It’s 11am in a hotel room in Paris. The French actor Mathieu Amalric, his face
stubbly and his dark eyes gleaming, has been in meetings all morning,
talking about his remarkable role in a new film, The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly. Now he wants to escape. “Let’s go down to the bar,” he suggests.
Dressed from head to toe in black, he slinks from the room with the fluid
grace of a panther. It is difficult to imagine this coiled-up bundle of
energy being still for a minute, let alone paralysed, as he is in the film.
“I joked to my friends before we began shooting that all I would have to do
was lie in bed or sit in a wheelchair,” says the actor, now hunched over a
glass of white wine. Even so, it was the most challenging thing he has ever
had to do. “At the end of each day’s filming, I was a wreck. Not moving for
hours at a time, it is totally exhausting.”
Imagine, he says, being unable to make any sound, unable to attract anyone’s
attention, unable to brush a fly from your nose, scratch an itch or move
anything other than one eye: this was the terrible fate that befell
Jean-Dominique Bauby, the then editor of French Elle magazine, who was
paralysed after a stroke in 1995, at the age of 43. He “wrote” a book about
his ordeal by blinking one eye at letters of the alphabet as they were
recited to him. The film, directed by Julian Schnabel, is based on that book
and was shot at the hospital near Calais in which Bauby died a few days
after the publication of his memoir in 1997.
Unusually for a work featuring a chronic illness, the film has been a smash
hit, winning four Oscar nominations, a Palme d’Or at Cannes and a Golden
Globe for best foreign film, and getting rave reviews in America, where The
New Yorker judged it a “feast of moviemaking” that confirmed Schnabel’s
reputation as the most inventive film-maker of the day. If only they still
said similar things about his painting. The diving bell of the title refers
to a recurrent image of Bauby helplessly trapped inside an ancient diving
suit, a metaphor for what the doctors call “locked-in syndrome”: his body
may be useless, but his mind has been unaffected by the stroke, leaving him
free to go on living in his imagination.
Amalric wanted to know what that felt like, so, whenever he was on the set,
the only movement he allowed himself was to blink with his left eye. “If I
had an itch somewhere, I wouldn’t scratch it,” he says. “If I wanted to go
to the loo, I wouldn’t say it. Or if I was thirsty. Even to the crew, I
wouldn’t say anything except yes or no, and only by blinking. Of course it
was false. Of course, I am an actor. I knew I could move if I wanted to. But
I tried to be paralysed as much as possible.”
He even avoided chatting with the other actors between takes. “If I had said
‘Hey, let’s go and drink a coffee’, or ‘How are your kids?’, or ‘What are
you doing afterwards?’, it wouldn’t have helped them to be in front of the
silence that was Bauby, to be in front of nothing, as it were. So I stayed
like that. I had this eye with a sticking plaster on it all the time, and an
eye lens with some blood on it. I needed the pain to concentrate on
solitude.” He believes he eventually came to understand what Bauby had gone
through. “There’s something very strange that happens,” he says, recalling
the experience. “People forget you can see them. So you can look at them.
Like a peeping Tom. You just have fun watching the crew, watching the girls.
You look at their legs, at their ass – they don’t even know you’re looking.
You can look at everything. You can feel everything. Your sensibility is
extreme.”
At the start of the film, the audience sees only what Bauby sees – doctors,
nurses, visitors, the strangely beautiful hospital room with a curtain
flapping in the breeze. We hear his thoughts on the soundtrack. At first he
is angry and bitter: an orderly turns off the television on which Bauby is
watching a football match, but there is nothing he can do about it other
than to internally scream “ Merde!”.
With grim humour, he adapts to a life of the mind, and the result is at once
poignant and funny: we go on a speeded-up journey through Bauby’s
imagination, watching him skiing and surfing as a boy, and reliving memories
of kissing his girlfriend in the surf and driving in a convertible with her,
when her hair is seen from behind, blowing in the wind. One image that
haunts him is of chunks of ice crashing off a glacier into the sea.
The actor, too, was living in his imagination as he lay there, trying to be
Bauby. Sometimes he would think about his previous film, an erotic adventure
called The Story of Richard O, whose protagonist goes on a sexual safari in
Paris one summer. “I used that when I was lying in that hospital bed, not
moving,” says Amalric, who has now moved onto more solid refreshment, a
plate of beef carpaccio. “I was thinking about all those women. I just tried
to remember their smell. I tried to remember those special nights I had
spent with them. And I could.”
No wonder Amalric, the son of two journalists from the newspaper Le Monde,
seems to regard acting more as fun than as a proper job: he got onto the
screen “by accident”, he says, and despite, at 42, being one of France’s
most respected practitioners of the craft, he still regards it as a
distraction from his real career, that of film-maker. He has directed three
films, including Le Stade de Wimbledon, a comedy, in which he cast Jeanne
Balibar, his former wife.
He was clearly impressed by Schnabel’s directorial approach: nothing as banal
as a script was allowed to confine the imagination of this bearded,
cinematic adventurer, who is famous for painting on broken ceramic plates.
Instead, the actors were encouraged to improvise most of their lines.
“Julian has this special way of shooting. He tries to break professional
habits. The camera can shoot at any moment. Never try to be organised. He
thinks that if it’s organised, it is close to death. We spent nights with
him. He never sleeps. He has so much energy. He is exhausting. He doesn’t
ask you only to be an actor. He asks you something else. That’s why I could
invent.”
Going out to dinner with Schnabel, a former short-order cook in New York, was
just as much of an adventure. “He’s a monster,” the actor enthuses. “You
have to see him eating, it’s amazing. He takes everything on the menu. They
have to bring another table and another table to put all the dishes on it.
It’s always like that with Julian. Everything is huge, not just his
paintings.”
One of the most memorable scenes was shot at Le Duc, the favourite fish
restaurant of the former French president François Mitterrand – and of
Schnabel. In the film, Bauby has just had a feeding peg fitted in his
stomach, and knows that his eating days are done. He imagines the taste of
oysters and a spectacular feast in Le Duc with his attractive young speech
therapist. “I didn’t eat for two days,” Amalric says. “It is an incredible
restaurant – salmon, bass, octopus, everything you want. We ate and we ate
and we ate.” They feed each other oysters and gaze passionately into each
other’s eyes while licking their fingers. Then Bauby leans across the table
and starts hungrily kissing the girl. It was not scripted. “I was completely
drunk,” Amalric explains. “She was too. I was so drunk that I just started
kissing her.”
Acting, he says, was like being a “forger” or committing a bank robbery. “I
need that sensation of getting away with something because it’s exciting.”
It was also a form of “vengeance on adolescence, when you have spots, when
you’re too shy to invite a girl to dance. That’s why people are actors. I
was full of complexes when I was young. I was in my bubble. I’d have never
thought of becoming an actor”.
It’s not that Amalric wants to give up directing, but he finds it difficult
to get on with his next behind-the-camera project while being offered so
many enticing roles. “Each time, I say, ‘Okay, this one is the last one, then
I do my film’ – but each time I get an irresistible offer.”
The latest was an offer to be the next Bond villain, which he immediately
accepted. It is not because he wants to be famous. Far from it. “Spending
two days in a hotel doing interviews is not my goal. No, I could be with my
kids. I could be making love. That’s real life. Surprising my girlfriend,
going to Lisbon for two days, you know, that’s life. But I couldn’t resist
it. My two boys, who are 8 and 10 – I can’t tell them one day that I refused
to be the villain in a Bond movie.” Besides, he has always enjoyed the
films, and confesses that, since the age of 18, he has used 0007 as a Pin
number. He reels off a list of actors who have been Bond villains before:
“Just the best actors in the world.”
Before accepting the role, he asked the veteran actor Michael Lonsdale, who
played the villainous Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker, how it had affected his
career. “It didn’t change his life,” Amalric says. He adds that the film is
“very dark” and the role extremely physical – anything might seem physical
after playing Bauby – because of a big fight with Bond at the end. “I’ll
have to be in shape for it,” he says.
Then, perhaps, he might be able to get back to directing. At least, until
another irresistible role comes along.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opens on February 8
I really hope it wins the Oscar so more people will be touched by the beauty of it. It cannot nor probably not will not be categorised or summarised too easily as one's own inner voice mixes with Bauby's for a very personal experience. A great film.
Julie, The World,