Director Julian Schnabel (right, standing) on the set of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Etienne George/Courtesy of Miramax Films

You've performed in a number of languages…
No not too many! Swedish, English, and French, a couple of times.

But French is probably the least frequent, I guess.
Yes.

What was your feeling when you found out you'd be doing the part in French and not in English?
Well, I always hesitate. After all, it was a small part… But I have a good teacher. A live-in teacher. [Von Sydow nods at his wife, Catherine, a Frenchwoman, who sits across the table.] Extraordinary. But —

You speak French.
No. [He shrugs, as his wife smiles at him.] Well… but I'm not fluent. It is difficult. Do you speak French?

Not very well, no. Hardly at all.
Well, anyway, you know something about it.

Tourist — tourist French.
Restaurant French! And the funny thing is you, you don't think about this, but you use totally different muscles speaking English than speaking French. It's funny, because I speak — I'm not eloquent in English, but I speak English without difficulty. I'm not exhausted when I'm done speaking English. When I speak a lot of French, I feel — [sigh] — I'm tired, in my speaking muscles, if you see. And there's a complete difference in which muscles you utilize in order to speak French.

There's a hugely intimate scene between Papinou and Jean-Dominique Bauby, the main character of the film — a flashback, before Bauby's paralysis, wherein he shaves Papinou, his increasingly infirm father, your character. How did the two of you approach this scene?
As so often happens, I didn't know him before. I arrived on the set, and there's Amalric. "How do you do?" I'd seen him in films, but he's a very good actor. He has a reputation. And what I was not prepared for when we started was that we didn't rehearse. Or rather, Julian [director Schnabel] started shooting immediately as we started rehearsing. What I was not prepared for was that Amalric started improvising dialogue. And that was tough for me. In order to do it that way, I have to be better prepared than I was. I'm just not capable of doing that immediately. But just without having explored possibilities in advance, I found it difficult. So we wound things back, and did it as it was scripted. But he's a very sensitive person and it was wonderful to work with him.

Julian Schnabel, the director, is a very larger-than-life kind of character. What was it like to meet him for the first time?
We met him the first time at San Sebastián, I think. He has a house in San Sebastián in Spain. His wife is Spanish. And we had been talking on the phone, and then — it was clear that I was going to work with him. And then the film festival in San Sebastián came up, and he asked the people there to invite me to go to the festival, which we did. And so that's where we met. But we didn't discuss the film actually very much. We just got acquainted and had a great time. Then I worked on my own, just to get prepared and to get familiar with the bloody French. And to be free from too much hesitation. And then, when we shot, we shot all night into Monday. We did rehearsal… or rather he started shooting directly as we began rehearsal! And as always, we shot it backwards. We shot the second scene first. Which is normal, I must say. He gave us total freedom. He didn't tell us to do any particular things. The only specific physical direction concerned things that were necessary for the point of view of the camera.