Hell on earth

Hell on earth
It was only when Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel was in the can that things started to go very wrong. He talks to Xan Brooks

o Xan Brooks
o The Guardian,
o Tuesday March 23 2004

The Internet Movie Database provides a glittering set of credits for Paul Schrader. It lists him as the writer of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ and the director of American Gigolo, Mishima, Affliction and Auto-Focus.

For good measure, the website adds that he's currently scripting a spy thriller (Cold Shelter) for Miramax and has recently finished directing the Exorcist prequel (Exorcist: The Beginning) for Morgan Creek studios. There's just one problem with these last pictures. Officially they don't exist.

Of the two, Cold Shelter is an obvious phantom. "I was as surprised as anyone," says Schrader, sipping coffee in the bar of his London hotel. "I asked my agent to call Miramax, and they had no idea either."

But the Exorcist prequel is a more unruly ghost. Schrader shot the film last year, screened it for the studio and was summarily fired. Since then, the backers have hired a new team of writers, a new director (Renny Harlin) and made the entire picture (virtually every frame of it) over again. "It's a unique situation, completely unprecedented," he says. "My footnote in movie trivia is assured."

Meanwhile, the making of Exorcist: The Beginning has blossomed into a Hollywood sideshow that threatens to eclipse whatever version finally sees the light of day. The idea was to shoot a story set 30 years before William Friedkin's 1973 classic, pivoting around an exorcism in 1940s Kenya. The director envisaged it as a "character-driven period drama" that steered clear of spinning heads and pea-soup vomit.

For his part, Morgan Creek chairman James Robinson said that he chose the angst-ridden, cerebral creator of Raging Bull and Affliction because "the movie needed someone who didn't do the standard horror-type movie". To all intents, the two seemed in perfect accord. And then all hell broke loose.

As part of his settlement with the studio, Schrader was made to sign a "non-disparagement clause", which presumably means that he can't deride his bosses, let's say, as a bunch of greedy incompetents who ordered one movie and then decided they wanted a different one. "But fortunately that cuts both ways," he adds. "It means they can't say anything bad about me either."

Except that they already have - in a sneaky, roundabout fashion. During the initial argument, the film's scriptwriter, Caleb Carr, remarked: "The problem with Paul's cut is that it does not deliver the psychological fear we were looking for." On another occasion Carr was quoted as damning the movie as "one of the most inept, amateur, utterly flat excuses for a film that has ever been concocted."

Schrader gives a world-weary smile. "Caleb got jobbed," he says. "After I signed this non-disparagement clause, they [Morgan Creek] brought Caleb back in to rewrite the film. He gave an interview where he slagged me and then they got rid of him." So Morgan Creek was using Carr as their hit man? "Only he didn't know it," says Schrader.

Then there is the rumour that the studio originally attempted to get a new editor, Sheldon Kahn, to overhaul the movie, and that Schrader stormed the editing suite and bodily ejected him. "Well, that's what they used as leverage against me," says Schrader. "I don't think that I fired him, I thought I just demoted him. But maybe Shelly says I fired him."

In the end it was Schrader who got fired (along with three of the original actors). Everyone else decamped to the Cinecetta studios in Rome to make what industry wags have dubbed "the sequel to the prequel of the Exorcist". Harlin (Die Harder) will be credited as director, while Schrader is airbrushed out of existence. Instead of a pungent, slow-burning religious thriller, the new version will feature oodles of gross-out horror.

Bizarrely, Robinson is on record as describing it as "more believable and less cerebral" than the earlier film. Believable in the sense of spinning heads and projectile green vomit, one imagines.

With hindsight, Schrader likens the whole farrago to "a simple case of buyer's remorse. Somebody goes out and buys a Lexus and they come home and say: 'You know what? I should really have bought a Hummer.' So they go out and buy a Hummer. And then they've got a Lexus and a Hummer."

So what happens to the Lexus? "Well, that's where it gets interesting," he chortles. He's heard a rumour that his Exorcist may eventually be released on DVD, although he has yet to get this in writing. He hopes the backers might even go so far as to screen the two films side-by-side and let the audience decide which they like. "In the end it's a revenue stream," he says. "And all revenue streams eventually reach the sea."

Schrader, too, appears to have moved with the flow. He is in town as the swansong speaker at the Orange Word Screenwriters season, which has been running for the past two months at the British Library. While here, he has lined up a business meeting to raise the funds for a script he recently completed but is unwilling to discuss (except to insist that it is not the fictitious Cold Shelter).

In the meantime, he has found time to take in a few movies. He recently saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which he describes as a very different beast to 1988's Last Temptation of Christ. "I thought it was medieval. My guess is that Mel has a problem with the Enlightenment, because his film really does go back to the visceral cult origins of Christianity, and the fervour it has created is more akin to a Gospel tent meeting than a motion picture." He takes a hit of coffee. "I'm just troubled by it. It's a kind of primitive religion that I don't want to return to. It reminds me more of Shiites than it does of Episcopalians."

In the meantime, he manages a decent impression of someone who is not utterly tormented by the hell he's been through. "You can't let it make you bitter," he insists. "It's this business. It's this world. I was talking to Bob Altman the other day, and he said, 'Every time you think that they've fucked you every way they can, guess what? They come up with a new one.'" He brays wheezy laughter.

"The problem with The Exorcist was that I wasn't holding any cards. They paid me for the movie, so they own the movie. It's like if you made this chair and I buy it from you. You want me to sit on the chair, and I want to put it in my fireplace. What are you gonna do?" He grins. "Time to go off and make another chair."