Paul Schrader interview: “Movies aren't going away”
After a bruising experience on his last film, Dying of the Light, which was taken off him on completion and re-cut, Paul Schrader is back with full artistic control for wild crime caper Dog Eat Dog
The 1970s is routinely hailed as the greatest period in the history of American film, but the filmmakers responsible for those extraordinary achievements have experienced wildly divergent career paths over the subsequent four decades. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg became moguls, Martin Scorsese managed to sustain a career attempting to make personal films in the studio system, while directors like Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola enjoyed periods in Hollywood's good graces in the 80s and 90s, before being cast out once more.
Paul Schrader has always felt slightly removed from that group, however. He didn't make his directorial debut (Blue Collar) until 1978, when the freedom enjoyed by directors in that era was on the verge of being curbed. Schrader can pinpoint the moment when he felt that the ground had shifted, as he left Hollywood in 1984 to make Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. “The first three or four films I made for the studios,” he recalls. “Then I went to Japan, I came back, and the studios weren't making those kinds of films anymore. They were now independent films. I just kept making them.”
A sense of independence is important to Schrader. He has never received the widespread acclaim of his peers, he has never received an Oscar nomination (not even with his screenplays for Scorsese's films), and a number of his films have barely been released, but over the course of his career he has quietly put together one of the most impressive and distinctive bodies of work in American cinema.
As eclectic as they are, each film has Schrader's unmistakable stamp of artistic and intellectual provocation, which is why the experience of making Dying of the Light in 2014 hurt him so badly. The film was taken away from Schrader and re-cut against his wishes, leading to an online campaign by the director and stars Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin, to no avail. Schrader walked away from that experience bruised but resolute. On the next Paul Schrader film, he was going to make sure he had final cut.
The film that Schrader has chosen to exercise his editorial rights with is Dog Eat Dog, a film that's quite unlike anything he has ever made before. When I suggest that some of his stylistic choices here are as audacious and surprising as those in Mishima, he responds with laughter. “Sure, but it's not quite as intellectual.” Schrader attacks this adaptation of Edward Bunker's novel with the verve and energy of a man secure in his artistic freedom, and excited by the opportunity to venture into uncharted territory.
“I had been involved in an unpleasant situation with Nic and we just wanted to work together again, to prove that we could make a film that people would see,” he says. “I read this script and I thought maybe this is the one. Nic wanted to do it, but now I was doing a crime film and I thought, I'm not a crime film director, you know, so I'd better start studying. I had a whole summer studying crime films, and how do you make one after Scorsese, after Tarantino and after Guy Ritchie? So that became the goal, to make a crime film that felt like it was made in 2016.”
Schrader distinguishes his take on the genre by turning everything up to 11. Dog Eat Dog is an outrageous caper centred around three unapologetic scumbags (played by Cage, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cook) as they attempt to pull off a big score and avoid getting sent back to the jail at which they first met. It's wilfully offensive, gruesomely violent and frequently hysterically funny, with Willem Dafoe's unhinged performance as the psychotic but needy Mad Dog setting the tone.The opening five minutes alone will have you either shaking with laughter or shaking your head in disgust.
“As we got into it, more and more I kept thinking, this stuff is funny, I can't take these guys seriously,” Schrader says, “and we just kept moving more and more along that road. Then when I was editing it, I realised that if people started laughing in the opening scene they'd laugh throughout, but if they don't then they'll never laugh. So we had to really amp up that opening scene in the editing to make it very, very clear that if you're taking this movie seriously, you're in the wrong theatre.”
Working on such a tight budget can bring its own problems – and Schrader tells me that Nicolas Cage temporarily quit Dog Eat Dog on the first day of filming after discovering that he hadn't been paid – but for the most part he is happy to work on this smaller scale. “I don't need that much money,” he explains. “I don't need that much money in my life and I don't need that much money on screen. I'd rather just do something lower key, I don't need the big toys.
"There was a documentary that I watched about De Palma, where Brian said all he wanted to do was to get the big toys – the cranes, the cameras, the big sets – and I've never felt that. It has become relatively inexpensive to make a film now, so the film that took 45 days when I began now takes 25 days, and you have more footage.”
But while Schrader is keen to embrace the new tools available to him, he admits that it's hard to keep apace with cinema's technological advancement. “I used to think that we were entering a period of transition,” he says. “I now believe that we have entered into a period of constant transition, and we will never get out of it. Just like the computer is out of date by the time you open the box, every film model is out of date by the time you finish the film. The distribution models, the technology models, it's all changing very quickly.”
‘When audiences don't think art is important, well then it's awful hard to make important movies’
What does all of this mean for cinema as a popular art form? Schrader came up in an era when films mattered, but in the age of streaming precious few contemporary films seem capable of making the kind of cultural impact that we once took for granted. Schrader believes the responsibility for this lies not with the filmmakers or the studios, but with us. “Movies aren't going away, but the 20th century notion of them is going away.
"Movies used to be the centre of the social conversation and audiences were turning to artists for advice: what do we think about the war? What do we think about gay rights? Women's rights? Black rights? And the moment audiences ask artists for input, great art will emerge, it's that simple. When audiences don't think art is important, like my kids don't think movies are important, well then it's awful hard to make important movies.”
OK, so we might not be able to make a case for Dog Eat Dog being an 'important' movie, but it does represent the return to prominence of a vital American filmmaker. Schrader has put the unpleasantness of Dying of the Light behind him and he is determined to keep pushing forward, reinventing himself and exploring new possibilities as he has done consistently for over 40 years.
“What can I do that I haven't done before? What can I do that's different? What new challenge can I try? Can I self-finance a movie and pull it off? Can I make a film about a girl in a closet, you know?” he says, referencing his 1988 film Patty Hearst. “I go to the cinema sometimes and look at the screen and I think, how do they stay awake? They've all made this film five, six times before. The next film I'm doing will be a film unlike any I've ever tried to do.”
Paul Schrader celebrated his 70th birthday this summer, but this old dog can still bite.
Dog Eat Dog is released 18 Nov by Signature Entertainment