Film-makers on film: Paul Schrader

Film-makers on film: Paul Schrader

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 25/01/2003

Los Angeles, 1969. Paul Schrader had just given up his original vocation, to become a Calvinist minister, and was following a university course in film studies. He had also landed a coveted job as film critic for a new underground magazine, the LA Free Press. One of his first assignments was Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, which was made in 1959 but had taken 10 years to reach the West Coast.

The reasons for the delay are not difficult to guess: Bresson's films are hardly hot commercial prospects. Fiercely uncompromising and minimalist, his work, invariably about a soul's struggle to survive a world of cruelty, pares away such worldly fripperies as spectacle, dialogue, music and drama in order to seek a higher spiritual truth.

Schrader's review was so effusive that it had to be published in two instalments. "An unmitigated masterpiece," he raved, although he also admitted, "Bresson deprives the viewer of every superficial pleasure . . . there is a good chance that Pickpocket will bore the hell out of you."

Here was someone who was unafraid to challenge the zeitgeist: two months later, Schrader's equally provocative pan of Easy Rider got him fired. Undeterred, he wrote a whole book, Transcendental Style in Film, about the presence of the Holy in the work of Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu.

Bresson rarely gave interviews, so it's interesting to learn that Schrader managed to gain an audience with the reclusive French master.

"I met him in 1976 on the way to Cannes at his apartment on the Ile St Louis in Paris," he recalls. "We spoke two different languages, both literally and figuratively. My questions and his answers were not connected and it was a weird, fascinating interview. I remember my own hubris, because at the end he said to me, 'Are you going to have the big prize at Cannes?' And I said, 'I think so.' "

Fighting words. But they were justified. The film was Taxi Driver, which Schrader wrote and Martin Scorsese directed, and it did, indeed, win the Palme d'Or. Two years later, Schrader himself stepped behind the camera to make Blue Collar, soon followed by Hardcore and American Gigolo.

Paul Schrader, writer/director

Born: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1946

Selected films:
Taxi Driver 1976, screenplay
Blue Collar 1978
Raging Bull 1980, screenplay
American Gigolo 1980
Affliction 1997
Auto Focus 2002

Within a couple of years, he had become one of America's most respected - and iconoclastic - writer-directors.

I wonder whether Schrader's tastes have changed since he became a practising film-maker. But, although he flirts briefly with another work by Bresson, A Man Escaped, he swiftly returns to his first love.

"I adore Pickpocket and can watch it endlessly. To me it's as close to perfect as there can be. It's a rather short [75-minute] piece about a moral investigator in the form of a policeman and a young man who thinks he is somehow above the law. Well, he isn't. But there is a girl, and she is an element of grace which comes into his life."

At the end, this character visits the pickpocket in prison. "I copied that ending in American Gigolo, which was sort of perverse because American Gigolo is a very superficial film. But I stuck it on just because I liked it. When I came to do Light Sleeper, I realised, 'No, this is where I should have used it.' So I used it again!"

Schrader's work is peppered with such moments that echo Bresson's films, though he has never tried for the same stylistic austerity.

"I'm not rigorous enough to even attempt what he did. But he taught me I could make films about unlikeable people - I could take an outcast, a lonely man, a guy who lives an interior life, and say, 'Let's walk in his shoes.'

"Pickpocket gave me the courage to write Taxi Driver, and from that point on I have never had a problem with characters that appear beyond empathy. I've made films about a wannabe assassin, a gigolo, a drug dealer and a guy who's totally into home porn." Due to open here in the spring, this last, Auto Focus, tells the true story of Bob Crane, the star of a long-forgotten 1960s sitcom Hogan's Heroes, who, dazzled by fame, left his family to become a sleazy swinger. "He's a jerk," says Schrader. "But he's a fascinating jerk, kind of likeable in a way, and one of the things that makes him interesting is his sexual obsessions."

It is intriguing to imagine what Bresson might have made of Schrader's current project: a prequel to The Exorcist which follows the Max von Sydow character as a young priest in Africa. It will be a hard call to match the classic cult status of the 1973 original: is Schrader still as self-assured today as that critic who once sat at Bresson's feet?

"I'm confident about my ability to make things work that other people don't believe can work," he says. "But I'm not confident about how the world will treat me."