Don’t Call Him a Filmmaker, at Least Not First
Don’t Call Him a Filmmaker, at Least Not First
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ripplecloud
677 days ago
The rights to “The Diving Bell” had been bought by the veteran Hollywood producer Kathleen Kennedy, who planned to make the movie with Universal Pictures and with Johnny Depp as the star. Mr. Depp, a friend of Mr. Schnabel who played two roles in “Before Night Falls,” was interested and said he wanted Mr. Schnabel as the director. But then Mr. Depp fell out because of his commitment to the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise — “that pirate thing,” as Mr. Schnabel describes it.
And so instead of making a movie aimed at a broader audience, something of a Francophile “My Left Foot” (the movie’s jokey nickname on the festival circuit has been “My Left Eye”), Mr. Schnabel and Jon Kilik, his longtime producer, along with Ms. Kennedy, put together one that all but manufactured its own hurdles. It has a mainly French cast with no bankable stars, a story witnessed in many scenes through the blurry lens of a single camera serving as Bauby’s eye and — quelle horreur, at least for the American market — it was made entirely in French by a director whose grasp of the language was not good. “Now it is,” he reports. “It was sort of fancy restaurant French before that.”
Even the film’s other backer, the French company Pathé, wanted the film to be in English. “Their concern,” said Mr. Kilik, who last year produced “Babel,” another heavily subtitled film, “was that this is a hard enough subject to tackle and a hard enough subject to find an audience for, and ‘You’re going to make it even harder by making it in French?’”
And so instead of making a movie aimed at a broader audience, something of a Francophile “My Left Foot” (the movie’s jokey nickname on the festival circuit has been “My Left Eye”), Mr. Schnabel and Jon Kilik, his longtime producer, along with Ms. Kennedy, put together one that all but manufactured its own hurdles. It has a mainly French cast with no bankable stars, a story witnessed in many scenes through the blurry lens of a single camera serving as Bauby’s eye and — quelle horreur, at least for the American market — it was made entirely in French by a director whose grasp of the language was not good. “Now it is,” he reports. “It was sort of fancy restaurant French before that.”
Even the film’s other backer, the French company Pathé, wanted the film to be in English. “Their concern,” said Mr. Kilik, who last year produced “Babel,” another heavily subtitled film, “was that this is a hard enough subject to tackle and a hard enough subject to find an audience for, and ‘You’re going to make it even harder by making it in French?’”
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