badly ill have approached Schnabel to thank him for the movie, he says. They often wonder how he could understand the experience himself.
"Why the hell would I be qualified to do that?" Schnabel asks himself. "I don't know. Your imagination, I imagine."
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