Ingmar Bergman died yesterday. He was 89 and left behind a remarkable body of work including The Seventh Seal, Winter Light, Wild Strawberries, Persona and Fanny And Alexander. If the next line seems like a terrible thing to write, keep in mind he would have appreciated the sentiment.
What a stroke of luck for me.
If a great master must pass, as indeed all things must, he might as well be checkmated in good time for you to ask Paul Schrader about it. (Sadly, news of Michelangelo Antonioni’s death, in keeping with that director’s lifelong unwieldiness, comes just after the interview.)
“Bergman was an extraordinary influence,” Mr. Schrader tells me. “He was not only an artist. He changed the very landscape of cinema. Before him no one did serious introspective work for the commercial cinema. You could not operate that way. It was only through Bergman that people realised it was possible. He built the ride and a lot of people have got to ride on it since.”
At 61, Paul Schrader, the renowned filmmaker, screenwriter and critic has left his own indelible imprint on the medium he loves. A dangerous visionary, his scripts for long time friend and collaborator Martin Scorsese include Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Bringing Out The Dead and The Last Temptation Of Christ. Hailing from an era when Cahiers Du Cinema was at its influential peak, a time when the makers of film were the thinkers of film, Mr. Schrader, a former protégé of Pauline Kael’s, has written extensively on the great masters, film noir and just about everything else besides.
As an auteur, in the proper sense of that word, he has poked persistently at the underbelly. America, according to the gospel of Paul Schrader, is entirely populated by low-life opportunists, pimps, perverts and psychopaths. In Hardcore, George C. Scott discovers that his decent Christian daughter is now mixed up with porn and snuff films. In Affliction, Nick Nolte is scarred from years of abuse at the hands of his drunken, violent father (James Coburn).
Abroad, people don’t get any more amenable. There aren’t many Western filmmakers who’d feel compelled to take on the life of the gay, fascist wannabe Japanese dictator Yukio Mishima, but for Schrader, Mishima; A Life In Four Chapters is a stand out entry in his resume.
“I’m proud of it because it’s unusual,” he says in his recognisably Midwestern deadpan. “But I have different favourites. I like what I’m working on now (Adam Resurrected). It’s from an extraordinary book set in Israel in 1960 in a sanatorium for Holocaust survivors. I have a one-line pitch. I can describe it as a story of a man who was once a dog who meets a dog who once was a boy. It has very meaty material and I think, I hope, I’ve pulled it off. But overall I like about half of my films which is quite good as a hit rate.”
More than three decades have passed since Paul Schrader broke into the film business as the co-writer (with his brother Leonard) of The Yakuza. Last year, he finally secured the financing for The Walker, the concluding part of a loose quadrilogy that kicked off with Taxi Driver in 1976 and continued with American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992). Looking back over these four titles, from Travis’ inappropriate date with Cybil Shepherd through to Woody Harrelson’s openly gay high-society escort in The Walker, one is struck by a gradual move out of the closet.
“That’s right,” the director confirms. “This character first came about quite a few years ago. I was wondering where the character in Gigolo would have been 25 years later. And I decided his skills would be social not sexual. He’d be wittier and probably gay. That was the genesis of The Walker. You’re right. I have been trying to get him out of the closet since Taxi Driver. But if you think about the way he has protected himself from his father by creating a superficial persona, that’s his protection. When the superficiality comes under question all of sudden he becomes vulnerable. So I still think he’s got one foot in that closet.”
Will this guy ever get a chance to march in a gay pride parade?
“I don’t think so,” he proffers. “These films are just too hard to finance. It took me six years to get this one off the ground. I think it’s time to say goodbye.”
Like many of Schrader’s unlikely heroes, The Walker undergoes some kind of purification after he finds himself at the centre of a criminal investigation. It’s a recurring directorial preoccupation and one that would seem to have roots in the filmmaker’s stern Calvinist upbringing. As a child, growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, his mother would stab him in the hand with a pin to remind him what hell would feel like. His father, the more severe of his progenitors, would administer whippings with an electric cord. Neither Paul nor Leonard were allowed to go to listen to music or go to the cinema, for such places were regarded as dens of iniquity. Paul, the younger of the two brothers, would not see a film until he was 19-years-old.
“You can never really get away from it,” he states. “Particularly if you packed that baggage for 22 years of your life. It will be with you. It crops up at odd times. You may find yourself referencing a story from the bible and you think ‘Oh Jesus where did that come from?’ You think you have left it behind you but it finds a way.”
How so?
“Well, I’m not a trivial person. I’m quite serious. You stand me beside Willem Dafoe and he’s a gregarious fellow. I mean we’re friends but we have very different personalities. I tend to like to spend time alone. I walk and read and drive alone. He’s the complete opposite.”
And yet Dafoe seems to function as a kind of muse, having appeared in The Last Temptation Of Christ, Light Sleeper, Auto Focus and The Walker.
“Yeah,” Schrader laughs. “It looks that way. I don’t set out to do it. But he’s in Adam Resurrected as well. It’s funny. I never write with anyone in mind. But someone always comes along and says ‘Willem might be good for this’ and I always think, ‘Oh yeah’.”
The young Schrader was planning to be a minister for his family’s breakaway Calvinist sect when the counter-culture bit. His naturally solitary tendency and the thrill of the forbidden drew him toward cinema. He hooked up with Pauline Kael through film courses in Columbia and wound up in LA working as a critic.
A screening of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket would inspire him down a different road.
“Well, that was the film that opened the door for me,” Schrader reveals. “I was a critic in 1969. I never thought there was a place for me in the filmmaking world. My interest was scholarly, I never saw myself as having any potential that way. And then I saw this film about this guy in a room. He’s a criminal but he’s also on a kind of spiritual journey. So I thought, ‘Wow, I could do something like that. There may be a place for me in this industry.’ It sparked me to write a book about Bresson and then eventually to write Taxi Driver.”
He and brother Leonard had already received a record sum ($325,000) to pen the screenplay for The Yakuza, but Taxi Driver, written during a bout of drinking and depression, would place Schrader right at the epicentre of a minor revolution. At a time when such young turk directors as Coppola, Spielberg, De Palma and Scorsese were breaking into the industry, cinema was hip and definitely dangerous. It’s a tribute to the film’s potency that when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, he did so after repeated viewings of Taxi Driver in a misguided attempt to impress Jodie Foster. In the wake of the shooting, the FBI contacted both Scorsese and Schrader.
“I had to lie to them,” admits Schrader. “They wanted to know if I had heard from him (Hinckley). I didn’t tell them about the letter. It was just some kid looking to meet Jodie Foster so I threw it out. And I thought, ‘Fuck, if I tell the FBI they’ll never let me go.’ So I said, ‘No, he never got in touch with me.’ I have had some scrapes with local constables but I don’t want the Feds on my case.”
Schrader admits that he probably couldn’t have cracked the industry at any other time, though he insists that the romance of the Brat Pack-era has been greatly exaggerated.
“It’s never been easy to get a film made. Okay, it is harder now, especially in the US where you don’t have subsidies. But the industry has always been driven by marketing. A lot of the films we’re talking about today could not have been made if the marketing was as monolithic as it is now. But it has always been there.”
He’s equally keen to dispel the notion that he’s the social-climbing psychopath found in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a seductive compendium of dirt on Hollywood’s rock ‘n’ roll generation.
“Well, it’s not all untrue,” he reflects. “But it’s not true either. It’s a collection of gossip and hearsay about everybody. There’s a story about me and Richard Pryor and when Peter (Biskind) sent me the galleys, I said, ‘Peter, you have a story that never happened here.’ And he turns around and tells me he has a source, my brother Leonard. It turns out Leonard said something to somebody and that got passed along and by the time it makes it to Peter, it’s a total fabrication. I tell Peter it didn’t happen. He just keeps saying he has a source. It’s that classic thing. When the legend becomes history, print the legend. And the entire book is like that.”
Biskind may have overly glamorised the era, but no cineaste could deny that it’s all been downhill post-Star Wars.
“Oh yeah,” nods Schrader. “I mean you’re touching upon a much bigger issue. The 20th century was the century of the movies and that century is over. Movies will never ever regain the position in society they once had. The filmed entertainment is in the process of changing. We don’t know where technological advances will take it but we do know it will never be what it once was. The proliferation of different kinds of media has destroyed the social function. Movies always had a social function. People came together around film. They were rallying points for certain social and psychological issues. As the audience splinters it has lost a lot of that cohesive power. Movies are not the same anymore.”
I’m loathe to disagree with Paul Schrader, but I don’t really believe that he’s given up on movies. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who maintains a more dynamic relationship with the 10th and loveliest muse.
Recently, after a lifetime of thinking and thinking and thinking about movies, he came full circle on the issue of film canon. His late mentor may have loved the idea of film as trash, but Schrader now sees the need for a definitive list, one that would allow for “beauty, strangeness, unity of form and subject matter, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, and morality.”
Just don’t ask him to compile it.
“I put together a list and at the top you had films like The Rules Of The Game, Tokyo Story, City Lights, Pickpocket,” he says. “But it became too daunting a task. There were too many cultural and aesthetic considerations. And there are now so many films. It’s no longer possible for a young film fan to know film any more than one could definitely know western literature. When I was starting out 40 years ago it was possible to know all film history but not today. Still, I think the idea of the canon becomes more attractive now as we can see the boundaries of film history.”
He’s not only thinking about the medium. He remains active in a tough sector. Today he talks about hopping between cities and countries – the Isle of Man, Germany, Israel, Hungary – just so he can keep working.
Are these really the actions of a man who thinks film is dead?
“Well, it’s a strange one,” he smiles. “I was shooting in Bucharest recently and I found myself on the set and thinking, ‘You know, if this is my last shoot it would be okay.’ And I thought ‘Wow, where did that thought come from?’ I have always been such a careerist and such a hustler. I lost my brother (Leonard) last November and maybe some of the indigestibility of his death is coming back to haunt me. And I thought maybe my career is over now. But I was having dinner with Scorsese last week and I asked him if those thoughts ever came to him. So he said, ‘Yeah, but you got to shut that voice up right away’. And I guess he’s right.”b