Julian Schnabel ‘had to’ direct it

“I’m an artist,” the painter and film director Julian Schnabel says, looking very much the part in a worn red-and-black plaid shirt open to the waist. “I make more money painting one day than I did on this movie. I did it because I had to.”

The picture in question, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” premiered at Cannes on Tuesday to sustained applause. Taken from a celebrated book, the film fluidly tells the remarkable and moving story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a Frenchman and editor of Elle, who, because of a stroke, became a victim of “locked-in syndrome,” meaning his mind was totally intact inside a paralyzed body.

Bauby wrote the bestselling book, published in 1997 just 10 days before he died, one letter at a time, using a complicated system that involving blinking his left eye, the only part of his body that could still move. Schnabel assumes the Ronald Harwood script came to him for Hollywood reasons, but he took it on for personal ones.

“They wanted Johnny Depp to do it, and he said he would if Julian Schnabel directed it,” the man said of his actor friend. “But then the pirate thing came up; he couldn’t shave, it was more pressure that he didn’t need.”

Schnabel, a confident, charismatic man who learned French to do this film, went instead with top French actor Mathieu Amalric. Even though he says Pathe, the French production company, initially told him “we don’t want you to make it in French; we want you to make an American movie,” he persisted, believing, correctly, that the sonorous nature of the French language, both in passages from the book and in the voice quality of the actresses who play the women in Bauby’s life and therapy, was irreplaceable.

Also irreplaceable was Schnabel’s rich visual style -- here aided by the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski -- a compelling way of creating images visible in both his previous films, “Basquiat” and “Before Night Falls.” “The Diving Bell” may sound like a static, difficult-to-dramatize story, but in Schnabel’s hands it is anything but that.

Given that the director loves to talk, giving him a story about a man who can’t speak may seem strange, but Schnabel sees it differently.

“He does a lot of talking; he just can’t move his mouth.” He says. His talking is heard in the film’s voice-over. “That makes the audience the confidant of the main character; no one else knows what he’s thinking.”

Schnabel wanted to do the film in part because of experiences he’d had with his friend Fred Hughes, who ran Andy Warhol’s Factory. “He had MS, and as he got sicker and sicker, he couldn’t talk,” Schnabel remembers of his friend’s multiple sclerosis. “He ended up lying in a bed in the middle of his apartment, like Miss Havisham. I’d go to the house and read to him, and it was his nurse who first gave me the book.”

Schnabel sees the film as “a self-help manual, something that could help someone else who’s facing death,” but his wife, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, who plays one of Bauby’s therapists, was initially not so sure. “My wife said, ‘Give me a break. You always make movies about people who are dying or dead.’ I didn’t see it like that. I said, ‘It’s going to be really funny.’ ”

As to the art world’s reaction to his films, Schnabel says that “when you step out of the art world, they get scared you’re not in their jurisdiction anymore. They say, ‘The guy’s not serious about painting.’ When I did ‘Basquiat,’ it was like Joe Valachi talking about the mob. So what am I? I’m a painter that made a few movies.” And pretty good ones at that.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com