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What Schnabel did have, and continues to have, was an instinctive visual sense and a healthy dose of ego.

"In Jean-Michel's case, (a documentary filmmaker) came to interview me about him and it became more like a rescue mission," Schnabel explains. "I tried to help this man make the film, (but) he was going to do a terrible job."

As Schnabel elaborated later, "I didn't have any qualifications other than knowing my subject and being a huge movie fan."

In a way, his lead actor in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Mathieu Amalric, might have illustrated Schnabel's modus operandi best by describing the filmmaker's mood on the set: "Freedom, confidence, enthusiasm and love."

These intangibles have resulted in top director kudos this past year for Schnabel at Cannes and from the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. as well as DGA and Oscar nominations -- all firsts.

Schnabel clearly takes pride in not fitting into any easy definitions as either a painter or director. As a man in love with the restorative power of art in all of its forms, Schnabel approaches his movies emotionally and assembles them like one might build a collage.

"In the case of Reinaldo (Arenas, the persecuted Cuban poet of "Before Night Falls") and Jean-Do (Bauby, the Elle editor stricken with locked-in syndrome in "Diving Bell"), the quality of the language of both these books made me feel like I'd like to see the images go with this language," he says.

Schnabel's inspirations can come in a variety of ways. The piano music composed by Paul Cantelon in "Diving Bell" was discovered almost by accident, and the song used from U2, "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)," evolved out of an epiphany he experienced while driving a rented Mercedes and listening to the tune in the South of France. The footage of Alaskan glaciers toppling into the sea was something he envisioned for "Perfume," for which he wrote a script based on the novel by Patrick Suskind (the film version was ultimately made by the German director Tom Tykwer).

The instinctive process would continue on the set. When below-the-liners told him he couldn't do something, Schnabel would take on the challenge just to prove them wrong.

"Because I'm the painter that I am, I don't have any hierarchical notions about what should be in the frame," Schnabel said during a Variety panel for "Diving Bell."

Just as he doesn't make drawings as preparation for his paintings, Schnabel prefers not to rehearse. And given the fact that he was working from an English script with mostly French actors performing in their native tongue, he gave them more than the usual leeway.

"I translated each of these roles with the actors," Schnabel explains. "There was no rehearsal. We just translated their parts with phrasing that felt comfortable and natural to them. I deferred to them in a way."

The actors were also challenged to do things they hadn't done previously, like speaking into a lens without the benefit of another actor responding to them.

"Sometimes with directors you feel like they put you in a little box and they tell you what to do," explains Emmanuelle Seigner, who played the mother of Bauby's children. "But (Schnabel) lets you be very free and try things and be unpredictable."