Paul schrader

Born on July 22, 1946, in Grand Rapids (Michigan), Paul Joseph Schrader received a Calvinist upbringing, apparently excessively strict and obfuscated. His mother, who belonged to the Christian Reformed Church, a schism from Dutch Calvinism, came one day and stuck a needle into his hand several times. “This is hell, but non-stop,” she told him next. This very particular childhood would later be reflected in all of his work. ” In Protestant theology we believe in three basic concepts: sin, redemption and grace. I am interested above all in sin and redemption”, he declared .

Perhaps his love of cinema comes from the fact that when he was little he was not allowed to watch movies. “Everything that was considered mundane entertainment was prohibited.” As it is, Paul Schrader didn’t see his first movie until he was 18 years old. “I finally got to see The Nutty Professor , but it was a disappointment, because I was a very serious boy.” Shortly after, he discovered the work of tormented and Nordic authors such as Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer ., with whom he connected much more. They made such a deep impression on him that he decided to study film, graduating from UCLA Film Studies. Later, he became a film critic for the LA Weekly Press and Cinema Magazine. In 1972 he wrote the influential book “The transcendental style in the cinema: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer”.

He debuted as a screenwriter when he wrote with his older brother, Leonard Schrader (who died in 2006), the script for Yakuza , which after a review by the great Robert Towne ( Chinatown ), ended up in the hands of Sydney Pollack . The writing team was inspired, judging by his brilliant phrases: ” When a Japanese breaks down, he will close the window and kill himself; when an American breaks down, he will open the window and kill another .”

The film, with Robert Mitchum as an ex-combatant who helps a Japanese friend whose daughter has been kidnapped by the mafia, became a cult film, which means that it was not very successful, but it garnered many fans, especially among the people of the industry, which gave a great boost to the career of Paul Schrader. In fact, Yakuza made him known among the generation of directors that were beginning to emerge at the end of the 70s. One of them, Brian De Palma , signed him for Fascination , a free review of From Among the Dead (Vertigo) , by Alfred Hitchcock .

He married Jeannine Claudia Oppewall in 1969, a production designer who would later sign titles such as LA Confidential or Los puentes de Madison . But Schrader soon loses interest and is unfaithful. Finally, he quarrels with her wife and breaks up with her to go off with a lover with whom he also argues, and who leaves him. This double break makes him enter a deep crisis. “I had fallen into a state of manic-depressive psychosis. Not being able to sleep, I spent three or four weeks eating garbage, watching porn and wandering around in my car at night. It was a period shaken by the sick desire to kill myself,” he said.

“Eventually I suffered from an ulcer, which caused me to be hospitalized. I honestly think that saved my life.” To exorcise his inner demons, he begins writing the script for Taxi Driver , always keeping a loaded revolver next to the typewriter to serve as inspiration. It doesn’t take more than 10 days, because he had a great need to write that story. “I wanted to express the absolute syndrome of urban loneliness,” he has declared. Autobiographical elements abound. “At the time I wrote it, I was in love with guns. I was suicidal, I was a heavy drinker, I was obsessed with pornography in the way that a lonely person is, and all of those elements are in the script.”

When he finishes writing, Paul Schrader hands over his work to his agent and leaves the city of Los Angeles. Such a bombshell did not go unnoticed by producers Michael and Julia Philips. At first they wanted Brian De Palma to take it to the screen, who was immersed in other projects, but he acted as an intermediary, introducing them to the young Martin Scorsese . The Philips aren’t too convinced at first, but relent when they see Mean Streets , hoping the filmmaker will cast Robert De Niro as the lead .

Finally, the film casts De Niro as Travis Bickle, a lonely and unstable ex-Vietnam fighter who starts working as a taxi driver. Taxi Driver wins the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and gets four Oscar nominations. It should be noted that according to his usual way of working, Scorsese carried out numerous rehearsals allowing his actors to introduce some improvisations. De Niro himself contributed dialogue for the famous moment where he draws his gun in front of the mirror (“are you talking to me?”) which was not in the original script. The very personal Scorsese also introduced modifications; when directing he was inspired by the classic Centaurs of the desert , by John Ford, also with a hero who has lost a war he believed in, lonely, short on words, with an impossible, racist and violent love.

Since then, Schrader maintained a close friendship with Scorsese, with whom he collaborated again on the excellent Raging Bull , and later on the not-so-inspired The Last Temptation of Christ and Full Throttle (1999) , during the filming of which there was so much tension between director and scriptwriter, who are currently barely related.“We were quite similar: the same age, the same physique, both asthmatics, cinephagos, prone to overthinking everything… Marty was a Catholic, an urbanite and of Italian descent. I, however, a small-town Calvinist with Dutch ancestors. I think that we were different enough that something interesting came out of our work together. Now things have changed: we see each other once a year, we live on different planets… And Marty’s is much older .”

The success of Taxi Driver allows Paul Schrader to launch himself into production, with Blue Collar . An actor from that one, Harvey Keitel , repeats, accompanied by Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto , who despite the difficulties in dealing with the director, achieved some memorable performances, as three workers in an assembly line who commit robbery to solve their problems economic.

Throughout his filmography, Schrader has given free rein to his thematic obsessions, such as regret, appearances and the desire to change ( American Gigolo ), dissatisfaction with sexual relations ( Kiss of the Panther ) or the business of sex and perversions ( Hardcore, a hidden world ). One of his best works revolves around suicide, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters , a biopic financed by George Lucas of the controversial Japanese writer Yukio Mishima , a grieving, self-destructive man full of ghosts, who fits very well into the gallery of characters Schrader’s. He also wrote the script for The Mosquito Coast., which was made into a film by Peter Weir .

In 1983, Paul Schrader rebuilt his life with Mary Beth Hurt , an actress who has appeared in titles such as Woody Allen’s Interiors . He has had two children with her, which has given him some stability. In the 90s, Schrader shoots some high-rise films, such as Escape Chance , similar to American Gigolo , with a drug dealer ( Willem Dafoe ) accused of murder as Richard Gere’s character in it. He especially highlights Affliction , a film very his, with Nick Noltedoing a great job as a divorced deputy sheriff, who gets out of control, drinks, takes drugs and ends up causing his daughter to return to her mother, which sets him off on a path of violence and degradation. Veteran James Coburn stands out as an abusive father, a role that won him an Oscar.

But in recent times, Paul Schrader has not raised his head, as if he had lost any need to make movies. They fired him from The Exorcist: The Beginning , as he shoots a very discursive film, with complex existential monologues, so the producers replace him with Renny Harlin , to add scares. The Walker doesn’t just work , with Woody Harrelson as a companion-entertainer for politicians’ wives and who, of course, will be implicated in a crime. The film has some discovery, such as its criticism of the perpetuation of the political class. In the pretentious Adam Risen , an overacting Jeff GoldblumHe plays a deranged man who is admitted to a mental institution, where he helps the director treat a newly arrived child, while reminiscing about his painful past.

He has garnered very negative reviews with The Canyons , a crowdfunded project about the world of Hollywood today, written by Brett Easton Ellis. The filming was difficult for him because of the conflictive protagonist. “I have been a prisoner of Lindsay Lohan . Today is my first day off. I have been a hostage to an unpredictable actress for 18 months,” she has come to comment.