“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a very personal film to me, and that’s reflected in the soundtrack. I wanted to have the music from Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and I use it for the sequence where Jean-Do is driving a convertible around Paris, even if he didn’t drive a convertible in the script. There’s also the theme music from Lolita played by Nelson Riddle, and stuff from Nino Rota, and The Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes, U2’s Ultraviolet, and Tom Waits’s All the World is Green, because I’d been listening a lot to Tom’s last album Orphans.
There’s an interesting story behind the guy who wrote the piano music for the film, Paul Cantelon. He was a child prodigy, who was hit by a car when he was 12, and he suffered total amnesia. Five years later he started getting his memory back, and he remembered how to play the piano. One day he was playing this song for his mother, and he said, ‘Listen to his mom, I just made this up’. And she said,’Oh Paul, that’s Bach.’ So Paul really identified with the main character Jean-Do.”
