Julian Schnabel and the cast of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at the Cannes premiere Photo by Matt Carr

One obvious question with an interesting answer was why the New York-born Schnabel made the film in French. Although Diving Bell is a French book, the assumption was that an American director would make an English-language film of it. That assumption was even shared by Pathe, the French studio partially producing the film: "When the people from Pathe spoke to me, I said 'I want to make a French movie,' and they said, 'I want to make an American movie!'" But Schnabel's decision was as much informed by environment as verisimilitude. Describing the surroundings of the Berck Maritime Hospital where Bauby spent most of the rest of his life (he died in 1997 very shortly after his book was published), Schnabel said, "You can't manufacture a landscape like that, an architecture like that, and this man sat in that place; and on the beach, when the tide went out, it looked like he was sitting on the moon. And it did look like Cinecitta, and I did think of Antonioni, and, to try and reconstruct that in California somewhere, and have an American actor play it, or to send Americans to France, have them speak in a French accent and have French people watch it and read subtitles seemed absurd to me. It's a French man that wrote this; the subject is obviously universal, but I think his sensibility and his sexuality are French and it would be fake if I did it another way." He added that even when Depp was attached to the film, the idea was to have Depp speak French (he's lived in France for over a decade) and surround him with French actors.

Which is not to say Schnabel didn't take liberties with the truth and add poetic license when telling Bauby's story: The decorating of the walls of Bauby's hospital room with photos and art prints is not true to Bauby's own life, alas; Schnabel borrowed this detail from the end of the life of his friend Fred Hughes, who was similarly "locked in" while fighting MS. While there is a passage in Bauby's book about imagining being handsome, Bauby does not evoke Marlon Brando — as Schnabel does by putting some freaky stills taken while Brando was playing a guru in Candy on screen during Bauby's monologue. Some will admire the deftness with which Schnabel puts a lot of himself into Bauby's story; some have already pronounced themselves less than charmed (The New York Times' Manohla Dargis believes the picture reveals "more about the aesthete behind the camera than the character before it"). "I think this movie is the most autobiographical of mine, because I've been terrified of dying my whole life. My father died when he was 92, and he was terrified, my mother died at 89 and she wasn't, because she had congestive heart failure and she died many times so she figured she was coming back again and she was tired of coming back, but my dad who had never been sick in his life and had always taken care of my mother... he was so ebullient and he was such an energetic guy and boom, two years later he was gone. And I felt that this movie, well, it was too late for it to be a guide for him, but maybe it could be a guide for me, or other people." Schnabel's parents are the dedicatees of the movie, along with actor Jean Pierre Cassel, who died shortly after portraying a priest in this film.

As it happens, the Tribeca lunch where Schnabel was at such a low point took place around the time Depp had to drop out of the film because of piratical commitments. As it further happened, Schnabel had seen actor Mathieu Amalric in a film years before and had him in mind to play Bauby before Depp's involvement. It was an interesting coincidence that made Amalric's casting feasible. "I had seen Mathieu in [Olivier Assayas' 1998] Fin août, début septembre and I always thought he would be the guy that could do [Bauby]. I mentioned him to [co-producer] Kathleen Kennedy at one point, and she didn't know who he was. And a few years later, she had made a film called Munich," and at that point Schnabel almost winked, continuing that after Depp dropped out "she said to me, there's this guy in [Munich] who's really fantastic, and I asked who he was, and she said 'Mathieu Amalric,' and I said, 'He's a good one, why don't we make it with him?'"