A case of life and death

Schnabel, a 56-year-old New York painter and film-maker, had been given a copy of the book by the nurse of his dying friend Fred Hughes, a former manager of Andy Warhol's Factory. And now his father was in hospital, terminally ill with cancer.

'My father had been happily married for 60 years and he was terrified of death,' explains Schnabel. 'He passed away a month later and I think making the film was a way of dealing with his death. To me, the movie isn't about Bauby and the triumph of the human spirit and all that crap. It's about how you deal with the situation of your death and looking into yourself and finding your interior consciousness. As Jean-Do [as he was known] says: "Did it take the harsh light of disaster for me to find my true nature?"'

Schnabel's previous films, Basquiat and Before Night Falls, also concerned artists who were, in the words of his producer Jon Kilik, 'people who have had to struggle against unimaginable conditions to survive their lives'. Originally, the film version of The Diving Bell... had a megabucks studio in the shape of Universal and man of the moment, Johnny Depp, as the lead. When both withdrew, Pathé came along and Schnabel decided to shoot Ronald Harwood's English script in French, cast French actors and film at the hospital where Bauby was treated.

Schnabel remembered Mathieu Amalric, the villain in forthcoming Bond movie Quantum Of Solace, from a film he'd made several years earlier and thought he would be ideal for Bauby. For the rest of the ensemble he chose, without any auditions, an impressive array of European talent: Anne Consigny and Patrick Chesnais from Not Here To Be Loved, Niels Arestrup from The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Marina Hands and Marie-Josée Croze from Tell No One, Emmanuelle Seigner from Bitter Moon and veterans Max Von Sydow and Jean-Pierre Cassel.

'I saw all of them in these different French movies,' says Schnabel. 'Fortunately, they wanted to work with me on this movie; they believed in the story. Mathieu was amazing as Jean-Do. He had one eye covered and in the other was a contact lens with veins painted on it, so he could hardly see. He had this prosthetic thing in his mouth and I glued his lip down. He never complained.'

After travelling to France and spending time talking to Bauby's best friends and colleagues, Schnabel made several important changes to Harwood's script. Take, for example, the scene where the mother of his children (Seigner) asks Bauby whether or not he wanted to see them after his stroke.

In the original version, Schnabel recalls, he just says 'yes'. 'But I thought, "where's the conflict in that?" So I made him say "no". [Bauby's colleague] Anne-Marie Perrier told me that she actually took Jean-Do out of the hospital in an ambulance one day to show him another guy with locked-in syndrome [where patients are aware but cannot move or communicate], who lived with his family. I think that helped show him he could still be a father.'

Shooting the first half of The Diving Bell And The Butterfly from the perspective of the stricken Bauby, Schnabel vividly immerses us in the dreams and fantasies of his protagonist. The film-maker's crew were often puzzled by his unorthodox directorial methods. 'I think they thought I was nuts,' he laughs, 'because I would do things like take my glasses off and screw them to the camera, or I'd sew up the lens with latex. The director of photography, Janusz Kaminski, actually asked me at the beginning if this was going to be an experimental movie and I said: "I hope so."'

Clearly, Schnabel is not a man troubled by a lack of self-confidence ('People shouldn't come to me if they don't want me to do my job,' he declares), but it's hard not to warm to this bear of a man's passion for his work. He's been rewarded with a best director Oscar nomination for The Diving Bell... to complement his best director prize at Cannes. And he's already shot, with daughter Lola's assistance, the live concert movie Lou Reed's Berlin, where some of the sets were made from his own paintings.

'Like The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, it's a very personal film,' says Schnabel. 'When I meet young painters, I always say to them: "What's personal to you about this work? What are you bringing to it?" If I'd just made The Diving Bell And The Butterfly as it was sent to me, we wouldn't be sitting here now.'

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (12A) is released on Friday.