It’s the 1990’s. Imagine you’re 43, you’re a handsome man, the toast of Paris and oh yeah, the editor of Elle. Pretty sweet right? And right now you’re driving a sports car. That’s so cool I can’t even picture it. Then you feel a bit wrong, pull over and your entire body freezes up and you go into a stroke induced coma. You wake up and although your brain is working the only other working parts of your body are your hearing and your left eye. Pretty fucking harsh doesn’t even cover it.

Well this happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby in 1995 when a stoke gave him ‘locked in syndrome’ and turned him into a big brain trapped in a dead body. Well thanks to some quality (and hot) nurses he managed to start communicating using his working eye. He then decided to take up some publishers on the option to write a novel he had had before the accident. In order to do this he had to memorise and dictate his experiences using his eye to a patient girl reading the alphabet aloud. The novel ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ was a huge hit and the writing of it is being turned into a movie due out soon. I read the script and it’s a funny, moving, clever screenplay that works fantastically well on the page. If they can pull off the tricks needed to make the eye-alphabet dictation work on screen this could be a real winner.

Johnny Depp was going to do his best cripple routine apparently but the only star attached currently is the awesome Max von Sydow playing the father. Look out for this one, it puts shit in perspective!