REEL LIFE: Paul Schrader

Notes from the Reel Life event with Paul Schrader at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2005

With the Edinburgh Film Festival playing host to Paul Schrader’s suppressed cut of the Exorcist prequel, Dominion, the Reel Life interview with Schrader was always going to be dominated by one question. After the Exorcist franchise holders Morgan Creek took the prequel off Schrader’s hands letting Renny Harlin almost totally re-shoot it before releasing that version to minimal profit and almost vengeful criticism. After all that, how on earth did Paul Schrader bring his original, superior version to public screenings, first at the Brussels Fantasy Film Festival and now Edinburgh? Towards the end of the talk Schrader finally explained exactly how, presenting the obvious in a way worthy of a screenwriter of his calibre: ‘whenever greed does battle with hubris, greed will always win. I underestimated the power of greed’. At the time of writing Dominion is set for DVD release in October. In the current cinema world that now takes DVD very seriously indeed, this is vindication of a kind.

When asked about his first experience of a cinema franchise, Schrader was blunt ‘make an effort to stay far away’. He then continued ‘the script I was given was a ‘70s movie, retro-horror which caused the problem. The original notion was a throw back horror film, which in retrospect was not a wise decision’. When asked to explain what exactly made the script a ‘70s film his response was ‘character development driven, less CGI, slower pace, stately atmosphere as opposed to the video game mentality – up front all the time where character was secondary to the ride’. The interviewer described Schrader’s decision to work with a studio again after many years as a ‘return to the citadel’ to which the man himself added ‘I don’t know why they chose me, probably for Auto Focus. [John] Frankenheimer got sick, three months later I got the job. Affliction took me six years to get the funding. This was a temptation!’ Then to assay any unspoken criticisms about Dominion he continued ‘the script I was given was even more serious than my film. Clearly a mistake had been made. I got folded into a mistake. Normally a studio would release it and move on’. Except they didn’t in this case, they started again which neatly returns us to the power of DVD. The festival screenings have all been a warm-up for the DVD release giving Morgan Creek a second chance to turn a buck on the Exorcist Prequel. Though to be fair they are different films unlike many DVD special editions.

The Exorcist debacle exhumed, the interview moved on to Schrader’s heavy body of work from Pauline Kael protégée to Scorsese screenwriter and director in his own right. Information documented elsewhere but straight from the source. Paul Schrader is indeed as David Thomson describes in my battered 1994 edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film ‘among the best talkers’.

Particular highlights here included growing up in a rural Protestant Dutch community in Michigan. Schrader came to cinema at the relatively late age of 16 sneaking off to see The Absent Minded Professor. Underwhelmed, it was only when he saw an Elvis flick later that the illicit thrill of cinema kicked in. This late introduction to cinema put me in mind of Korean director Kim Ki-Duk who allegedly didn’t see his first film until he was into his thirties.

Rural Protestant Dutch is of course relevant because of how one might describe Martin Scorsese in similar terms: Urban Catholic Italian. You could throw being the asthmatic younger brother into the mix also. Schrader passed his script for Taxi Driver onto Brian de Palma who passed it to Scorsese. The two men were sufficiently similar to ‘get’ one-another and as Schrader puts it, sufficiently different to get along.

This kind of talk leads to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls territory, the other fashionable reason to interrogate Schrader about, 1970’s Hollywood cinema. As he describes it with Scorsese, he thought it was a sea change. This was a time of politicisation brought on by Vietnam and the draft, civil rights, gender, sexuality and they all thought that film was following, as it always does, late. As we know they were wrong. The sea change was a blip, an aberration. The right wingers were watching and paying attention and they started to use market research to determine what the public wanted. Schrader’s superb example at this point concerns hiring artists ‘you tell the decorator what colour to paint a room not vice versa’ As he retells it, this didn’t happen in the 1970s. So the studios then told the movie makers what they wanted and the 1970s kind of films were phased out, Schrader recalls returning from making Mishima in Japan in 1984 and realising that it had all changed. This was about the time the American Independents started to appear to fill the void which of course Schrader chortles; they too also eventually stopped becoming independent.

From here it’s left for Schrader to marvel at the free form approach of screenplays and films that now exists, trash modern screenwriting courses and videogames, and mourn the passing of cinema ‘the 20th century was the century of film. I don’t think that in the 21st century films won’t regain their social importance, they may not even gain their artistic importance’.

There was more, there always is. So to finish with an anecdote: ‘never underestimate the bonding power of asthma’.