To most modern Hollywood directors, alienation might as well be the latest
fragrance from Calvin Klein. But for Paul Schrader, man’s existential
loneliness in a godless universe remains an all-consuming obsession. He may
no longer be enslaved to the puritanical religion of his youth, but he
clearly still believes in Hell on Earth.
In more than three decades as a writer, director and collaborator with some of
the biggest names in cinema, Schrader has exorcised his own self-destructive
demons through a string of morbid psychodramas and autobiographical
antiheroes. He wrote Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last
Temptation of Christ for Martin Scorsese. As a writer-director he has
tackled true stories about suicide, sadomasochism and sex addiction.
Audiences rarely leave a Schrader movie whistling a happy tune.
Schrader’s latest film, The Walker, is relatively benign by his
standards. The body count is low, the moral corruption almost genteel. Woody
Harrelson stars as Carter Page III, a gay gossip hound who makes his living
escorting neglected political widows to stuffy Washington functions, until
he is caught up in a murder plot. Co-starring Lauren Bacall and Kristin
Scott-Thomas, The Walker offers a plusher vision of purgatory than Taxi
Driver, but the flames of Hell are never too far away.
It is tempting to read The Walker as a diabolical depiction of the
current US administration. It certainly paints contemporary Washington as a
nest of well-heeled vipers prepared to sell out friends and hush up murders
in order to maintain the status quo. The notorious Abu Ghraib torture
pictures even figure obliquely in the plot. But Schrader plays down any
obvious political message.
“I really don’t think that’s an artist’s job,” says the brawny, pugnacious
61-year-old. “It’s a citizen job, that’s true. But you do have to find the
truth in the small things, the truth in a character. Because if you approach
it the other way – making a statement about the environment, about
Washington, about race relations – it all gets kind of big and
self-important. Just find the truth in one little person and one little
place, and let it radiate out from there. Whether it’s about Washington,
sexual politics, or whatever.”
Sexual politics is an important thread in The Walker, even if Schrader
will not commit to any wider political agenda. There has long been a latent
homoerotic streak to his work, from Taxi Driver through Mishima
to Auto Focus. But Page’s sexuality, he argues, is chiefly a device
to expose the hypocrisy and hollowness around him.
“I think we’ve finally come to a point in history at which you can make a film
where the main character is homosexual and not have it be a film about
homosexuality,” Schrader says. “First of all I got the idea of the walker.
Then I thought it would be interesting to put him in Washington DC, because
it’s the last important city in America where sexual hypocrisy is mandated.
It would be a much different story in New York, Miami or LA. But in
Washington it really is: don’t ask, don’t tell. That makes the character
interesting. And then the politics started coming out of that.”
Besides a handful of Washington exteriors, The Walker was largely shot
on the Isle of Man and in London, where it was also edited.
Schrader is frank about his pragmatic decision to take advantage of local
budget breaks. “If you shoot 50 per cent of your days in the Isle of Man,
they give you 25 per cent of your budget,” he enthuses. “I personally think
it’s a great place to shoot because there is nothing else to do! Shoot six
days a week, sleep in on Sunday.”
If The Walkeris superficially about modern Washington, on a deeper
level it is also about Schrader himself. Carter Page is the latest in a long
line of thinly disguised surrogates who share the director’s jarring
dislocation from the world around them.
Robert De Niro’s psychotic vigilante Travis Bickle in Taxi Driverwas
the first, born from an intensely lonely period in the early 1970s when
Schrader was drinking heavily, suicidally depressed, and obsessed by guns
and pornography.
“I love to take these marginal characters who many people think are beyond
empathy or identification and say, you know, they are interesting,” he nods.
“Let’s walk down the road with them and see what their world is like. The
other side of the rock is equally valid.” Richard Gere’s hollow political
pawn in American Gigolo, Willem Dafoe’s numb cocaine dealer in Light
Sleeperand Greg Kinnear’s doomed sex addict in Auto Focus all
share in the director’s DNA, too.
Schrader even makes the connection explicit in The Walker, with a
knowing homage to Gere’s mirror scene in American Gigolo. “It
is a kind of a progression, a similar kind of character,” he explains. “He
is older in life, his skills are social not sexual, but I knew there was a
connection between the films.”
The director explains this own sense of alienation as a byproduct of his
religious upbringing. Raised in Michigan by devout Calvinist parents of
Dutch descent, Schrader was forbidden “worldly amusements” as a child and
only saw his first film at 18. But once he arrived at UCLA in 1968, he was
propelled into a universe of sex, drugs and cathartic excess.
“It was a whole radically different world that I became part of,” Schrader
recalls. “But I always felt there was something between me and that world.
It was like looking through a pane of glass and I couldn’t quite touch it,
even though I was in it. And that dislocation first showed up in Taxi
Driver, where there literally was a pane of glass between the character
and the world. I’ve always circled around that same feeling.”
Schrader first broke into Hollywood as part of the 1970s “movie brat”
generation alongside Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford
Coppola. This gritty, vibrant era has since been widely mythologised as a
high watermark for socially significant American cinema, but Schrader is not
entirely convinced.
“Yeah, that so-called golden age,” he shrugs. “It was a golden age in the
sense that cinema was really important, it had a powerful role in society.
Movies really mattered. There were a lot more serious movies being made and
people thought of movies a lot more seriously. That is true, but there was
also a lot of junk.”
Lurid stories about Schrader abound in Peter Biskind’s controversial
postmortem on 1970s Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Cocaine,
porn, nervous breakdowns and backstage bust-ups figure heavily. But like
most of the heavyweight names whose highs and lows Biskind documents,
Schrader dismisses the book as overblown quasi-fiction.
“It was just a patchwork quilt of gossip of innuendo,” he argues. “Peter had
himself a great theme but rather than do a solid book he decided to do a
gossip book. It’s full of false things about people I know, one after
another. It was a classic case of print the myth. It’s second, third,
fourth-hand gossip. That’s why it p***ed a lot of people off.”
Schrader left Hollywood in 1983. “Because of the drugs,” he says. Marrying the
actress Mary Beth Hurt, he swapped cocaine and suicidal despair for
fatherhood and family life. “I went to New York, then Japan. Got married.
Changed my life.”
But compulsive, self-destructive behaviour still fuels his work. There is
plenty of sin in his modern-day passion plays, but rarely salvation. Most of
his protagonists are lost souls, remaining in torment even after the story
ends. Which might help explain why, despite his high critical standing and
multiple awards, he has been a stranger to big-budget features for most of
the past three decades.
Schrader’s only serious commercial hit to date was American Gigolo,
27 years ago. His last major studio production was Cat People in
1983, aside from the aborted debacle of his Exorcist “prequel” Dominion.
“That damn Exorcist situation, which I got into because The
Walker had just fallen through,” he sighs. “I’ve only myself to blame
for getting into it.”
Adding to that was the death of Schrader’s older brother, Leonard. Although
they began their careers writing screenplays together, they fell out when
Paul took sole credit and a larger fee for writing the 1975 gangster
thriller, The Yakuza. Their relationship suffered a final breakdown a
decade later after they collaborated on the mesmerising literary biopic, Mishima.
“At that point I became the older brother, in charge, giving orders,”
Schrader later confessed. The two barely spoke for 15 years.
Following a long illness, Leonard Schrader died in Los Angeles last November
of heart failure. He was 62. His younger brother was present but their feud
was never quite healed. “It was resolved, but not to my satisfaction,”
Schrader frowns. “You always hope the time will come that you mend the
relationship. We mended it, but not to the degree I wanted.”
Following The Walker, Schrader has already finished shooting his next
film, Adam Resurrected. Based on a novel by Yoram Kaniuk, it stars
Jeff Goldblum as a circus clown spared the gas chamber so that he can
entertain his fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. So, then, yet another
journey into Hell on Earth.
When he was young, Schrader’s mother would prick him with a pin as a tiny
preview of the infernal, eternal torments awaiting sinners in the
after-life. Deep down, does he still believe he is going to Hell? “I don’t
know,” Schrader shrugs. “I don’t think they’ll let me in. It’s too crowded.”
The Walker is on general release from Friday. A special edition DVD of Taxi
Driver is released on Aug 13
SCHRADER ON FILM: CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
TAXI DRIVER (1976)
Scorsese’s Catholic vision of purgatory meets Schrader’s puritanical vigilante
nightmare. Both the writer and director were questioned by the FBI after the
film was discovered to have partly inspired John Hinckley’s attempted
assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981. He did it to impress one of the
stars of the film, Jodie Foster.
THE THIRD KIND (1977)
Schrader wrote the first draft of Steven Spielberg’s alien fairytale (starring
Richard Dreyfuss), but removed his credit after the studio toned down his
religious subtext.
RAGING BULL (1980)
Reunited with Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Schrader adapts the life story of
the boxer Jake LaMotta into an Oscar-winning Shakespearean tragedy.
AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980)
Schrader and Richard Gere greet the dawn of the designer decade in this
prophetic and sexy murder thriller.
MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985)
A visually stunning biography of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (played by
Ken Ogata) who formed a homo-fascistic warrior cult and died in a failed
military coup in 1970. Considered by many to be Schrader’s masterpiece.
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988)
Working with Scorsese again, Schrader pens a contentious passion play
depicting Jesus (Willem Dafoe) as a flawed human figure.
AFFLICTION (1997)
A powerful family saga in which Schrader directs an Oscar-winning James Coburn
as an abusive, alcoholic father. Partly inspired by the director’s own
troubled relationship with his parents.
