| Paul Schrader | |
|---|---|
| Born | Paul Joseph Schrader July 22, 1946 Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S. |
| Occupation | screenwriter and film director |
| Years active | 1975–present |
| Spouse | Mary Beth Hurt (1983-) |
Paul Joseph Schrader (born July 22, 1946) is an American screenwriter, film director, and former film critic. Apart from his credentials as a director, Schrader is most notably known for his screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
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Schrader was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the son of Joan (née Fisher) and Charles A. Schrader, an executive.[1] Schrader's family practiced in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church,[2][3] and his early life was based upon the religion's strict principles and parental education. He did not see a film until he was seventeen years old, and was able to sneak away from home. In an interview he stated that The Absent-Minded Professor was the first film he saw. In his own words, he was "very unimpressed" by it, while Wild in the Country, which he saw some time later, had quite some effect on him.[4] Schrader refers his intellectual rather than emotional approach towards movies and movie making to his having no adolescent's movie memories.[5]
Schrader received his BA from Calvin College, with a minor in Theology. He then earned an MA in Film Studies from the UCLA Film School graduate program upon the recommendation of Pauline Kael. With her as his mentor, he became a film critic, writing for the Los Angeles Free Press, and later for Cinema magazine. His book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, which examines the cross-cultural similarities between Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer, was published in 1972. The endings of Schrader's films American Gigolo and Light Sleeper bear obvious resemblance to that of Bresson's 1959 film Pickpocket. His essay Notes on Film Noir from the same year has become a much cited source in literature on film.
Other filmmakers which made a lasting impression on Schrader were John Ford, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Alfred Hitchcock and Sam Peckinpah. Renoir's The Rules of the Game he called the "quintessential movie" which represents "all of the cinema".[5]
In 1974, Schrader co-wrote The Yakuza with his brother, Leonard, a film set in the Japanese crime world. Schrader became involved in a bidding war over the script and it sold for $325,000, which was more than any other screenplay up to that time.[6] The film was directed by Sydney Pollack and featured Robert Mitchum, with screenplay rewritings by Robert Towne of Chinatown fame.
Although The Yakuza failed commercially, it brought him to the attention of the new generation of Hollywood directors. In 1975, he wrote the screenplay of Obsession for Brian De Palma. Schrader also participated in an early draft of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but Spielberg disliked the screenplay, calling it "terribly guilt-ridden", and opted for a lighter script.[7] His script for Rolling Thunder (1977) was reworked without his participation, and Schrader disapproved of the final film.[5]
His script of Taxi Driver was turned into the Martin Scorsese film, which was nominated for a 1976 Best Picture Academy Award. Besides Taxi Driver (1976), Scorsese also drew on scripts by Schrader for Raging Bull (1980), co-written with Mardik Martin, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999).
Taxi Driver provided the critical acclaim and consequently available funding that enabled Schrader to direct Blue Collar (1978), also co-written with his brother Leonard. Blue Collar features Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto as car factory workers attempting to escape their socio-economic rut through theft and blackmail. Schrader recalls that shooting the film was difficult, because of the artistic and personal tension among him and the actors; it was the only occasion he suffered an on-set mental collapse and made him seriously reconsider his career. John Milius acted as executive producer on the following year's Hardcore (again written by Schrader), which showed autobiographical parallels in the depicted Calvinist milieu of Grand Rapids, and the character of George C. Scott which was written after Schrader's father.[5]
Among Paul Schrader's films in the 1980s were American Gigolo (1980), his 1982 remake of Cat People, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985, again co-written with Leonard Schrader, with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas serving as executive producers), for which he was nominated for the Palme d'Or prize at that year's Cannes Film Festival, and Patty Hearst (1988), about the kidnapping and transformation of the Hearst Corporation heiress. In 1987, he was a member of the jury at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival.[8]
His work in the 1990s included The Comfort of Strangers (1990), adapted by Harold Pinter from the Ian McEwan novel, Light Sleeper (1993), a sympathetic study of a drug dealer vying for a normal life, which he called his "most personal" film,[9] Touch (1997), from an Elmore Leonard novel, and the rural drama Affliction (1997), from the Russell Banks novel, which gained wide critical acclaim. In 1998, Schrader was the recipient of the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award.
In 2002 he directed the biopic Auto Focus, loosely based on the life and murder of Hogan's Heroes actor, Bob Crane.
In 2003, Schrader made entertainment headlines for being fired from Exorcist: Dominion, a prequel film to The Exorcist (1973). The production company, Morgan Creek Productions/Warner Bros. disliked the resulting film and had large segments re-shot under director Renny Harlin; it was released as Exorcist: The Beginning in 2004. Schrader's version eventually had its premiere at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film on March 18, 2005 as Exorcist: The Original Prequel. It received limited cinema release under the title Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist in mid-2005.
After that, he filmed The Walker (2007) and Adam Resurrected (2008).
The September-October 2006 issue of Film Comment magazine published his essay Canon Fodder which attempted to establish criteria for judging film masterworks. Schrader headed the International Jury of the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival. Currently, he is a Jury Member of the continuing Filmaka short film contest.[10]
On July 2, 2009, Schrader was awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement in Screenwriting award at the ScreenLit Festival in Nottingham, England. Several of his films were shown at the festival, including Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which followed the presentation of the award by director Shane Meadows.
Schrader also wrote two stage plays, Berlinale and Cleopatra Club. The latter saw its premiere at the Powerhouse Theater in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1995 and its foreign language debut in Vienna in 2011.[5][11][12]
Schrader is married in second marriage to actress Mary Beth Hurt, who appeared in smaller roles in various of his films.
A recurring theme in Schrader's films is the portrayal of a protagonist who is on a self-destructive path or who undertakes actions which work against himself, deliberately or subconsciously. The finale often bears an element of redemption, preceded by a painful sacrifice or a cathartic act of violence.
Schrader repeatedly referred to Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and The Walker as "a man in a room"-films, which form a tetralogy closing with The Walker. The protagonist changes from an angry, then narcissistic, later anxious character to a person who hides behind a mask of superficiality.[5][13][14]
Although many of his films or scripts are based on real-life biographies (Raging Bull, Mishima, Patty Hearst, Auto Focus), Schrader confessed having problems with biographical films due to their altering of actual events, which he tried to prevent by imposing structures and stylization instead.[5]
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