Julian Schnabel
On stage at the BFI Southbank, artist-turned-director Julian Schnabel talks about his experiences making The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the agony of quitting smoking and the joy of being heckled by a drunken Sean Young. Will he ever stop talking? Only if you speak to him in French ....
guardian.co.uk,
Friday February 08 2008
Francine Stock: I'm going to talk for about 20 minutes or so and then throw it open to the audience. Let me say something first of all: this is now the second time I've seen the film and the more I see it the more I think that it is a film about consciousness and a film about the process of dying - and in a sense it really does transcend Jean-Dominiques's story in a way that even he might not have realised.
Julian Schnabel hugs interviewer. Audience laughs.
FS: This is just the beginning ... It seems to me that this is a film so hungover with the idea of death. And I think that when you started to make this film, death was very much in your mind.
Julian Schnabel: It's OK. We're all gonna die. We're all dying now ... Well, my father was very sick and he had never been sick in his life. He had a gall bladder operation once and a horse kicked him in the head when he was young, but besides that he was 92 years old and he had never been sick ... My mother on the other hand, she had congestive heart failure, and so she died many times. She was dying and they wanted to give her some morphine. I said: "If you take that you won't wake up again." She said: "You know I'm tired." I'm sure she thought she was coming back, because she had come back so many times before. But my father, never having been sick, he'd grab onto the bars of the bed in his hospital room and he'd say: "Julie, I'm falling". And he said some amazing things. He actually left me a poem - he'd never written a thing in his life. There was a man named Fred Hughes who worked for Andy Warhol - he ran The Factory. And he had MS and after Andy died he got progressively worse and after a while he couldn't talk. And I used to go and read to him. And his nurse, Darren, gave me the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And after Fred died my kids were about 14 and it was Christmas time and it was time for them to go on holiday. And I thought, who could take care of my dad? And Darren McCormick was the only person I could think of ... I asked Darren if he could write down everything my dad said while he was in the room. And my dad left me this epic poem that was amazing.
The day that Darren arrived at the studio and was in the room with my father the script came to me for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I knew about the book for years, but I had no intention of making this movie. I'd been terrified of death my whole life - like my father. And I guess I was next on the conveyor belt, so I figured I'd better straighten this out before I go, because it can't just be sex, chaos and nothingness. So I made this movie and you know, I'm not scared to die. Maybe it's totally illogical that I feel like that, but if someone wants to come up and kill me right now, I won't be scared. I think it taught me how to live in the present ...
And Mathieu Amalric - it's extraordinary: you know this is awards season and they're giving people awards everywhere. As far as I can see the best performance this year has been given by Mathieu Amalric. I love Daniel Day-Lewis, he's a friend of mine and I think he's a great actor and brilliant in There Will Be Blood. Javier Bardem is a very close friend of mine and he is going to get the Academy Award for best supporting actor this year. And then there are other people, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julie Christie, Marion Cotillard ... but Mathieu Amalric - the reason he's not on the best actor list is because people think he's not there. And the reason why the movie works is because he's invisible. One thing I've learnt about him being invisible, well you have to think: here's a guy who's lying on a bed and his hands are on pieces of foam. He's got a patch over one eye, a contact lens in the other that has blood painted on it, so he can't see out of that either, he's got a piece of plastic in his nose, bite-plate in his mouth and his lip is glued to his face. And he's not moving, so what happens is, people think he's not there. That's the life of the disabled: you don't have to be as paralysed as Jean-Do, but if you don't move people think you're not there.
And I think one way that we got being close to this person was that Mathieu was so smart: he was ad-libbing all of that stuff. I put in a soundbox just outside of the set, so he could see on a video what these women were saying to him but they couldn't hear what he was saying - he could say whatever the hell he wanted to say. And I think he really understood Jean-Do's sense of humour. I think the fact that the movie's funny is really important, because if it wasn't funny it would be really sad. So he really helped me. All the actors did such a great job - I never had to wait once for an actor. Sometimes the crew got a little nervous because I always shoot the rehearsal, and I don't rehearse. Because I don't want someone to do something really great and then you say: "Turn on the camera, would you do that again please", because it doesn't seem right. But anyway, my father really forced me to do this. I'm not a journeyman film-maker where somebody will say, "here's a script, would you like to make a movie?"
The only movie I wanted to make was Perfume. Maybe some people in this room know this: I've talked about it a lot. That was the only film I wanted to make and that's why I didn't make a movie for seven years. I don't know if anybody saw that movie but it was dreadful, but they made a bunch of money in Germany with it. I guess that's their audience - Germans.
FS: You start the film with this sort of Jean-Do vision, we're inside his head.
JS: Who knows? I swore off cigarettes. You know Sean Penn smoked a cigarette on Charlie Rose and Charlie let him do it and then he was sorry that he did that. Sean wasn't but Charlie was.
FS: Don't do that ... We're in his head and I did wonder when I saw it whether you would stay there the whole time. But you couldn't. Why not?
JS: Everybody would have left. My editor said, "How long are you going to do this?" I said, as long as possible. What's interesting about it is that usually when people talk to the camera in a movie, the movie stops. In this case everybody talks to the camera, so you don't even realise there's nobody in the middle between you and that person. It's just a convention of the film. I think it has to do with, if you see a painting of a bunch of people, you're fit into that rectangle. I'm a big Caravaggio fan and I like when the edge of the picture goes past the edge of the frame. And I like that in movies too, so the fact there's no one between you and the people that are talking to you is very satisfying to me, because it's like you're watching a fragment of a larger whole. And you're getting a slice out of that, so it feels like virtual reality: it's not a regular movie. I think the reason I like to film water moving or ice is that it's so physical. You feel like the screen could fall on you, and I like thinking of the screen as a sculpture. So when Emmanuelle Seigner sticks her head in the corner of the screen and everybody's sitting there ... I once was watching in San Sebastian there's a beautiful theatre, its made of velvet and it looked like these little Lilliputians were watching and this giant was peering in it them.
FS: Let's take that moment when the ice starts to crumble and fall down. Is that your imagery or his? Because he does talk a great deal about the images, the diving bell and the butterfly being ...
JS: Well that was not in the book and it was not in the script. But it was in my script to Perfume. (Audience laughs) Because I thought that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille could crawl up to that mountain and smell all the way to Egypt and I thought that Jean-Do could do the same thing with his memory ... I talked to a guy named Bernard Chapuit who was Jean-Do's best friend and he said something to me. He was talking to me about coldness, about these icebergs. He said: "Why did you think of that?" And I said: "For me that was the key to the movie, the glaciers forming." And there's a moment where he starts being able to travel. And I thought, well this is supposed to be the good part. But what happens if he's travelling and he starts seeing the world fall apart? That would be downer. So I realised that I had to take that bit and put it before that montage, and it would be the epiphany that he had, that had I been blind or deaf would it take the harsh light of disaster for me to find my true nature?
Essentially it's a natural disaster ... But, I had two women, two great women who were archivists, and I asked them to find stuff for me, and first thing I wanted was images of those glaciers. And I'd watch them for hours on end and listen to Bach. Except that it was Glenn Gould playing ... the only compromise in the film is that it's not Glenn Gould playing the piano. I dunno - his family was a little difficult and it was screwing the favoured nation thing up so I couldn't have that. I tried to adjust it with a computer but you can never substitute anything for the human touch. But if you didn't know it, sorry I told you.
But I found out a lot of things. I'm a detective. I read the script that was sent to me, I thought it was a very fine thing. But I needed to go to the hospital and meet the people. I needed to see that place, to watch the tide go out 500m and come back in. I needed to meet the nurse. I mean I don't know a damn thing about all these technical issues, but I'm smart enough to say to the nurse: "What did he do when he was in his room." "Oh, his hands were on pieces of foam". "Well how were his hands?" "Oh, they were bent like that". "Oh, was there anything else in the room?" "Yes, there was a humidifier." And so on and so on, until you find exactly what it was like and neurologists will come up to me and say: "How did you get it so perfect?" And I actually won a science award for this. But there's one thing that's incorrect in the film and that was that in the script it was written that: "I'm being washed, turned over, my ass wiped, all of this" and I thought: well if you've got a guy with a tracheotomy you're not going to spin him round in a bath tub because you'll drown him. And normally what will happen is that you'll take that person and put them on a little gurney and lower them into the water. And there's no bubbles. But that was OK because when I went in there, I looked through the doorway and there was the pool. That wasn't scripted either. There was the pool and this man Daniel was his physiotherapist, so that was the guy that actually held Jean-Dominique Bauby and took him in the pool. So we were able to do that and the man was beautiful. And the first woman you see is Virginia who was his physiotherapist also. So, essentially, everybody that wasn't working on shift whenever we were shooting is in the movie.
FS: It's just the most extraordinary location ...
JS: you know, I never could have made this film in English. I couldn't have made this film in Hollywood. I couldn't have done it on a sound stage somewhere. If you can't believe it, how can you expect anybody else to?
FS: This meant you learning French for the film ...
JS: I did learn French, yes. Who wants to speak French with me? You ...?
Audience member talks in French. Schnabel says nothing.
Audience laughs.
FS: You talk about the level of improvisation with Mathieu Amalric. On set, how much do you allow for that?
JS: I allow everyone to do whatever they want, until I don't want them to do it. And then I say, "Stop." In the case of Marie-Josée Croze, I wanted her to come in and meet Sandrine, who was his real therapist ... and she liked the Jean-Jacques Beineix documentary. She did not want to see this movie get made and she said he never said he wanted to die, and she would never yell at him. And Mari-Jo didn't want to meet her. But I felt she needed to meet her, and she did and she came back all "complexee" and she had all these things in her head. So I said this is what I want you to say to him and she was getting crazy and nervous - which is good. And so she says all these things to him, that she doesn't want to say. And I then she gets up and walks out, and then I say to her, without turning the camera off: "Go in now and tell him you're sorry, that you went too far, and you didn't want to say that." So she does and I think she got to do what I wanted her to do and she got to do what she wanted to do. And it's hard to plan those things. It's a living breathing thing: you just have to go there and be there, and it's the same thing with the camera. When I made Before Night Falls I never shot one scene that I rehearsed with the camera person. So I'd set it up and I'd look at it and I'd say: "That's good, now let's do it this way." Just because I wanted to be fresh. And then you see an actor like Christopher Walken, you never know what he's going to say. He never knows: he can say the same thing but he can say it five or 10 different ways. And I think he feels that if you can't surprise yourself, how can you surprise anybody else. And I like that. That's why I paint. If I knew what I was going to do before I did it, I wouldn't do it.
FS: And Picasso said that too, didn't he?
JS: I don't know. Maybe.
FS: I think he said: "If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the point of doing it."
JS: I don't think he said that.
FS: I think he did, because I have it written on a piece of paper. So, his speech therapist said he never said he wanted to die, but yet you put that into the film. For why?
JS: Why? Because if he didn't there wouldn't be a movie. Movie needs conflict. That's why On the Road hasn't been made into a movie. Maybe it will be: you know, Francis Ford Coppola's been trying to do it for a long time. You know, I asked an 11-year-old boy: would you make a movie out of On the Road and he said: "There's no conflict in it". See? Anyway, what were we talking about?
FS: Well, the fact that you made him say something he didn't say.
JS: Well, we don't know that he didn't say that. I'm sure that he said that, or felt like that in some way. I mean I made people say things that nobody said, just because I thought they should say those things.
FS: Where this is leading is that your three films have all been involved real people, and people who have only recently died. So what is the attraction?
JS: Well it's good to know your subject matter. I was in the basement with Jean-Michelle Basquiat when he was painting, so I knew just what it looked like. I didn't think I was reinventing the wheel when I made that picture. It was the first movie I made and I wasn't that familiar with the material, so it's very spartan. But I know what it looks like when somebody's painting. I like things to look real. But there were issues between the women in this movie. The girlfriend was the one who spent most of the time with him, but he left the book to his wife and his children. And I think that hurt her a lot. When somebody dies it's very painful for everyone, and I think this movie was a way of resolving a lot of these problems.
For example that scene in the hospital bed when his girlfriend calls up. The wife's there and originally what was written was the wife saying: "He wants to say he loves you, but he won't say it while I'm here." And then the script says: "I've always had the great fortune to be loved by extraordinary women." If I would have put that in the movie I would have thrown up. So, I actually met a woman named Anne-Marie Perrier who worked for him, and she told me, and Bernard Chapuit told me, that she was there about 80 times. Anyway, they had a big fight and stopped seeing each other for a while. and he was getting sicker and she was getting sick so Anne-Marie called and said would you speak to him please? And she called up and she said: "Do you want me to come and see you?" And he said: "Each day I wait for you." And I thought, that's really great, and she'll know that I know this, and it's like saying to her, "I know that he loved you." And I just think for his wife to spell that out, is so brutal.
When you don't have any time, there's no time for lying. Do we have to be on our deathbeds in order to tell the truth to the women that we sleep with? Also, I wanted the girlfriend to be there when he died, and I thought: Who cares if they don't like each other. The guy's dying: they should both be there. In fact the wife wasn't there, but if you're making a movie and the wife's not there, you wonder why she's not in the scene ... There's a moment where he - Jean-Do - says: "Now I'd like to remember myself when I was debonaire, devilishly handsome." And as far as I was concerned he was never handsome - the real guy. And Mathieu Amalric is very attractive but some people might not think that he's beautiful. But anybody in the world, man, child, goat, would think Marlon Brando was beautiful. So, I had these pictures of Marlon Brando, when he was horsing around on the set of Candy. And I asked the executor of his will if I could use them, and that's obviously not in the book, not in the script. And he says: "That's Marlon Brando, that's not me." But ... you just try to find a way to tell the story. You know, once I was in the studio with Jean-Michelle Basquiat and I looked at one of his pictures, and he said: "It's my version". And he was right. And so, it is my version of the accumulation of stuff. So what's not in the movie doesn't exist. I'm kidding, I'm kidding!
FS: Let's watch a short extract from Basquiat ...
(Clip of Basquiat)
FS: When you were casting David Bowie and Dennis Hopper - is there a value in casting people that audiences already know?
JS: Well, I thought to have David Bowie playing Andy Warhol was like a doppelganger. I mean, was it Andy Warhol playing David Bowie or David Bowie playing Andy Warhol? He wasn't like a a regular actor. Also, what's interesting in that film is that all the famous people are famous. All the people that were not famous were not famous. They all want to be known, the others are known. There's a certain thing going on that's part of the reality of the film. If you watch the film .. the dialogue ... when you first come to New York city, you don't know anyone. I was born in New York but I moved to Texas as a teenager. I moved back in 1973. And as you see people that are famous walking around the street, you don't run up and say anything but you want to say something to them. I don't know what you think somebody famous is going to do when you touch them or get near them - nothing, really. But when you're an artist ... I mean I wanted to meet Andy Warhol when I went to New York. You want what they have, you want the recognition, you want the attention. But what most young artists don't realise is that why should they have the attention. Don't be in a hurry to have a show, just because you've been born. You need to do something that maybe is valuable to other people in some way; maybe you have something to share. Until then there's no reason for you to have a show. But it's hard to tell a young person that, who's got all the blood boiling in them and they're all excited. But it's funny to see that clip. I haven't seen that in a while. Benicio [Del Toro] ... he knows, he's an expert. Four years, six to get rich, he's got it all worked out. Essentially that was a combination of John Lurie and Vincent Gallo, that became Benicio['s character].
FS: Obviously it was your world, and you are a painter, and very renowned, and indeed are played by Gary Oldman in the film. Was it fun casting yourself?
JS: Yes, Gary's funny. Gary's a great actor. Someone asked him if it was difficult playing me with me directing him. And he said: "No, if I did something he wouldn't do, I wouldn't do it." And that was about it. He's also able to eat huge quantities of spaghetti. I can do that too. I guess he was doing what he thought I would do. In the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I took Mathieu and Anne Consigny to eat many times, so that whole scene where they are in Le Duc and they eat all that fish, there were no rehearsals but they certainly ate quite a lot of fish before they did that other scene. Anyway, did you want to show that other clip from Before Night Falls? Does anyone want to leave? Anybody have some marijuana? I mean, what you doing here?
FS: No smoking in public. OK, Before Night Falls ...
(Clip of Before Night Falls)
FS: Every time I see it I want to cry, I find it incredibly moving. And I think that this film, I mean again, it's the promise of escape, freedom. But I wanted to ask: three films in 12 years, and you're painting most of the time. Do you think of yourself primarily as a painter?
JS: It doesn't matter what I think I am, it matters what I do, and people can sort it out for themselves. This movie can be seen here and in California at the same time. It's hard to see a painting in more than one place at once. And also, there's no system, there's no press junkets for paintings. And I don't care, I don't think that's something we should have. In fact there are many exhibitions and museums where they have PR people and people who promote art as a way of making business. But the fact is that if you want to see that Caravaggio painting you have to go to Rome and put your coin in and the light comes on and you can see the Conversion of Saint Paul. So I think that the way of communicating is much longer [with art]. But some kid will see my painting and will think: "I know what he did there, and I can use that and make these kind of paintings." But I guess being a painter has made a difference.
FS: I think we'll take some questions from the audience now.
Q1: I have a slight confession to make, which is that I walked out of Before Night Falls, because it seemed right at the end, when they get to America, that they had got to the promised land. And that was like a real insult to Cuba. But now I've seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I can see that you are interested in the far-flung places of the world and the mind. I just wondered if you're still interested in America, and whether it can still be exotic, now that it's everywhere.
JS: Well first of all, you ought to see Before Night Falls, because it didn't end there. He did not find paradise in the United States. I don't want to tell you the end but that's not the end of the movie. It's good to play with 52 cards in the deck, sometimes. Sorry, am I supposed to be polite all the time? But sorry, am I interested in America? We have to be interested in America, because no matter how much of a third world country it's become in the last few years ... it's a great big mess. And there's a huge amount of capital there. And hopefully we're going to get rid of the guy who's the president. Unfortunately the American people let a coup d'etat let place. He was not elected but we all lay down and let this happen. It's probably too late to repair the damage, but it's never too late to fix things. So hopefully we'll see the backside of that motherfucker. I mean, he's a war criminal. It's a shameful thing that he did.
Q2: This film was a lot about death. Let's assume that clinical immortality will be a reality, and you will be able to live for 300 years. How would you approach that in a film?
JS: I think you should start writing it now. My favourite bit in that film AI was when the kid was sitting in the helicopter for 1,000 years. The present is the present is the present - always. Even if we live for 1,000 years we'll always be in the present. A driver dropped me off at the theatre the other day and he said: "I'll be in the same spot." No you won't.
Q3: What do you think about the writers' strike and being heckled at the Directors' Guild Awards.
JS: Well, two different subjects. The writers deserve a part of the pie and their grandchildren and children deserve a part of this technology and the powers that be are going to have to give it to them. They've shown they can stop the Golden Globes and a lot of other things that cost people money. So they will fix that and the Oscars will take place. As far as being heckled ... My friend John Killick, who's here, gave me a beautiful introduction, and I got up and thought what he had said was fine, so I didn't need to say anything. And then Sean Young said, "Well get on with it." So I said: "Who said that to me?" And I looked at her and said: "Why don't you have another cocktail, darling, and then you can come up here and finish my speech." And I meant it. I had nothing interesting to say. I should hire her, to come with me everywhere I go, because I got more attention. Who heard of the Coen brothers? All they talk about is Sean Young and me. I never met Sean Young. I would have given her a big hug and I never would have kicked her out. So, the girl had a little too much to drink ... so what? And if somebody knows her and where she is, I'd like to send her some flowers.
Q4: One of the things about this movie: when you make movies of people's real lives, there's going to be something you can't do justice. Is there something like this and what's the thing you were most proud of that you did capture.
JS: First of all, I don't believe that. I think that you only have two hours, so you have to decide what you want to select, and there's a format to it. I hoped that Florence would have been happier. His son, Theo, told me that now he could get on with his life. His kids felt like there was closure. I felt like it was more important what he did for all of us. It's nice when you're making a movie. Just imagine, if I was the director of Ocean's 13: "Yeah Brad and I had a great time. Andy Garcia knows a lot of great jokes." What would there be to talk about? I think with this movie there's a lot to talk about. You know when I had a show at a gallery and it was my first big show in 1981. And an artist named Alex Katz said to me: "Great show". And I said: "Great show? What do you mean 'great show?' If it wasn't, I'd have to commit suicide." And, it's not a job. There's no room for failure. I mean, I didn't make a nickel making this movie. It cost me money. But I needed to do this for myself, for my father and for other people. I must have inside of me some kind of an impulse as some kind of educator. Because obviously I could have made the movie and just watched it by myself, and not bothered getting it distributed. But that first show, it had to be great, there was no chance for it to be anything else. And I've seen shows by other artists where I would jump out the window. I would kill myself.
The great thing about this movie for me was that Jean Dominique was reporting back from a place where nobody else had ever reported back from. So I had to think: how do I tell this story? How do I deal with the sound? Where do I put the camera? John, who's sitting here, told me something the other day that cracked me up. It was on the set of Basquiat, and my first AD had this piece of dental floss on his back. So I walked up to him and didn't know what the hell it was. So I gave it to [Basquiat star] Jeffrey Wright. And I said to him: "Take this piece of dental floss, and can you just pull it real slow like that ..." And I took these tyres and stuck 'em in a pile, and there was this music I heard in a taxi cab in Munich. He told me it was his son playing the piano, so I said: "Can I buy that tape?" It turned out later it wasn't his son, because I had to get the rights. But this very beautiful oriental piano music was playing and Jeffrey was supposed to be stoned on heroin, pulling this piece of dental floss real slow, slowing everything down. Most directors illustrate a script, and basically, when I get a script I think, "Where can I go with this?" Somebody asked me if I wanted to direct American Gangster, and I thought, "You don't need me to do this. Somebody else could do this." And, Million Dollar Baby. I had no idea what a female boxer would do. I don't know anything about that, so I make movies about things that I know about. I know about artists. I really knew about Grenouille [in Perfume] even though I never killed any girls and that's all I wanted to do and that's why I didn't make another movie. All these other directors that were interested took other jobs. And I just sort of didn't care. I didn't have to take another job, because I ... have a job.
Q5: Could you tell me a bit about Max von Sydow's two scenes in the film? Because for me they were probably the strongest emotional beats in the film. You say Mathieu Amalric was overlooked, but I think Max von Sydow was too.
JS: I agree with you. He's great in the movie. You know they never met before doing those scenes, that was the first day they met. They heard each other on the telephone. But to look at each other you'd think these guys had known each other their whole lives. Max is a brilliant actor. I was very close with my father and I think Mathieu knew that and so did Max. And I've shaved my father many times. I just think they did a great job. I just put the camera in my place and gave them my shirt and told them to do what they would do.
Q6: How did you collaborate with [scriptwriter] Ronald Harwood?
JS: I didn't. Ron Harwood wrote a script that was very very good and it was sent to me. And then I thought about what it needed to turn into and I turned it into that thing. I translated it into French. There were things in it that I thought were really really attractive to me and really good and then there was stuff that I just needed to change. And I changed a lot of it. And he saw the movie when it was finished. And that's that.
FS: And that, is that. Thank you very much Julian Schnabel (applause).
JS: God bless him, he'll probably get an Academy Award.
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