In his first flourishing years as a Hollywood screenwriter, Paul Schrader hung out at a sprawling house in Brentwood, just across the street from where Marilyn Monroe was found dead. He would sleep during the day, or drive round looking for porn cinemas. At night, he would sit up writing, a brass crown of thorns perched on his head and a .38 idling on the desk beside him.
Whenever Schrader hit a tricky patch he would stop typing, put the gun to his temple and dry-fire the trigger. Click, click, click. Taxi Driver was written this way. Hollywood folklore is rife with such stories of Schrader: this wannabe Calvinist minister, adopted as the psycho-visionary of 1970s cinema; this critic turned scriptwriter turned loose-cannon director.
For the choicest anecdotes, simply leaf through Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a colourful account of the Scorsese-Spielberg-Coppola generation of movie-brats.
But beware: the Schrader inside is not a pretty sight. We see his hysterical tantrums, his sex and death fancies, his selling out of his nearest and dearest. Schrader (ever cinema's great completist) has read the book. He calls it "the gossip culture's revenge on the counter-culture". Later, he takes a hit of coffee and concedes that, "there is some truth in practically all of it".
It is early morning, and wintry. Schrader has just arrived in London after a six-day crossing on the QE2, and says he can feel the room moving under his feet. On the table between us, an asthma inhaler sits atop a copy of Philip Roth's I Married A Communist. At 52, he has the look of a mischievous but benign uncle, with his conservative clothes, his twinkly eyes, his fleshy nose supporting outsized specs. His voice sounds like Donald Duck after cigarettes. But on closer inspection, there is something blurred and unfinished about him. His body and face look lived in without ever quite becoming home.
For the first chunk of the interview, Schrader talks about Affliction, his smouldering adaptation of the Russell Banks novel, which has Nick Nolte's cop cracking up in snowbound New England.
Affliction opens up like a straight murder-mystery genre piece (small-town cop gets in over his head), then inexorably shifts its focus. The film's real mystery, we grow to realise, lies in the volatile insides of its character's head.
"One of the nice things about film is that you can have someone say one thing and do another," Schrader points out. "They can say: `I love that woman more than life itself', then sneak off to a bar and pick up someone else. And that has always interested me about characters, that classic Freudian inquiry."
That said, Affliction is also a startlingly up-front and red-blooded thing - a film borne out of its creator's age-old obsessions with male ritual and violence bred in the bloodline. A depth-charge, in other words, into the sludge of Schrader's own past. Schrader admits it. All of his pictures are at least halfway autobiographical. More crucially, he feels that every film-maker has maybe one or two stories to tell and that they simply tell them in a variety of ways. "No matter how far you run, no matter how fast you run," he insists, "you never outrun your background."
Compare Affliction - which plays out in snowy, rural America and hinges on two brothers (Nolte and Willem Dafoe) raised by a brutal father (James Coburn) - with Schrader's Michigan childhood, his elder brother Leonard, and his domineering Calvinist dad. The similarities are striking. Not that movies were a big reference point in the Schrader household. So strict was his upbringing that Schrader didn't see his first film (Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder) until he was 17.
From here, Schrader struck out for California, where he cannibalised the back-catalogue of Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson and worked first as a film critic, then as a writer. He lived the life. His mates were other young guns: Scorsese, De Palma, Spielberg. He drove a car with a vanity-plate that read "OZU" (the perfect symbol for the man's customised blend of art-house formalism and jivey, jukebox Americana).
When Leonard Schrader arrived from Michigan, the pair collaborated on a successful action-flick script (The Yakuza, directed by Sydney Pollack), split the profits and made a bundle. In 1972, Schrader sat down and conjured his darker fantasies into Taxi Driver. Scorsese directed, and Schrader used it as a springboard for his own career behind the camera. Cue the raw-boned Blue Collar, the pristine austerity of American Gigolo - his sole bona fide box-office hit, and an early showcase for Richard Gere - and the schlock-horror of Cat People.
Meanwhile, Schrader's old buddies weren't faring too badly themselves. Spielberg made Jaws, Lucas made Star Wars, Scorsese influenced everyone. The counter-cultural cohorts turned into Hollywood big-shots. The crassest of studio screenwriters couldn't have dreamed up a more fairytale finale. Except that Schrader's protagonists rarely enjoy such conventionally happy endings (and Schrader movies are autobiographical, remember).
In reality, the director's golden years were strung out on a knife edge of cocaine, mangled relationships and suicide dreams. And anyway, says Schrader, the gang he once ran with were never friends, not really: "Just a bunch of carnivores hanging out in a pack. You couldn't turn to each other for sustenance."
Even Scorsese, with whom he collaborated on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, does not quite qualify. "With Scorsese it's more of a respectful working relationship, a sort of arms-length affection."
In 1988, even that relationship seemed to be over. Today the pair are once more working in tandem: Schrader adapting the script for Bringing out the Dead (from Joseph Connelly's novel); Scorsese directing it down in New Orleans. "We had not expected to work together again," Schrader admits. "But it actually went very well. I was pleasantly surprised."
But the biggest casualty of Schrader's time in the sun was his brother Leonard. Their relationship - always one of simmering sibling rivalry - imploded spectacularly on the set of Mishima in 1984. This stylised biopic of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima was originally Leonard's idea, until Paul took it as his own. "He stopped talking to me," says Paul. "Put it that way."
Why was that? "Aah, he started seeing in me something that he had always seen in our father, which is someone who would reach in and steal your identity." Was that valid? "It could have been," he concedes. "Because by that time I had begun to treat him like an employee. But still, I mean, 15 years is a long time."
Asked if he feels guilty, Schrader wriggles on the couch: "There's not much I can do about it. He gets a signal about once a year, but he doesn't respond. Perhaps if his career had gone better, it might have been easier." The last he heard, Leonard was teaching at the University of South Carolina in Charleston.
What's ironic is that this meltdown happened at a time when Schrader finally appeared to be getting his own life in order. The years prior to Mishima had become an ongoing personal hell, with a combination of Hollywood excess and the ghosts of his family threatening to overwhelm him. One could say that suicide runs in the Schrader genes: three men on his father's side killed themselves while he was growing up.
Penny Marshall, the director of Big, who knew Schrader at the time, recalls his peculiarly fastidious method of taking the same way out: "He was going to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger, but wrap a towel around his head so he didn't make a mess."
As I mention this, Schrader pours more coffee. This procedure grows more fascinating as the interview winds on. On his first helping, he filled the tiny cup to its brim and added one sugar cube. On his second, he filled it half-way, then introduced another cube. This is his third helping: he fills the cup no more than half an inch. In goes another cube. The concoction must by now be a concentrate of caffeine and crystals.
"There was a time when the idea of suicide was an extremely comforting one," he says. "The sense that this could be over. I used to use long, elaborate suicide fantasies to go to sleep. Checking into a hotel room, and the type of gun, and all that, and at someplace in the narrative I would fall asleep." What, always before you pulled the trigger? Schrader brays wheezy laughter. "Well, if you didn't, you had to start all over again."
In the end, the fantasy evaporated abruptly. Its disappearance coincided both with the making of Mishima (with its hara-kiri concerns) and the birth of his daughter. "It became perfectly clear that it was a selfish fantasy mechanism," he points out, "and that now I was a father I wasn't allowed that level of selfishness."
Today Schrader lives in New York with his wife (actress Mary Beth Hurt) and their two children. He attends church (Episcopal, not Calvinist) every Sunday. During our brief meeting, he gave the impression of a recovering something (addict, alcoholic, whatever); a man at the tail-end of an ordeal, which has left him physically and spiritually blunted, without ever quite dulling his enthusiasm, or his mental edge. Having subdued the demons that once fuelled his work, he is now mulling over the cost. Schrader confesses that a part of him suspects he's just coasting now, that his best stuff is behind him.
Still, he is rightly proud of Affliction, and pleased with Bringing out the Dead. The trees, he says, have come into bloom again. Even so, doubts remain. On the one hand, Schrader feels more content now than he's ever been.
"But it's a two-edged thing. I mean, contentment is nice. On the other hand, you always have that nagging thing in the back of your head that says: `Boy, if I completely f*** up my life, and lose all my money, and ruin my marriage, and alienate my children, then maybe I'll have something to say'." That wheezy laugh again. "And then you think: `Wait a second. Maybe I won't'." More laughter. "And then I'm really screwed."
By this point, Paul Schrader's mirth has induced a coughing fit. He reaches across the table, ignores the inhaler and goes for the coffee instead.
Affliction is on general release.