The gospel of film according to Paul Schrader
The opening scene of Brillante Mendoza’s latest film, Lola, is a hell of a way to open Cinemanila 2009: an elderly lady (the utterly convincing Anita Linda) struggles, against unrelenting Manila winds, to light a candle for her slain grandson. She fiddles with a box of matches on the street, each stick sputtering out; she casts each spent match to the ground, lights another, as the winds turn her umbrella into a broken spider web. It’s a portrait in futility, or perseverance, depending on how you look at it. Maybe it’s a reflection of the latter for Cinemanila organizer Tikoy Aguiluz, who battles each year to maintain the fest’s quality, find a permanent home for screenings, and at the very least corral 70 or so international films for competition and public viewing. His assessment of this year’s festival in a pithy nutshell? “We’re still here,” Tikoy says with a shrug.
Set in squatter areas of Manila inundated by floodwaters, Lola reflects Mendoza’s success at the recent Venice Film Festival (another city forever in danger of sinking) and Cannes. It perhaps gives Filipino filmmakers hope yet again that their stories will somehow reach international audiences. This year’s fest focuses more on local fare, with a “Digital Lokal” block (six local movies shot on DV cameras), a night devoted to the deaf in local film and a tribute to late film critic Alexis Tioseco.
Also here this year is filmmaker Paul Schrader, whose recent feature Adam Resurrected was shown after he gave a “master class” lecture to young filmmakers and media people gathered in Market! Market!, ills winds or no.
Schrader coped with the absence of stage lighting to converse and field questions about screenwriting, directing and getting your stories told at a time when Hollywood is experiencing its own crisis — not the “crisis of story and ideology” that his generation faced in the early ‘70s when studios gave way to new filmmakers, but a “crisis of technology and revenue collection.” Ironically, it’s a time when technology has allowed countless people to shoot their own movies for next to nothing and post them online — yet fewer people are watching them and more cinemas, Schrader predicts, will close down for good in the near future.
Despite the downbeat message, Schrader, dressed in Crocs and shorts, generously ladled out tales about shooting films like Affliction with James Coburn and Nick Nolte, writing Taxi Driver and getting his movies made in an inhospitable climate.
With his strict Dutch-Calvinist Midwestern background, the young Schrader wasn’t allowed to watch movies until he was 18; he had a kind of apocalyptic epiphany while viewing his first film, Anatomy of a Murder, alone: he saw angels descending inside the darkened theater, and thought he was going to burn in hell. Naturally, he devoted the rest of his life to film. He was taken under the wing of influential film critic Pauline Kael in New York, wrote a book of film analysis called Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, and eventually sold his first script co-written with his brother Leonard, The Yakuza, to a Hollywood studio in 1975 for a reported $325,000.
Next up was Taxi Driver, which came from Schrader’s own “personal problems” at the time: driving around LA late nights, drinking a lot, sleeping in porno cinemas, developing an ulcer (“I had a gun at the time, and a lot of suicidal ideation,” he mentions).
“I realized I had this metaphor of a taxi driver — this guy in an iron coffin, in the middle of the city, surrounded by people yet absolutely alone,” he explains. “I knew I needed to write that script; I didn’t write it to make money, to impress anyone. I just wrote it because this kid was inside me and if I wrote about it I could make him go away, by exposing him.” So in one swoop, Schrader combined his own personal catharsis with a kind of recipe for screenwriting: focus on characters with personal problems.
The script went to Martin Scorsese, beginning an intermittent, often-stormy working relationship that also resulted in Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead. If we’re to believe Peter Biskind’s anatomy of ‘70s Hollywood, Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, Schrader wrote many of his scripts in those days with an unloaded .38 pistol next to his typewriter; whenever he got stuck writing, he’d pick up the gun and go click, click, click.
You could say Schrader’s characters are all obsessive, self-destructive, always picking at their personal scabs. But that’s only part of the story.
Schrader always seemed to go against the grain, even for the ‘70s pack. Having written at least 18 scripts and directed as many movies, he knows the craft inside and out. His movies range from a mesmerizing study of suicidal novelist Yukio Mishima to a dark and feverish take on Hogan’s Heroes TV actor and porn addict Bob Crane in Auto Focus (a movie Schrader calls “a hoot”); an adaptation of the Russell Bank novel Affliction (in which Nick Nolte memorably extracts his own rotten tooth) to horror movie excess (Cat People, Communion: The Exorcist Prequel); and a trilogy of nocturnal character studies that includes American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and last year’s The Walkers.
As for scriptwriting, Schrader advocates “the oral approach”: “If you have some doubts about your story idea, start telling it to someone — a friend in Starbucks, a stranger in a bar — and about two-thirds of the way through, get up and go to the restroom and come back and don’t tell them the rest. If they don’t ask you about the rest of it, you don’t have a movie! You shouldn’t be writing that thing!
“What’s great about this approach is it saves you from writing scripts that don’t get made, or sold, or even read. It’s very debilitating to write script after script that nothing happens to.”
Working with tough guy legend James Coburn while directing Affliction, he knew the actor’s stoic style would conflict with Nick Nolte’s method approach. “James is of the school, ‘Where’s my money, where’s my mark?’ And Nick is of another school: ‘What’s my motivation?’ So I told James, ‘Listen, if Nick thinks you’re just saying the lines, he’s gonna come after you, and I’m not going to be able to defend you.’ And James said, ‘Oh, you mean like real acting? No one has asked me to do that in a long time, but I think I remember how to do it.’
“Sure enough, the first day of shooting, James comes out with that big voice, and he’s hiding behind it — it’s his most powerful tool. And I said, ‘Shit, this is what I was afraid of.’ So I just had an idea. I said, ‘Have you ever worked in falsetto?’ So I had him read through his lines like this… (in a high voice). It’s embarrassing, particularly to him. But what do actors do when they’re embarrassed? They look for a place to hide. And where did he run? He ran straight into his character.” The role won Coburn an Oscar.
Schrader bemoans today’s film industry — a time when even film criticism (his former vocation) is endangered. Paid critics “are being replaced by this blog world. That’s a real pity, because when you used to be paid, you had a kind of responsibility and you worked hard. A lot of blogosphere critics don’t feel a responsibility to the truth or any social niceties. You get name-calling, no fact-checking… That’s too bad, because you can learn a lot from criticism.”
In his opening remarks, he struck an even bleaker note, telling the Market! Market! crowd that “all who come here today with the hope you’ll get lucky like I did in Hollywood, the odds are tremendously against that.” Not only are formulaic, technology-driven Hollywood sequels squelching the kind of personal filmmaking that Schrader and his generation inherited from the Europeans, but fewer young people are watching movies. “We know why this is: the huge competition of audio/visual devices. We’ve created 20 more types of entertainment, but we still only have 24 hours a day. So who has time to watch movies?”
The obvious question then arises: Why continue making them? Schrader shrugs; there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing. He’s constantly on the move, from country to country, raising investment money and getting his films financed “against all odds.” He shot his latest feature in Romania and Israel with their money; currently he’s working on a Latin-themed movie with Mexican money; and next week, he’s off to Mumbai to finance a Hollywood-Bollywood collaboration.
But even the creator of Travis Bickle can mellow somewhat. In his director’s commentary for the Taxi Driver DVD, Schrader reflects: “It’s a young man’s movie, an adolescent movie, full of semen and anger.” He notes that a lot of the “suicidal glory” evident in his characters disappeared right after his daughter was born. “Suddenly I realized how selfish that kind of ideation was. You immediately have to put that kind of thinking away and be responsible. And I told a friend about this later, and he told me not to worry: he said this kind of thinking would come back.”
It’s comforting, somehow, to think Schrader continues to pick at his wounds — and still burns with the passion for film that he first encountered as a 20-something Calvinist Midwesterner beset by angels in a movie theater.
