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| Paul Schrader: Filmography | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 3 2014, 05:51 AM (368 Views) | |
| pabs | May 3 2014, 05:51 AM Post #1 |
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From The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2010), by David Thomson. Paul Schrader, b. Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1946 1977: Blue Collar. 1978: Hardcore. 1979: American Gigolo. 1981: Cat People. 1985: Mishima. 1987: Light of Day. 1988: Patty Hearst. 1991: The Comfort of Strangers. 1992: Light Sleeper. 1994: Witch Hunt (TV). 1997: Touch; Affliction. 1999: Forever Mine. 2002: Auto Focus. 2003: Exorcist: The Beginning. 2005: Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. 2007: The Walker. 2008: Adam Resurrected. In his gruff, giggly way, battling with, but owning up to, his obsession, Schrader is one of the most likeable of film directors. He is also among the best talkers, capable of mixing high-flown theory with nuts-and-bolts Hollywood anecdotes. He has so many roots: Dutch Calvinism in provincial Michigan; discipleship to Pauline Kael, and then Pauline’s chilling rebuke; he is the author of a fine book on Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer; he is addicted to rock and roll; he is aesthete and sensualist; he could probably do anything or anyone, if addicted. I went to interview him as Cat People was opening, and on his desk he had a book of French film criticism, the trades, and a Bible. Of course, he does decor as well as he talks, and he is a chronic scene-maker. I’m not sure the addict can do much without thinking about it, and that may be why he doesn’t much like himself. At UCLA, around 1970, Schrader wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press, and he edited a magazine, Cinema. His writing was like his talk—packed, allusive, and looking for fresh thoughts. He was as sensitive to Peckinpah and film noir as he was to Bresson—and no one studying his films should overlook the wealth and slyness of his quotes and references. There is a scholar in Schrader, a true devotee who probably worries over his creativity and knows how often he runs the risk of being pretentious. As a screenwriter, he and his brother Leonard drew on knowledge of Japan for The Yakuza (74, Sydney Pollack), which had a Robert Towne rewrite. Far more important was the script for Taxi Driver (76, Martin Scorsese), which grew out of Schrader’s own urban depression and feelings about violence and suicide. It is characteristic of Schrader, I think, that that script is so structured and rational in dealing with someone out of control. His work has the organizational stress of a paranoid. However, Taxi Driver was not just a collaboration with Scorsese and De Niro. It was a picture that helped those two identify their talents. In other scripting jobs, Schrader was less organically involved: Obsession (76, Brian De Palma); he worked uncredited on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (77, Steven Spielberg); Rolling Thunder (77, John Flynn); Old Boyfriends (78, Joan Tewkesbury); Raging Bull (80, Scorsese), where other writers did later work, without hiding Schrader’s typically schematic vision of a brute; The Mosquito Coast (86, Peter Weir); and The Last Temptation of Christ (88, Scorsese), where the dialogue was often at odds with the period re-creation. As a director, Schrader has placed himself on the edge of the mainstream. He understands commerce very well: he could explain how to make hits. But some perverse, rugged integrity has left his work increasingly hermetic and narrow in its range. Indeed, there are times when he does not seem to be simply an American director. Yet Blue Collar and Hardcore are both valuable for their view of the underside of American life. The first was an unusual portrait of racial mix, and George Scott’s agonized puritan in the latter was a fair measure of Schrader’s own tensions as he compared pure and profane. American Gigolo was his one hit. Yet it is Bressonian, as austerely aesthetic as the Ferdinando Scarfiotti design, and it had the very cool Richard Gere as the lead—John Travolta dropped out late in the day. It is a deeply ambiguous film, inhuman in some ways, nearly gay in others. It is like a New Wave film shot in L.A. on an American budget. Perhaps its success came from the title (brilliant) and the pounding music—Schrader composes his films to music. Cat People is his most flagrantly sensational work, beautifully vulgar, as energetic as Val Lewton, and a love letter to Nastassja Kinski (even if eventually she tried to return it to sender). The film is not highly regarded—it is truly disturbing in the nakedness of its confession and its unbridled fantasy. But I believe it is Schrader’s most dynamic work. Thereafter, he went to Japan, to lower budgets, to England, and to Natasha Richardson as a lead actress. He was fighting to keep in work, but he seemed less and less persuaded by the hope of a large audience. I have not enjoyed the later films too much, but I do not expect Schrader to start making dull or routine movies. He is married to the actress Mary Beth Hurt, and he has children. Perhaps, passing sixty, he was becoming settled, or more wary. Or perhaps he was waiting for America to come round to small, dangerous pictures. In recent years, Schrader has found it harder to make movies for theatres. One film was for television, and he has gone back to working on screenplays for others—City Hall (96, Harold Becker) and Bringing Out the Dead (99, Scorsese). Ironically, the film that got most attention (with a nomination for Nick Nolte and an Oscar for James Coburn) was Affliction, which had had to wait two years before it found release. But the most movielike work is surely Forever Mine, an ecstatic romantic fantasy, beautifully made, which might have been even better but for casting problems. He shot his prequel to The Exorcist and cut it. The result was a haunting study in lost faith, for which he was fired by the producers, and the project was reassigned to Renny Harlin. Eventually, Schrader’s version was released—but there were no winners. Auto Focus was his film of the decade—very dark, yet strangely light. Neither The Walker nor Adam Resurrected was in its class, or seemed to belong to the old Schrader. |
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| pabs | Jun 22 2018, 05:40 AM Post #2 |
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Schrader discusses his career, and his latest film, in this podcast: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/film-comment-podcast-paul-schrader/ INTRO to podcast: “Although religious symbols and themes have often found their way into Schrader’s film work, First Reformed marks the first time he has applied elements of transcendental style—as extolled in his seminal book Transcendental Style in Film—to his own filmmaking. Early in his career, Schrader was occupied with exploring the pathological lure of sex and violence in narrative cinema,” Aliza Ma wrote in her review of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed for our May/June issue. As part of our Film Comment Free Talks series, Schrader joined Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for a conversation about the twists and turns and leaps in the writer-director’s career—from starting out as a critic and UCLA film student in the ’60s, to writing screenplays for Taxi Driver and Last Temptation of Christ, to directing films from Blue Collar through First Reformed. This week’s podcast captures the discussion. (Please note: the audio is at times slightly imperfect due to an unforeseeable technical snafu.)" Edited by pabs, Jun 22 2018, 05:50 AM.
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