At the Movies with Governor Tom: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

On November 10 I attended a sneak preview of this French flick called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. First off, let me admit up front that the reason I saw this film had less to do with the film itself and much more to do with the fact that Swedish acting legend Max von Sydow was appearing…in person!...after the screening for a Q&A. I don’t even have to ask if you’ve heard of Max von Sydow. I know you have, even if you’ve never gotten his name straight. You’ve seen him in something, I guarantee it. The guy’s in everything. In the States he’s probably most famous for playing that old priest in The Exorcist (although he only looked old; Max was in his early forties when he made that). And about a decade after The Exorcist he played Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon. And he’s been in tons of other stuff. Seriously, if by some miracle you don’t know who I’m talking about, look him up on the Internet Movie Database.

Even if Maxie hadn’t shown up at the screening, I’d still be glad I caught this sucker. Listen, if you think you’ve got problems, you’ve gotta see this. Based on the memoir of the same title, published in 1997, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the true story of this fortysomething French guy named Jean-Dominique Bauby. They called him Jean-Do for short. He was the top dawg at the French magazine Elle, and boy, was he living the life. He was a dark-haired stud, wealthy and wildly successful, with a gorgeous wife and kids, and a mistress to boot. Sometime in 1996 he and his tween son were taking a joy ride in the countryside in Dad’s unbelievably expensive convertible sports car. Suddenly, something goes wrong with Dad. He pulls over. Something just isn’t right with him. He can’t talk for one, nor can he move for another. Three weeks or so later he wakes up at a hospital somewhere on the northern French coast (coincidentally the same town where he lived with his dad as a youngster) and he can’t move. At all. Jean-Do is literally paralyzed from scalp to pinkie toe. The doctor tells him that he’s had something akin to a stroke. Only it isn’t your garden variety stroke. It’s some such thing where wires get crossed in the brain stem. Jean-Do, Doc tells him, has something called Locked-In Syndrome. The only part of the body Jean-Do can move are his eyelids. In other words, he can blink, and that’s about it. But wait, it gets even worse. Soon enough they discover that Jean-Do’s right eye isn’t draining properly. To keep it from becoming septic, they sow the sucker shut with stitches (one of the most gut-wrenching scenes in the film, as the sutures are applied while the camera, and therefore the audience, looks out through Jean-Do’s eyes).

So that leaves Jean-Do with the power to blink his left eye. That’s literally all the poor playboy can do. Do you think that stops him? As they say back in my native Jersey: Fuhgeddaboutit! As it turns out, Jean-Do’s got a wild and wacky sense of humor. We hear his voiceover a lot, his interior thoughts spoken by the actor who plays him, Mathieu Amalric. You might remember him from Munich. Not only do we get to listen to what he’s thinking, we get to see his memories and experience his wonderful imagination. Remember, dude’s a playboy. And he hasn’t a clue how awful he looks. So when he sees how hot his nurses are, he’s really jacked up. That’s the kind of flick this is. There’s so much humor where you least expect it. His two main nurses—Marie the physical therapist and Henriette the speech therapist—are these two gorgeous young gals. When Jean-Do first lays eyes—sorry, eye—on them, he’s like: “All right! I really must be in Heaven now!” And so on. It’s thanks to Henriette the speech therapist that Jean-Do devises a system to communicate with people. This is what they do. Whenever he wants to say something, Henriette takes this card that has the alphabet on it. The only thing is, it doesn’t have the alphabet in proper A to Z order. It has it in the order of most commonly used letters to least commonly used letters. Henriette literally reads the thing from the beginning, and as soon as she lands on a letter that Jean-Do wants to use, he blinks. Then she starts over again until she lands on the next letter he wants to use, in which case he blinks again. And so on, until Jean-Do has blinked his left eye enough times to form a word, and then a sentence. That’s how the guy talks to people.

His luck gets even better with the women. As it turns out, before he came down with the whole Locked-In thing, Jean-Do had landed a one-book contract with a big-time publisher in Paris. His original plan was to write a novel that would be a sort of modern-day The Count of Monte Cristo, only with a female protagonist. Now that he’s thinking about it, sitting in his wheelchair and looking at the ocean and reminiscing about his life, he decides he wants to write his memoir. So his publisher sends him this assistant named Claude. Yep, you guessed it. She’s another hottie. And like Henriette, she’s got the patience of the Apostles. Henriette teaches Claude the communications system she’s got going with Jean-Do. Claude then uses that system to be Jean-Do’s transcriptionist, if you will. Jean-Do essentially dictates his entire memoir by blinking his left eye. And it’s that memoir that this film is based on. Kinda cool, huh? The memoir was published the last week of February 1997 to rave reviews, but poor Jean-Do passed away 10 days later. Trust me, I’m not spoiling this film by telling you that he died. And let me reiterate that it’s not as depressing as it sounds. Au contraire, as the French say. I found it to be quite uplifting.

The long-suffering wife Celine, by the way, is played by Emmanuelle Seigner, otherwise known as Mrs. Roman Polanski. When not acting, she’s the lead singer of a rock group called Ultra Orange and Emmanuelle.

The film was directed by this guy from Brooklyn named Julian Schnabel. Never heard of him? That’s okay. This is only his third film, and he’s a painter foremost. I know that because I just saw a thing in the New York Times wherein he basically says he prefers to be thought of as a painter first, a filmmaker second. You can see why. He’s done a lot as a painter and has had his work shown all over the frickin’ place. When he gets the directing bug, he seems to like telling true stories of these really creative types who face tons of impossible odds. His first film was Basquiat, which came out back in the summer of ’96. It featured a then-not-very-well-known Jeffrey Wright playing the painter Jean Michel Basquiat, as well as David Bowie as Andy Warhol. Ever see it? The cast is pretty stellar: Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Chirstopher Walken, and Willem Dafoe. His second film was 2001's Before Night Falls, which starred Javier Bardem as Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, and Johnny Depp as a transvestite named Lt. Victor. Just as Basquiat helped kick-start Jeffrey Wright's career, so did Before Night Falls for Javier.

And now for the Q&A following the film with Max von Sydow. The man’s 78, so he did appear a bit fragile. Still, if you’ve seen him in anything going back to the seventies, he actually looks the same as ever. As someone in the audience tried pointing out: “Mr. von Sydow, you look the same since…since…” And that’s when Max piped in: “…since The Exorcist.” He smiled with that warm, grandfatherly smile we saw more than once during the evening, and everyone chuckled. One thing that struck me right away was how he sometimes struggles with English. He definitely qualifies as fluent, but now and then he drags out a word while thinking of the word that follows. This would have struck you too if you’ve seen him in any of his English-language films. Max has such a deep, commanding voice. I suppose with a script memorized, he can make it seem like English comes naturally. Heck, the first time I saw him was as Brewmeister Smith, the villain in Strange Brew, back in ’83. Watching that film, it never occurred to me that English was a second language to him.

Someone asked him about his experiences with Swedish filmmaking legend Ingmar Bergman. Max talked about being cast in a play by Ingmar when he was still in his twenties. So we’re talking the 1950s here. Ingmar was the resident director of a theater in the southern Swedish town of Malmo. The way it worked as that Max would act in stuff for this theater company in the fall, winter, and spring. Then, when the theater shut down for the summer, Ingmar and Max and a bunch of other people would go make a movie or two. That’s how they made great stuff like The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring.

As for Ingmar’s methodology, Max said he was very structured. His structure was the only way he could work year-round. The guy would still be editing his film or two in the fall, when the Malmo theater came back to life. He was never late. Max said that Ingmar “was so punctual it was creepy.” Whether on stage or on a film set, Ingmar was very focused and intense. When it was time to work, it was time to work. However, Max said that there were plenty of laughs. On a film set, for example, when it was time to take a break before the next scene, there’d be plenty of joking and kidding around. There sort of had to be in order to balance out Ingmar’s intensity. Still, Ingmar was never so focused that he couldn’t have tea. Whether working on a film or a play, Max said that every afternoon without fail they’d have their three o’clock tea time. Every day, hands down. As for the theater, Max made a point of saying that they would sometimes do American stuff, such as Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams.

His crossover into the English-language movie world came in the early sixties. Here’s how it happened. He did this Swedish flick with Ingmar Bergman called The Virgin Spring. It got accepted to Cannes. No one from the film was able to make it to Cannes except Max. At this point he’d already done The Seventh Seal and other stuff, so he was sort of well known in the international movie world. While at Cannes promoting The Virgin Spring, Max was approached by a Hollywood agent who wanted to take him on as a client. He said no and left it at that. The following year he found himself at Cannes yet again as the sole representative of another Ingmar flick called Through a Glass Darkly. That very same Hollywood agent approached him and wouldn’t let up. Max finally said okay, the agent could send him scripts.

Among the roles he turned down off the bat was the villain in the very first James Bond film, Dr. No. It’s probably just as well. The villain, Dr. No, is Chinese, and I have a hard time picturing Max as Asian. Not that they couldn’t have made it happen. The actor they did end up casting was a white Canadian guy named Joseph Wiseman, but I had no idea he wasn’t actually Chinese until well after I’d seen the film.

The first English-language role he did take was playing none other than Jesus Christ in the George Stevens picture The Greatest Story Ever Told. If Ingmar Bergman was focused and intense, George Stevens was anal. Max explained that rather than storyboarding, George shot every scene from every conceivable angle, and then edited out most of the close-ups. Max had suggested to him that they film the Last Supper with a round table so that Jesus could actually make eye contact with his Apostles when telling them that one of them would be his undoing. But nah, George took the Da Vinci painting literally and wanted to shoot the scene accordingly.

When asked to compare Julian Schnabel's directing style with Ingmar's, Max said that in essence Julian was much looser and more laid back. There was still some structure, but Julian wasn't very much into rehearsing, for example, whereas Ingmar was always by the book with rehearsing. Julian would make his actors dive into the scene and, sometimes, print the first take. Still, Max felt he hadn't worked enough on the film to make a full comparison. He only had two scenes in The Diving Bell, both of which were shot in one day.

Considering all the work he did with Ingmar, you'd think Max's favorite film to have worked on might be one of those. Nope. When asked by someone in the audience which of his own films was his favorite, he said hands down it was Pelle the Conqueror. Ever see that? No? Please do. The gist of it is that it's set toward the end of the 1800s. Max plays this Swedish farmer named Lasse. Life sucks for Lasse and his son Pelle. So like a lot of other down-on-their-luck Swedes, they pack themselves onto a boat bound for Denmark where they hope to find work and a better life. They do sort of find work, but life doesn't stop sucking. Tons of adversity ensues. You get the idea. Pelle the Conqueror scored the Best Foreign Film Oscar in '88. No small feat considering it beat out the likes of Salaam Bombay! (India) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spain).

An elderly woman from the audience said her personal favorite from Max's resume was a flick he did back in '96 called Hamsun. I'm not even gonna ask if you've seen this, but you've got Netflix, right? Or Blockbuster? Check it out. It's a bio pic about the acclaimed yet controversial as hell Norwegian writer named Knut Hamsun. Dude almost lived to be a 100, from like the late 1850s to the early 1950s. Anyway, his politics aside, he was a great writer whose work influenced a lot of other great writers, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer. Then World War II started (Knut turned 80 that year), and Norway was occupied by the Nazis. Whether his reasons were genuine or just to survive, Knut decided he liked Hitler. Perhaps his feelings were genuine because when Hitler bit the dust, Knut wrote an obit about him wherein he called Adolf a "warrior for mankind." When the war was done and Norway was free again, Knut's countrymen were understandably pretty upset with the old codger. Treason was considered, but when examined by a shrink, it was decided that Knut was sort of losing his marbles and that jailing him for treason wasn't really worth it. Anyway, it was an ignominious end to an otherwise stellar writing career. Max said he had a blast playing Knut because the guy, as you can see, was complicated to say the least. Actors love it when they land a juicy role that offers so much potential for hamming it up.

Speaking of which, Max said he had a great time playing the villain in 1983's Never Say Never Again. This was right after he played Brewmeister Smith in Strange Brew. Never Say Never Again was that James Bond flick Sean Connery did that didn't really count as part of the series because it was a remake of the fourth film, Thunderball (1965). Max played the villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. You know, that guy who's always got the white kitty on his lap? Max chuckled as he remembered the artificial beer belly they made for him but which didn't get much screen time because he spent most of the time sitting behind a desk. And he also talked about his first scene in the film, where he was supposed to make a really long speech while petting the Persian. Apparently the feline wouldn't cooperate and so they literally had to do something like two dozen takes of that one speech. And then wouldn't you know it? Most of the speech was edited out.

Someone toward the front asked if there were any American filmmakers with whom Max didn't get along with. But nah, Max was too cheerful to discuss negative experiences. He said he felt blessed in having gotten along with all the Yanks he worked for who, in addition to George Stevens, include Steven Spielberg (The Minority Report), George Roy Hill (Hawaii), Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters), and Sydney Pollack (Three Days of the Condor). Not a bad roster, eh? Someone in the audience was sort of prodding him into saying he didn't like working with Woody Allen, but Max laughed that off. Woody was great, he said.

One of the last questions of the night was whether Max would work in theater or film, if he had to pick one. He didn't hesitate in saying it would be theater. He basically said that theater has an immediacy that is impossible to get with film since films come out months, sometimes over a year, after you've done it. So you lack that connection with the audience. Theater, he explained, has a magic that defies description.

I've been to my fair share of Q&As with actors and directors 'n whatnot. It can be pretty hit and miss in terms of how well the person can answer questions. Max was easily one of the best for me. He's totally not what you expect, especially if you know him from American films. Our directors seem to like casting him as these heavies. I mean yeah, he does have that deep voice and commanding presence. Brewmeister Smith, anyone? But in person he was completely disarming. At one point, when he was still talking about his work with Ingmar, Max took the time to explain the concept of blocking a scene for us. 'Course, he was addressing an audience that had a fair share of people in the biz who of course know about blocking, one of the first things you learn as an actor or filmmaker. But Max just had that kind paternal way about him. "Do you all understand blocking? This is what it is..."