» Celluloid dreams
Explore life on the silver screen at the Cinecity festival, including Julian Schnabel’s new film
Cinecity is back for its 5th edition from 15 November. The region’s leading film festival presents a packed programme of premieres, previews and special events.
Cinecity gives you the chance to see dozens of big screen previews of awardwinning films. Opening with Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, his first film since Brokeback Mountain, other highlights include The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (see below for interview with director Julian Schnabel) and Cannes Palme d’or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days.
There are programme strands dedicated to artists’ cinema, dance for camera, new work made in Brighton and a retrospective of British director Val Guest.
For full programme details and exclusive Cinecity podcasts visit www.cine-city.co.uk
Julian Schnabel interviewed by Stephen Dalton
The bad-boy New York artist turned international movie maker is in a flamboyant mood when we meet to discuss his third feature film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bearlike and brawny, the 56-year-old director seems happy to live up to his Hemingway-esque reputation for larger-than-life showmanship.
But there is nothing boorish about Schnabel’s most mature, accomplished and moving film to date. Completing a loose trilogy about doomed artists that began with Basquiat and Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly is based on the memoir by Parisian socialite Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was paralysed in 1995 by a stroke that left him trapped inside his frozen body with “locked-in syndrome”.
Incredibly, he dictated this bittersweet account of his nightmarish condition using just a single eyelid. “What Jean-Do did was amazing,” says Schnabel. “Usually people don’t speak to you from the grave. But this guy was sort of dead and alive at the same time, so he got to speak to us from this unique vantage point. I think the border between life and death became a little fuzzy for him.”
“I’d like to make a movie where audiences can feel they have seen something they don’t usually see”
A still from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
All of this may sound dauntingly grim subject matter for a biopic. And yet The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a lush and uplifting celebration of life, love and creativity which won Schnabel the Best Director prize at Cannes. In a role originally earmarked for Johnny Depp, the French actor Mathieu Amalric is terrific as Bauby, despite barely moving a muscle.
Schnabel calls it a “Buddhist film”, punctuating it with dreamlike visual flourishes and quasi-mystical nature imagery. It is very painterly but, the director insists, made with a very different discipline than his paintings. “I guess part of my brain likes to tell stories”.
Schnabel nods. “I feel like I need to explain things sometimes, and in paintings I don’t. I think people who like paintings don’t need answers. But the way film has constructed itself in this century, there’s usually a beginning and a middle and an end.”
Shot by regular Spielberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is visually sumptuous and stylistically bold. Much of it is filmed from Bauby’s firstperson viewpoint, blurry and hallucinatory. It makes for a bold and beautiful film.
“I think there’s more freedom in this movie than in Basquiat,” says Schnabel. “I wasn’t trying to show: ‘hey, I’m a painter, I can make a blurry film.’ I just think: here’s a guy who can’t see too good, so the audience will accept the fact that it’s blurry for a while. I’m sick of looking at the same thing all the time, I’d like to make a movie where audiences can feel they have seen something they don’t usually see. That’s why I was attracted to this material.”
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly screens as part of Cinecity at the Duke of York’s Picturehouse on Saturday 17 November at 6.30pm
