Confronting mortality
Filmmaker Julian Schnabel says he did not pay much attention when he was given a copy of the extraordinary memoir “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” about six years ago.
The slender volume was written by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor who had been almost entirely paralyzed by a stroke at the age of 43. Yet he managed to dictate “The Diving Bell” while lying in a hospital bed, communicating with his caregivers by blinking his left eye.
A few years afterwards, as Schnabel was coming to terms with the imminent death of his father, Bauby entered his life once more in the form of a screenplay drafted by Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of “The Pianist.”
Producer Kathleen Kennedy had offered Schnabel the chance to direct, and the story of Bauby’s suffering affected him so profoundly, he ultimately agreed.
“The thing about my dad is, he was never sick in his life, but he was very, very scared to die, and I couldn’t help him,” Schnabel recalls. “I couldn’t take away his fear of death, but through this film, I thought I could speak to people that were sick, that are scared to die. I could talk to someone about what consciousness is about, what it is to be alive.”
to be continued…
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