As the writer of Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader bashed out some of the best-known lines in cinema and created a character he has revisited many times: the tortured male antihero. He tells Donald Clarkeabout his latest film as a director, The Walker, and the demons that have always been on hand to help with his film-making
Paul Schrader has, in some respects, been an old codger forever. During the wild days of the early 1970s he did, it is true, ingest his fair share of narcotics and fling himself at quite a few eager young women. Still, the screenwriter and director has always had the air of a resting intellectual about him.
Promiscuously well-read, contemptuous of lazy thinking, Schrader looks very much at home in the body of a 61-year-old man. On the day of our interview, his dark suit is well pressed. The knot in his tie is perfectly symmetrical. I feel as if I have been summoned to explain why my essay is late.
"Well, at a certain age you have to start dressing like an adult," he laughs in an odd asthmatic voice that somehow suggests both Darth Vader and Elmer Fudd.
It is now more than 30 years since Schrader's script for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driverboldly announced the arrival of a singular new talent. In that time, Schrader has directed 15 features of his own and found himself gradually elevated to the status of "living legend". As befits a figure who came of age during the era of beatnik existentialism, he has demonstrated a particular interest in the troubled loner who struggles to cope in a world of corruption and compromise.
After Travis Bickle finished cleaning the streets of Manhattan, Schrader, now directing his own scripts, brought us further urban wanderers in American Gigoloand Light Sleeper. Now he returns to the theme with a fascinating new picture called The Walker. Woody Harrelson plays a gay socialite who spends his evenings accompanying rich, bored women to operas and cocktail parties in Washington DC. When one member of his coterie, a married woman, discovers her lover murdered, he agrees to pretend that he discovered the body.
Intrigue follows.
"That character began all those years ago with Taxi Driver," Schrader wheezes. "He's the kind of a guy who wanders around and looks into the world. He is essentially a voyeur. He performs a social service. He doesn't have much of a life and is trying to find one. Taxi Driverwas a metaphor for my own sense of displacement. As I have gotten over that, the metaphor has changed from that of anxious narcissism to superficiality. It's a nice variation. There are bits of me in there. But it is never a one-on-one correspondence with me."
Consideration of the young Schrader's "sense of displacement" in 1970s Hollywood inevitably leads one to consider the most discussed and pondered aspect of his early life. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Schrader was raised in a strict Calvinist household and was not allowed to enter a cinema until he was 18 years old. One wonders if that upbringing causes him to frown at the decadence represented in The Walker.
"I don't find it decadent. Anyway, decadence is valuable," he says. "Where that Calvinism does kick in is when I find myself getting angry about the triviality of modern life. So much of the culture of Calvinism is so value-oriented. There is a work ethic to it. Things have meaning. Time is important. A man's life is important. The Calvinism does not kick in when I see men in pink hot pants. It kicks in when I see precious culture trivialised."
After leaving school, Schrader, whose mother had stuck pins in him to give him a little taste of hell's torments, made his way to Calvin College with the intention of becoming a minister. But the movies quickly got hold of him and proceeded to drag him away from the path of righteousness.
On a visit to New York in the late 1960s, Schrader, by then a hopeless victim of the buff virus, was lucky enough to be introduced to the great film critic Pauline Kael. After spending an evening talking to the young man, Kael, a mentor to many budding geniuses, became convinced that he, too, should write about cinema for a living. She got him a place studying film at UCLA and, later, jobs reviewing movies for the LA Weekly Press and Cinema magazine.
By that stage, French critics such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut had already mapped out the path that led from writing about movies to directing them. I assume that Schrader intended from the start to move into film-making.
"No, I don't think that was at all in my head," he says. "At UCLA we had to make a student film, but that was that. I was just going to make my way in film studies. It came upon me rather slowly."
He admits that a key moment came with his first viewing of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket(1959). That hypnotic French film, in which a thief returns to his trade after being released from prison, proved to be a persistent influence on Schrader's own movies.
"I had not imagined that sort of film was possible. But I suddenly thought: I could do that. There's this guy in this room. He has all these repressed spiritual values. Maybe there was a place for somebody like me in the motion picture business. That was when the thought stated to germinate."
If reports in Peter Biskind's unavoidable book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls are to be believed, Paul Schrader's early days in Hollywood were largely taken up with crashing motorcars, waving guns around and hoovering up white powders. Schrader took to coke like mother's milk, Biskind writes in his deliciously unreliable compendium of gossip. He plunged into the drug scene with the enthusiasm of a lapsed fundamentalist. How any of these guys found time to make a film remains a mystery.
"Well, yes. Biskind's version is a gross exaggeration for the very simple reason that if we were behaving like that we wouldn't have been working," he agrees. "Every proper artist that drinks and does drugs still has a first priority and that is the work. The moment that changes he stops being an artist and Peter Biskind would stop writing about him."
Nonetheless, the script of Taxi Driveris fired with an agitation that speaks of pharmaceutical and emotional disorder. Schrader admits that the idea for the picture came during the darkest period of his life: he was broke, had fallen out with Kael and was reduced to living in his car. The vehicle had, he explains, taken on the quality of a coffin.
"Yes, I wrote that script as self-therapy. I didn't write it to sell, really. I had enormous pain in my stomach and it transpired I had an ulcer at just 26 years old. I realised I hadn't spoken to anybody in weeks. I was just like a taxi driver. So I sat down and hammered the script out really quickly to exorcise those demons."
Can he still write so quickly today? "Oh no. First of all, the pressure to create isn't there to that degree any more. Also, when you are young you can put in those long hours. You can start at eight in the evening and work straight to eight in the morning. You can do the nicotine and the caffeine and, eventually, the cocaine that it takes to keep that schedule. You get a little older and your body just can't do that."
Shortly after Taxi Driverbecame a surprise hit, Schrader embarked on his first project as director. Blue Collar, a tale of car workers driven to crime co-written with his brother Leonard, was a gripping piece of work, but the studio, concerned that two of the three leads were black, made no serious effort to promote it.
Despite delivering first-class pictures such as Light Sleeper, Afflictionand Auto-Focus, Schrader is frequently viewed as a screenwriter first and a director second. This is a partly a consequence of his success in writing some of the most highly regarded American pictures of all time for his buddy Martin Scorsese. Raging Bull, the boys' 1980 biopic of boxer Jake LaMotta, now looks like a searing meditation on the self-destructive urges that had recently consumed both writer and director.
"I met Marty pretty early on. We realised quite quickly we had a lot in common. We both had similar personalities. For a start, we were both short and asthmatic. We were both film buffs. He was an urban Roman Catholic and I was rural Protestant. But our backgrounds both had the same moral configuration. Actually, we had dinner last week and we still have a lot in common."
Have the two men matured in the same way? "Yes, I suppose we have," he laughs.
There is great variety in Paul Schrader's work as a director - American Gigolopresents Richard Gere as a camp, flashy icon of 1980s hedonism; the more recent Auto Focusrelates the unbearably sordid decline of TV star Bob Crane - but certain themes and influences remain consistent throughout. The existentially troubled protagonist of Pickpocketcontinues to reappear, and the films all seem fired by the lingering moral fury of the recovering puritan.
"It is probably not in my own interest to even discuss that," he says. "If I was an old-style director like Howard Hawks or John Ford I would say oh, there is no connection at all between the films, while knowing damn well there was. But, unfortunately, I am from the film-school generation. We were the ones who tried to crack the code of those directors who wouldn't talk. As a result, maybe we talked too much."
So what about the influence of those early years spent deprived of cinematic stimulus? Does Schrader resent his parents' strictness or does he accept that the suppression fired certain creative urges?
"Well, I do resent more than anything else that I was kept away from the warmth of women and sexuality by that puritan mindset," he says. "If I could redo anything I'd redo that. On the other hand, that sort of repression stoked a fire that brought me here - however many years later - with all these films behind me. I might have wished it different, but that upbringing gave me the career I have had. If I did it differently, then maybe I wouldn't have been quite so lucky."
A complicated man with an unshakeable rash of anxieties, Paul Schrader is never going to be entirely at ease with himself. But he admits that he does now enjoy a level of tolerable stability. Married for more than 25 years to the actor Mary Beth Hurt, he has two grown children and, despite his suspicion that cinema as we know it is doomed, continues to direct a film every two years or so. Next year, Adam Resurrected, his version of a cult Israeli novel, will reach cinemas. It must be time to think about slowing down a little.
"You just don't give up in this business," he counters. My brother Leonard died in November. I was shooting Adam Resurrectedat the time and I didn't have time to digest his death. He died. We had the memorial. And then, boom, I was gone. So, putting things in perspective, I found myself on set thinking: if this is the last time I was going to be shooting a film, it wouldn't be so bad."
He sighs and wags his head at the outrageousness of the situation.
"All my life I'd been such a hustler, such a careerist, and suddenly I am having unbidden thoughts of retirement. When I was having dinner with Marty I said: 'Has this occurred to you yet?' And he said: 'Yes, but you have to get those thoughts out of your head. They'll kill you.'"
The Walker opens today
Director's cut: five Schrader classics
Blue Collar (1978) Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor star in this terrific urban thriller in which three Detroit autoworkers uncover corruption after robbing their own trade union's safe. It's Treasure of the Sierra Madrefor thinking miserablists.
American Gigolo (1980) Before the decade had properly begun, Schrader delivered one of the key cinematic meditations on 1980s decadence. Richard Gere plays a hustler who becomes implicated in the murder of one of his clients. The Walkeralmost plays like a sequel.
Light Sleeper (1992) Willem Dafoe stars as a drug dealer who also acts as a kind of confessor to his up-market clients. Like many Schrader projects, the picture features a great deal of driving at night.
Affliction (1997) Based on a Russell Banks novel, this wrenching drama details the fraught relationship between Nick Nolte's small-town cop and his abusive father. James Coburn won a deserved Oscar for his performance as the older man.
Auto Focus (2002) A rare example of Schrader directing somebody else's script. Auto Focus follows the harrowing decline of Bob Crane, star of Hogan's Heroes, into alcoholism and sex addiction. A modern classic.
