Artists may look inside their souls or at the outside world, seeking what they will create next.
In 2004, Julian Schnabel needed only to look upstairs where his father lay dying to know he wanted to turn Jean-Dominique Bauby’s book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly into a movie.
Bauby’s memoirs of entrapment inside his paralyzed body while striving to communicate literally hit close to home.
Schnabel had read Bauby’s remarkable memoir, “written” by blinking his left eyelid in coded alphabet, painstakingly transcribed by others. Ronald Harwood’s screenplay adaptation coincidentally reached Schnabel around the same time Jack Schnabel, suffering with prostate cancer, moved in with his son’s family.
During the Telluride Film Festival, Schnabel candidly spoke about the convergence that led to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on film, and now his Academy Award nomination for best director.
The film opens Friday at Tampa Theatre, and Feb. 15 at Beach Theater on St. Pete Beach.
Schnabel, an acclaimed painter turned filmmaker, recalled a close relationship with his father, and how he had planned a trip to Germany to exhibit his neo-expressionist art. A few days before departure, Schnabel came face-to-face with the inevitable:
“One night, I was getting ready to travel, my wife was in bed and she said: ‘I don’t think your dad is going to be here when you get back.’
“I said: ‘Do you think he looks that bad?’ She said yes. So I went upstairs and put him in the bathtub like usual and said: ‘Dad, don’t (defecate) in the tub. But he did, like usual, and he was happy doing that.”
The next morning, Jack Schnabel’s caretaker called the son upstairs. “I think he wanted me alone with my father one last time,” Schnabel said.
“Bile was coming from my father’s mouth and his eyes were flickering and he looked scared. There was this fear in him that I wished I could’ve taken away. I really wondered what he was seeing while he was dying.
“What I wanted to do (with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) was to show what that looks like from the inside.”
Read the rest of Schnabel's comments Friday in Floridian.
Steve Persall is the movie critic for the St. Petersburg Times. He was conceived behind a drive-in movie theater his father operated and raised in projection booths and concession stands. He doesn't care how you did it up north.
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