Paul Verhoeven: The "Starship Troopers" Hollywood Flashback Interview

Director Paul Verhoeven.


This is the first of two conversations I've had with director Paul Verhoeven, the second being for his WW II drama "Black Book." When I met Verhoeven in the Sony Pictures commissary for lunch in October of 1997, I had been a fan of his work since seeing the classic "Soldier of Orange" in 1979. The manic energy that Verhoeven is renowned for was evident throughout our chat, and was infectious. By the time our all-too-brief lunch was over, I found myself waving my hands while I spoke in rapid clips, and using more bounce than usual in my stride, to the point where a few friends suggested I switch to decaf.

The other memory that remains vivid is the passion and high hopes that Verhoeven had for "Starship Troopers." Like the director himself, I thought this would be a groundbreaking movie event and that the world would embrace its blend of gleefully gory sci-fi action and deft satire, as they had with "Robocop" the decade before. Alas, it was not to be, but "Troopers" certainly became a classic in retrospect, claiming a spot on many highbrow critics' "overlooked" and "Best of the '90s" lists. It remains a personal favorite of mine, and one of Verhoeven's finest hours behind a camera.

"Starship Troopers" screens tonight at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, followed by a Q&A with Verhoeven.

PAUL VERHOEVEN
GOES BUGGY WITH STARSHIP TROOPERS
By
Alex Simon

Paul Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam, Holland on July 18, 1938. During his early childhood Verhoeven lived in German-occupied Holland and was exposed to the horrors of war first-hand, including watching the neighboring city of Rotterdam get flattened by German bombs and having a group of Dutch Nazi sympathizers throw him up against a wall at gunpoint at age six, only to walk off laughing. These early impressions of the reality and immediacy of violence left their impression on the future filmmaker, impressions that, combined with his Dutch frankness regarding sexuality and its depiction, Verhoeven has brought to his films since day one.

Though he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics and physics, Verhoeven discovered filmmaking interested him more, and he turned to creating documentaries for the Dutch Royal Navy and Dutch television. After success with the TV series "Floris," about a medieval knight (played by his frequent future star Rutger Hauer), he made his feature debut with Business Is Business (1971), then gained wider recognition with the Oscar-nominated international box office hit Turkish Delight in 1973. The aggressively erotic satire about the unhappy marriage of a sculptor (Hauer) brought recognition not only to Verhoeven, but to the emerging Dutch film industry. He followed this with Katie Tippel (1975), about the rise of an ambitious young girl in 19th century Dutch society. His next hit film, Soldier of Orange (aka Survival Run, 1978), was a riveting true story about the lives of six wealthy Dutch university students whose lives are irreversibly changed by World War II. Many regard it as one of the greatest war films ever made. In subsequent films, Verhoeven returned to the themes of sexuality and obsession he had begun to develop in Turkish Delight. Spetters (1980) was a frank look at the lives of gay and straight teenagers enamored of motorcycle racing. The Fourth Man (1983) was a stylish, hallucinatory, darkly comic thriller about a gay novelist on the trail of a woman he suspects to be a husband killer. Frequently working with cinematographers Jan De Bont, and Jost Vacano and actors Hauer, Jeroen Krabbé, and Renée Soutendjik, Verhoeven established a characteristic visual style that was both haunting and kinetic.

Verhoeven's work caught the notice of Hollywood, resulting in Flesh + Blood (1985), a grim and bloody 16th century adventure starring Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It did poorly at the box office and narrowly avoided an X-rating. For his next films, however, Verhoeven managed to transfer the commercial adroitness he developed on the art house circuit to the larger scale of Hollywood blockbusters. Beginning with Robocop in 1987 and again with Total Recall in 1990, his U.S. films have been violent, action-oriented material that pack theaters even as they arouse public and critical controversy. Basic Instinct (1992), sparked nationwide protests from gay activists for its depiction of lesbians, family groups for its sex and violence and some critics for what they felt was a confusing tale of sex, betrayal and murder that made a great deal of money, just the same. With Showgirls in 1995, Verhoeven's story of an ambitious lap dancer in Las Vegas, the director took a critical beating that would have reduced lesser men to rubble. But guess what folks, Paul Verhoeven is back--with a vengeance.


Starship Troopers, based on Robert Heinlein's classic 1959 novel, is a science fiction/war epic that can only be described as All Quiet on the Western Front meets Attack of the Crab Monsters. Telling the tale of a 23 rd century lad named Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) who is forced to fight for the future of planet Earth as it is threatened by invasion from a planet of bloodthirsty insects(!). Although the plot might make some cynics a bit skeptical, Troopers boasts the most eye-popping CGI visual effects ever put on film (created by special effects master Phil Tippett), along with what will surely be Oscar-winning production design and star-making performances from newcomers Van Dien and particularly from Dina Myer, as a feisty, sexy, 23rd century femme warrior. It was an E ticket ride that left this passenger begging for more at the journey's end.

Dressed in his trademark rumpled denim shirt and faded jeans, Paul Verhoeven, rushes into the Rita Hayworth dining room on the Sony lot. A bundle of kinetic energy, Verhoeven seems to vibrate as he sits, illustrating each sentence with his hands, like a conductor guiding an orchestra. Let's listen to the first movement...

Your wartime experiences in Holland seem to have colored your perception quite a bit. Tell us about what being a kid in the middle of World War II was like.

Paul Verhoeven: If you live in a country being occupied by another one, it's a weird experience, but because I was so young when war broke out, seeing fighting and bombing and ruins and grenades and dead bodies and planes going down in flames seemed like the norm. Then later after we were liberated by the allies, things changed obviously. Even today, those memories play a large part in my work. Sometimes I think my acceptance of violence is based on the fact that I saw so much of it early on. So you could say that I am still haunted by war, or if you like, inspired by it, although that's not a very politically correct statement. (laughs)

Did you come from an artistic family?

No. My father was a school teacher. I had an uncle who was a painter, but besides that the family wasn't artistic.

Verhoeven (R) in the Dutch Marines, late 1950s.

Initially you didn't pursue the arts, either.

Right. At university I studied mathematics and physics, and while I think that both subjects are very important, they didn't really touch me on an emotional level. So during my military service in the Navy, I got assigned to a documentary film unit and did documentaries on the Dutch Marines. I felt like filmmaking was more my cup of tea than mathematics. I never felt creative about (science). I was in it because I was good at it and because I could take my exams well. But I knew that I couldn't really bring anything new to it. Film was more versatile to me. So after the military, I decided to abandon mathematics completely and become a filmmaker. This led me first to television for a couple years until 1971 when I did my first feature.

How did you fall in love with film initially?

Two reasons, I think. One is that when I was seven or eight, suddenly the movies came to Holland. During occupation there were only German propaganda movies anyhow, which my parents weren't too keen on taking me to. So immediately after the war all these American movies came to Holland and it was like after all these years of being cut off from the rest of the world, there were all of the sudden all these different realities: westerns, musicals, science fiction. I went to the movies three or four times a week for fifteen years. The other reason was that my father was always showing films at school at the end of the day on this little 16mm projector. And at the end of the day when all the kids had gone I'd watch these films myself, looking at them again and again. I was fascinated by the possibilities of the medium...feeding the film into the projector, the way it threaded through...it fascinated me. It still took me a long time, until I was 26, to realize that film was what I really wanted to do.

Verhoeven and Der Governator clown on the Total Recall set.

Was there one film in that period that really sparked your imagination?

Sure, War of the Worlds. Also Tarzan's New York Adventure and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Also pirate movies like Captain Blood, Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate. All these sort of action-oriented movies with a lot of movement and a lot of splendor.

You have always presented sexuality and violence in a very matter-of-fact way in your films which is one reason, I think, why most people find them shocking. Do you think this comes from the fact that Holland is so much more relaxed as a country about sex and sexuality?

Yes, I think so concerning the sex. Sex is more accepted in Holland than in America. Violence is not. Violence is accepted by me. And other people of my generation who grew up with it.



Soldier of Orange is one of my favorite films of all time. Tell us how the project came about.

Well the book was an autobiography by Eric Hazelhoff, who was a war hero of the Dutch underground during WW II. We had been trying to get it made for a long time, but it was a lot more expensive than any other Dutch movie ever made. After five or six years, we finally got it set up with the assistance of the Dutch Royal family and the Dutch military...For me the movie was about friendship that goes above political antagonism. I thought it was an interesting theme.

You seem to explore the themes of friendship and betrayal with most of your films.

It seems to me to be a very general theme that goes on throughout your life. People that you think are your friends that then turn around and stab you in the back. And that attitude is certainly nothing new here in Hollywood. In war or in peace it's rare that you stick to your friends or that your friends stick to you throughout your life.

Jeroen Krabbe, Susan Penhaligon and Rutger Hauer in Solider of Orange.

I heard that Steven Spielberg initially contacted you about working in the U.S. after seeing Soldier of Orange.

Yeah, he called me in Holland and said "Why are you staying in Holland? You can do much more interesting things here." So he took me to a few different studios. After Soldier of Orange there was a lot of interest from the American film community...but it wasn't until the political climate in the Dutch film community changed to the point of it being difficult for me to work there that my wife and I decided to move to the U.S.


Trailer for the English-dubbed version of Soldier of Orange, poorly re-titled as Survival Run.

How was making a movie in America different than making one in Holland?

Not that much. Jan De Bont, who came here in 1975, told me that there was nothing to be afraid of. It was the same equipment, the same technique. If anything, in Holland you almost had to know more because there we had no "specialists" as there were here. In Holland, your lead actor might have to be your boom operator when he's not on camera, you see? Here in America everything is specialized and the director usually doesn't have to learn about those other skills.

One thing I noticed about your American films was that your scope really changed to that of making epic films. Do you ever see yourself going back to make a smaller, more personal film like the ones you did in Holland?

Yeah, but I would still try to make it for a big audience. It could be a bit more personal and more intimate than I've been doing the last few years. Ultimately it really has to do with the project itself and if it would be worth doing. Although in the United States I'm not known for doing projects like that. There's one project that I might do on the life of Houdini that Sony wants me to do. This story deals more with Houdini and his relationship to the occult than Houdini, the magician.

Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas, Basic Instinct.

Let's talk about Basic Instinct. When you direct an explicit love scene, how do you approach it with the actors, especially American actors, who might not be as open sexually as European actors?

I am very open with them because otherwise you cannot do it. I call everything by name and I tell them exactly what I want. In fact, with Basic, I storyboarded most of the (love) scenes very specifically and gave them to Michael (Douglas) and Sharon (Stone). The scenes were very choreographed. It was very precisely "You do this, then you do that. Then she does this, and she does that." Every move, every touch was all planned, all done like an action scene.

Did the uproar over Basic Instinct surprise you?

Yes, I thought it was silly. If the people who protested it had taken time to look at my work, particularly The Fourth Man, they would know that I would never make an anti-gay movie at all. I thought all the gay action groups were really full of shit and that it was all about politics because it was such a high-visibility project.

The ironic thing is that the protests probably helped the film business wise.

Yes. Because it was on the news every day. I didn't really see it that way at the time, but later I realized that it had worked that way.

Verhoeven on the Starship Troopers set.

Let's move on to Starship Troopers. Tell us the genesis.

This was about four years ago, at the end of Basic Instinct, (screenwriter) Ed Neumeier came to me with this idea of young adults, coming from high school that have to fight giant bugs in outer space! I got intrigued because it made me remember all the movies I liked so much in the 40's and 50's. It was something I always wanted to do, but never had a chance to do. Although it was what appeared to be sort of 'B' material, I wanted to bring it up to an 'A' in a way, although clearly it was never going to be Lawrence of Arabia (laughs). It still approaches that reality in a very serious way, and I think it succeeds, and seems to be able to portray the world of another species that is extremely dangerous and realistic. You see these movies of the 40's and 50's like Them! about giant ants, and so on, and they all seem today very (unrealistic). But if you look at Ray Harryhausen's work, like Jason and the Argonauts, it was much more sophisticated and poetic almost. And I've studied his work a lot. So I thought there was something there you could do. And I knew today with the digital technique that could give us this and that Phil Tippett would be in charge of it that maybe we could come up with something new and exciting.

Casper Van Dien: "The only good bug is a dead bug!"

I've never seen visual effects like these. Most of the CGI effects I've seen previous to this look like cartoons superimposed onto film. These looked real.

Yes, they're very well integrated. And I only did the movie because Phil was there. That was my context for doing it.

It also had the feel of a WW II propaganda film, which was really kitschy and wonderful.

That was basically there after the first draft, and the stuff with the Internet-style devices and titles came partially during the shooting and a lot in post production. It was an attempt to upgrade the old style Fox Movietone newsreels...and Third Reich propaganda films and even my old Marines documentaries that I did, because a lot of that was promotion and propaganda as well...That's why the relationship to the second world war is so important to me because it was probably the last war, and one of the few wars in history, where you can make the argument that it was good. Although all war has to be viewed as something that should be avoided, this was a case of two, or maybe three, evil empires that had to be stopped. Otherwise you have to argue that Europe really should have been left alone and see what would have happened. And then, well...I wouldn't be here! I'd be speaking German and working for UFA (the German film company). (laughs)

Neil Patrick Harris doing his best Joseph Goebbels.

Do you have any advice for first time directors?

I would be in good physical condition. Avoid drinking and abusing yourself in any way because shooting a film is so physically exhausting. It's twenty hours a day. And also try and prepare as much as possible. Make as many sketches or write down for yourself specific notes before you come to the set, at least for the first week or so. That way if you get stuck or feel uninspired you can just turn to the storyboard and do what it says. Perhaps it's not the best it could be, but at least it's okay, and that way you don't have to sit there and say to yourself 'Okay, now I have to be inventive.' Because then you get scared and lose your confidence. Then after the first ten days or so you loosen up. But in the beginning it's always like "What now?" So get as much sleep as you can, at least five or six hours a night if you can, and have a plan of some sort for the first couple weeks. Also be nice and have a good relationship with your actors and crew members. Listen to suggestions and be willing to admit when you're wrong about something. Even apologize in front of the whole cast and crew if necessary. I still do that today. I make terrible mistakes and get upset sometimes. Never be afraid to be seen as someone who makes a mistake and can own up to it. Like my parents used to tell me "If you ever have a fight, try to solve it before the sun goes down." That's very good advice for filmmaking, I think.

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Josh Brolin: The Hollywood Interview

Josh Brolin in the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men.

JOSH BROLIN:
NEW RIDER OF THE PURPLE SAGE
By
Alex Simon

As an actor, Josh Brolin is one of those rare birds who hit the ground running, debuting in the now-classic Steven Spielberg/Richard Donner hit The Goonies in 1985. The eldest son of actor James Brolin, Josh hit the world stage February 12, 1968 in L.A., but was raised outside Hollywood in the more rural setting of Paso Robles, CA. Having worked continuously in both features and television since his debut, Josh carved a niche for himself as an actor of depth and range, playing everything from cowpokes to urbane sophisticates, and working with the likes of Woody Allen (Melinda and Melinda), Paul Verhoeven (The Hollow Man), and David O. Russell (Flirting With Disaster). In all of his work, Josh Brolin brings an old-school quality reminiscent of Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin: a world-weariness appropriate of a guy who’s been riding on his worn saddle just a bit too long, but who loves what the end of the road might promise too much to get off his horse and settle down.

2007 could prove to be Josh’s banner year, with his name at the top of the credits in some of Hollywood’s highest-profile titles, beginning with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror section of Grindhouse as a duplicitous doctor who gets his grisly comeuppance; Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah, sharing the screen with Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron; Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, as a corrupt breed of cop guaranteed to make your flesh crawl; and finally the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, as a hapless Texas cowpoke who stumbles on a cache of drug money, and finds himself pursued by Mexican drug runners and, quite possibly, the Devil Himself (Javier Bardem). Best Supporting and Best Actor Oscar buzz is respectively surrounding Josh for his turns in the latter two titles.

Josh Brolin sat down with us recently to discuss life, film, and the genius of John Cassavetes.

One thing that struck me while watching No Country for Old Men was how reminiscent it was of the work of John Ford. Did the Coens discuss any of their influences with you?
Josh Brolin: No, not really, but it did have that wonderful stillness, and those breathtaking vista shots that Ford loved so much. They don’t really discuss those things, they just sort of do what they do. They don’t say things like “Okay, here we want to get a very cinema-verite feel of a John Cassavetes movie.” They say very little, actually.

Are you a fellow acolyte at the temple of Cassavetes?
Yeah man, I love Cassavetes. Woman Under the Influence has to be one of my top six films.

The first time you saw it, wasn’t it the first time you felt while watching a movie that you were eavesdropping on real life?
I did. And Gena Rowlands made me so uncomfortable, yet so familiar, with all the stuff she did at the dinner table. And it’s not even that all the movies are so great. Some are just pieces of life and are totally disconnected and you don’t really know what’s going on. But when it worked, it was just brilliant. One of my favorite films is Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which Cassavetes acted in, but didn’t direct. That scene when he’s looking for his friend in the street…I love that kind of filmmaking.

How long did it take you to figure out that Peter Falk was setting Cassavetes up?
The first time, a while. But I’ve seen it probably twenty times.

And you still don’t want to believe it every time you see it.
Right, because that’s the only person that Cassavetes has allowed himself to trust in the midst of this massive paranoia, but some of the paranoia feels very real, based on the hit man. I love those type of films. I just finished a short film myself that I wrote and directed that Robert Rodriguez gave me notes on. It was this very complicated morality play and it got to be so big and so complicated that finally I went ‘Fuck it, I can’t do this.’ So I pulled over my truck one day out of frustration and just wrote this three character piece that takes place out in the desert. It came to me so fast and so clearly that I said I wasn’t going to change any of it, except on the set. So we did 93 set ups in three days. We shot on 720p, and it looks really amazing. There was one condition: nobody could get paid, even if it meant losing the better person. Now when I look at it, I see the influence of Wim Wenders, the Coen brothers, Cassavetes’ influence. Hopefully there’s my own voice in there somewhere.

Are the Coens really hands-off directors?
Not completely. We talked a lot during the first week and a half about characters and during rehearsals. You go through the process of where you want to earn your character. They’re very laconic. There’s not a lot of talk, but there is a lot of body language, which you start to learn from them. Ethan’s greatest compliment he gave me was non-verbal, which I had no idea what it meant at first, but later learned it was the greatest compliment he could have given me. It was like “That was great. Are you happy with it? Is there more you’d like to do?” I think the reason they operate like that, and the reason they don’t give many interviews, is that they’re really shy, maybe the shiest people I’ve ever met. Joel said nothing during my entire audition. Just stared at me.

And there’s always at least one character in each of their movies that does that. Remember Peter Stormare in Fargo?
(laughs) That’s true. Who was like that in No Country?

I thought Javier was pretty close to that, even though he had dialogue. He was like a corpse talking, like a George A. Romero zombie come to life.
I like that: “A corpse talking.” He’s already dead. The grim reaper.

That’s who I thought he was actually. When I read the book a few years ago, that’s immediately what I thought the first time he appeared: the angel of death.
Yeah, and whether he’s real, or not real, or has a sort of mythological status.

The other movie I thought of was John Boorman’s Point Blank. I always felt that Lee Marvin’s character dies in the beginning and it’s his spirit that’s enacting revenge on those who killed him.
Right, because he was also very deadpan throughout that film. That’s cool. I don’t know that they consciously reference other movies in their films. If they do, they certainly didn’t mention it. Who knows what goes on in their heads? (laughs) I’m very close with Ethan now and close with Joel, but I still couldn’t tell you what makes them tick.

You’re in two movies with Tommy Lee right now: No Country and In the Valley of Elah, although you don’t have any scenes together in either.
No, I wish we had. We were actually talking about doing another movie together recently.

You did In the Valley of Elah with Paul Haggis. Tell us about him.
I’ve known Paul for a long time. I did a series a long time ago called Mr. Sterling that he came onto as a fix-it writer. He put down a script in front of me and said “I’ve had this for a while, please read it.” It was Crash. I thought it was a great script. I was attached for a while, but unfortunately I had no monetary value to my name, so it didn’t work out. Then Valley came to me because Tim McGraw had fallen out, and I said ‘Sure, I’d love to do it.’ I loved working with Paul. It was different, much more active than Joel and Ethan. Paul is finding his way, for sure. I think it’s tough to come right out of the gate and have an Academy Award-winning movie (Million Dollar Baby) and then the very next year, win with your directing debut. It’s never been done in history. So I loved that he chose to do In the Valley of Elah as his follow-up, instead of some easy, commercial thing.

I remember when I interviewed him for Crash and asked him what inspired the script, he said “Very simple: I didn’t want my tombstone to read ‘Paul Haggis: creator of Walker Texas Ranger.’”(both laugh) And it would have been easy for him to stay in that place. He was making a really good living, had a nice house, television had been good to him. But it’s a different deal now. He has more choices.

But if you’re an artist after a while, the money doesn’t mean shit.
Absolutely. You start to feel hollow. But you do the work, and you hope for the best. I’m very happy for Paul, and I hope for the best for him.

Tell us about Ridley Scott’s process. He’s one of the few directors who is both a brilliant shooter and a brilliant filmmaker.
You know what I’ve found with all these guys is they’re easy. They’re all easy. They don’t blow things out of proportion. They’re cool under pressure. They’re not about ego. They’re about the work. And that comes through. “Here’s what you and Denzel and Russell have to do. Figure out what it is you’re going to do, then I’ll hone it, and put it on film.” And that’s all there is to it.

With all three of these films, you’ve been surrounded by the cream of the crop both in front of and behind the camera. That can’t help but raise your game.
It raises your game, yeah, but at least my game I always go about the same way, whether I’m doing film or theater or television. In those cases, the manifestation of it just happened to turn out a lot better than a lot of these other movies I’ve done, where I watch them and I go ‘What the fuck?!’ (laughs) But I’ve always tried to be conscious about quality over quantity, like you were saying about the money. I’ve had agents who get me work that I pass on, who get so frustrated and say “Why do you hassle us about finding you work, then when we find you work, you turn it down?” That’s because I like working with good people, and doing good material. On my deathbed, maybe I won’t look back at having made $20 million a picture, but I’ll be able to say I’ve worked with the Coens, with Paul Haggis, with Woody Allen, with Ridley Scott, David O. Russell. Working with these people make you feel good about yourself when you go to sleep.

But it also seems like the people who are making $20 million a picture are oftentimes the most miserable.
Yeah, I guess. I can see how you could get caught up in it all, all the celebrity and doing your 50th interview for the week. Then you look at people like Sean Penn, and you say ‘I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing. Keep doing it.’

It seems like Sean Penn has always behaved as himself. Don’t you think the trick to not being eaten alive in Hollywood is to have a strong sense of yourself going into it?
Yeah, and then they get bitter and start taking it out on themselves and other people. Sean came up to me the other night and brought up this movie I did called The Dead Girl, which nobody saw, and he said “Dude! That was such a great movie. You were great, and I love that director, would you please tell her I saw that movie and I loved it!” He was just so genuine, and there was none of that “cool” affectation or bullshit of “Hey. Saw the flick. Good stuff.” He was genuinely excited about my work, just as I’m always genuinely excited about his work, instead of looking at a movie and saying ‘Man, I should’ve been in that fuckin’ part. Fuck that guy!’ I would never, ever want to be that.

How did having an actor father shape your perspective on show business?
Well, we weren’t in Los Angeles. I grew up in Paso Robles, around country/western singers and would have people like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash around the house. So I saw fame up close on that end. Tanya Tucker…wow! But the acting thing didn’t really permeate. For me it was more like, the old man leaves, works for a while, then comes back, except for when he did The Amityville Horror, because that was such a big deal, and it was an independent movie. I remember my mom putting posters up saying that it had grossed $100 million. We were all very proud of that.

When did you know you were an actor?
You know, I never wanted to be an actor. I wasn’t one of these kids that was running around doing scenes for people, until I took an elective in high school called “improvisation.” They told me to get up and create a character. So I got up on stage and created this middle-aged, balding man and just started riffing on it. I didn’t see the creative process. I thought it was easy. It took some time for me to realize that it’s a make or break thing, that completely works, or doesn’t work at all. There’s no “pretty good.” If you were pretty good, that means you probably weren’t very good. You’ve got to nail it. I’ve always loved storytelling. I was writing stories from probably seven or eight years-old on. I loved reading people like Ray Bradbury, whose imagination was just limitless. Then later, I saw how the two met, how acting was such an imaginative craft.

Then your first film was Steven Spielberg and Richard Donner’s The Goonies.
That was a great experience, maybe still the most amazing experience I’ve ever had. Now our kids are watching that movie, so I’m getting feedback from the next generation, which is amazing. Dick Donner was, is, the nicest guy in the world. Spielberg did this great thing. Donner was so overwhelmed, surrounded by kids for six months, non-stop. He was going to take a break, go to his house in Maui, just relax, maybe smoke a joint and sit on the beach, with no children. So what Spielberg did, he flew all of us kids to Maui, and got one of his assistants to get Dick out of his house. We took a bus to Dick’s house, proceeded to throw all our luggage and clothes everywhere. He came back from the store, or wherever, he dropped to his knees and screamed “What?! No!” with tears streaming down his face. It was a great joke.

Any memories of NFL great John “the Tooz” Matuszak from that picture?
Oh man, Tooz was just great. Here he was, this giant, and he was so sweet and gentle with all the kids. Sometimes he’d get drunk, but he’d just get very philosophical with all of us. We loved him. The only guy we were really scared of was Robert Davi. He was just scary, period. (laughs)

Yeah, but he played scary, while Tooz could really have been dangerous if he’d wanted to be.
Exactly, with Robert it was an act. Tooz in many ways was a big kid himself. It’s funny, I hadn’t seen him in many years, then I ran into him at a banquet at Universal, or someplace and I said hi. “Josh!” he screamed and picked me up in a big bear hug, nearly crushed me! Then a few days later, he was gone.

Was he one of those people we spoke of earlier, who maybe didn’t have a strong enough sense of himself?
It could be. I didn’t know him well enough to answer in that context. But you know what you got me thinking of? I just saw this documentary on HBO called “Gladiator,” about this multiple murderer in prison. They interviewed this guy, and he was the most charming, articulate person. You’d never guess in a million years that he was a killer. Then you actually see the murder he committed on tape. It was maybe the most unsettling thing I’ve ever seen. It’s stayed with me for months. It’s almost like we make a choice, consciously or unconsciously, where our evolution will take us.

Yeah, I just saw a piece on “60 Minutes” about the Supermax prison in Colorado, where they have the Unibomber, Richard Reed (the “shoe bomber), and Ramsey Usef, who plotted the ’93 World Trade Center attack. The former warden said Usef was the most dangerous man he’d ever met, simply because he was so charismatic, and so charming, he’s kept in isolation from the other prisoners, because his power over others is so great.
Right, and that can go either way. On the positive side, Bill Clinton is like that. When you meet him, you literally feel like you are the only person in the universe. He has that kind of power.

And I heard on the opposite side of the coin that Charles Manson and Hitler had the same quality.
Isn’t that interesting? It’s an amazing quality, and you either go to the dark side with it, or do amazing things with it.

Yeah, it gives one pause to think that maybe all these people are very evolved souls; they just evolved in opposite directions. Mother Theresa could have been Hannibal Lecter, and vice-versa.
Exactly.

We’re digressing a bit, so let’s get back to your work. Was your time spent on television’s The Young Riders a good way for a neophyte actor to cut his teeth?
It was. We basically took control of the whole thing, and were very inspired by being out in the desert. We did it for three years. I met some great people out of it, got to ride horses a lot, learned a lot about filmmaking and production. So yeah, it was a terrific learning experience. I was just in my 20s at the time, which is funny because my oldest son is nearly that age now. He’s in college.

So you were a young dad, then?
Yeah, very young. I literally don’t remember not having kids. For me having kids was the best thing that ever happened to me: humbly, selflessly, altruistically, it helped me to get over myself and made my life about something else. I know too many fathers who are like “Great, I have a kid. Have no clue what to do. See ya.” We never had a nanny, ever.

You got to work with Woody Allen, who’s one of my heroes. Tell us about the Woodman.
Javier just worked with Woody. He called me and asked about him. I said ‘Look, we just came off a Coen brothers film where there’s not a lot of petting going on, so you’re in the perfect place to work with Woody.’ I had heard all sorts of horror stories about how he doesn’t talk to actors and all that. I experienced the opposite. I found him to be extremely present, fun, funny. He didn’t talk a lot, but I got to work with Will Farrell and Radha Mitchell, and a lot of people I really liked…there was this one scene we were shooting on Long Island and we were sitting in this Rolls-Royce, and I was talking to Radha about how beautiful the sky was and it was almost starting to rain. After the sixth take, I said to Woody, ‘It’s really overcast out, man. I’m talking about these beautiful blue skies, and it’s raining out.’ There was this long pause, and Woody says “Well, just make it weather contingent.” (laughs) I had no idea what he meant, so I improvised, and I loved working with him.

I loved Grindhouse and couldn’t believe it wasn’t a huge hit.
I think the DVD sales of those two movies will be way bigger. I was very surprised. I thought it would be huge, but I guess it was just too geeky for the masses. The idea of doing a movie with no boundaries just sounded like so much fun, and we did have a blast. Robert and I had a great time. He’s an inspired person. I’ve never met anybody more energized and committed than he is. It inspired me to do my own stuff, including my short. Watching him, you say to yourself that there’s no reason for me to be walking around talking about how tired I am. There’s a whole intensity, a whole mania to what he’s doing. He’s incredibly prolific, painting all the time. We’d paint together, get 2-3 hours sleep, paint some more…finally I’d say ‘Robert, I’ve gotta go get some sleep.’ Love him, and loved working with him. I loved Sin City, thought it was great.

It sounds like you’d like to do more directing and writing?
Maybe. I think I’ll probably go the same route that Sean has, where if I find a story that I think is worth telling, then I’d love to tell it. That was the whole point of doing the short, to see where my strengths and weaknesses were. A lot of the people who’ve seen the short have said they think its voice is unique and its voice is mine. That wasn’t my intention. My intention actually was to not show it to anybody! I had a backyard screening at my house. The movie we showed was The Shining, and we showed the short first. Haggis was very complimentary and encouraging. A lot of my friends were in it. My daughter was in it, who’d never acted before and now probably never will again! (laughs)

That raises an interesting question: did you dad try to discourage you from entering the business?
He was really supportive, but he was very honest with me about the odds involved. Plus, with me as your dad, it’s going to be a whole other thing, because they won’t want to add to some kind of nepotistic thing, so it will be that much harder for you to get a job. But I liked the odds, and I did a completely different thing than my dad, which was lots of theater, then I got The Goonies, and then I did a movie called Thrashin’ that I was horrendous in, but that a lot of people seem to love. I watched myself in that movie and thought ‘Either figure it out, or do something else.’ It might’ve looked like me, but it wasn’t. Then I went to New York, started a theater company with an actor named Anthony Zerbe, and really turned my life around. We had four readers that read 700 plays a year, out of which they would pick 35. Anthony and I would read the 35, and then we’d pick three out of the 35, and we’d do three new American plays in rep. It was the best thing I’d ever done, for sure.

Who are some of your favorite playwrights?
There are so many, but I’d have to put Sam Shepard up at the top. I was lucky enough to do True West on Broadway. Sam is actually the one who turned me onto No Country and the writings of Cormac McCarthy. So I was turned onto it as a literary work of art first, before I viewed it as a potential part I could get.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Road.” Is he America’s greatest living writer?
I think Cormac is a true genius. He has no parallel, in my opinion. He’s always one step ahead of you. Right when you’re about to say ‘Okay, now I get it,’ he goes off into another direction. Great stuff.

It’s too bad that Sam Peckinpah isn’t around anymore. He’d have been the ideal director to adapt McCarthy’s work to the screen, since they explore similar themes, particularly how man’s “progress” often leads to an erosion of clarity in society and its rules.
You know what would be interesting to me? You take a movie like 3:10 to Yuma in its original version from the ‘50s, and now you have the updated version of it. I would love to see two or three versions of the same movie within four years of each other. After the Coens’ No Country, I’d love to see Clint Eastwood’s version, and then another filmmaker’s version. Just like in the theater, when you mount different productions of the same play. Each time, it would tell the same story, but be about something new.

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Sidney Lumet 1924-2011

Director Sidney Lumet.

Sidney Lumet was the first director I interviewed whose one-sheet posters hung on my wall as a kid. He was an idol, an icon, and an inspiration. I wasn't yet 30 when I met him at The Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills for our interview at the press junket for "Night Falls On Manhattan," one of his solid, authentic urban dramas that blended crime, politics and personal revelations that became his signature.

Lumet immediately put any butterflies I had at ease. Diminutive, but with the infectious energy of a teenager, his was a disarming presence. He paid me a compliment on my sportcoat, saying that I looked a bit like the young Mickey Rourke (which I still don't see, but what the hell), then went on to regale me for an hour with stories about his remarkable life in the theater, the early days of live television, and of course in film.

The other indelible memory I have of that day is this, and it remains a potent lesson to me about the fragile, complicated and often mercurial personalities artists possess: another journalist who was waiting in the "holding room" for his turn with the maestro, a man whom Lumet obviously knew as he greeted him warmly, had brought his teenage son. The boy looked at Lumet in awe. Lumet smiled, shook the lad's hand, and asked about his interests. The boy replied "I want to be a filmmaker, and you're my hero." Lumet's entire countenance changed on a dime. He immediately broke eye contact with the boy, turned and hurried away, as if the kid had just spit in his face. I'll never forget that moment.

Lumet's body of work is one that will carry on for the ages, and remains one of the cinema's most diverse. It is unlikely, given the vast changes in the movie business since Lumet's entry, that another contemporary filmmaker will ever assemble one to rival it.

Thanks for it all, Mr. Lumet. Tonight will be spent with a bearded Al Pacino, a raving Peter Finch, a haunted Rod Steiger, and a vulnerable Paul Newman, magnificent bastards all, reaching for that moment of redemption.

SIDNEY LUMET: THE MASTER SPEAKS
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.

Regarded by many as the finest motion picture director of his generation, Sidney Lumet's films have been nominated for over fifty Academy Awards. Born in Philadelphia in 1924 to parents who were veteran performers in the Yiddish theater, Lumet initially took to the stage as a child actor, making his debut on radio at age four and stage debut at the Yiddish Art Theater at five. He went on to appear in many Broadway plays, including "Dead End." He made his only film appearance at 15 in One Third of a Nation (1939). When WW II broke out, Lumet's career was put on hold as he did his U.S. Army service in India and Burma as a radar repairman from 1942-46.

Upon his return to the States, he organized an off-Broadway actors' group and became its director. During this time, he also directed in summer stock and taught acting at the High School of Professional Arts. In 1950, he joined CBS, where he soon won recognition as a gifted director of TV drama ("You are There," "Omnibus," "Best of Broadway," "Alcoa Theater," and "Goodyear Playhouse," among others). He was given his first chance to direct a motion picture with 12 Angry Men in 1957 when the film's producer and star, Henry Fonda, took a shine to the young director and his TV work. Thanks to his TV experience, Lumet was able to complete the tightly structured courtroom drama in 19 days on a budget of $343,000. With the help of cameraman Boris Kaufman, Lumet used the space restrictions of the cramped setting to advantage, generating uncommon tension from the claustrophobic confines of the jury room. The film and its director were nominated for Academy Awards. Lumet won the Director's Guild Award and the film was widely praised by critics. It would lay the groundwork for territory that Lumet would explore in many of his future films: humanity attempting to prevail amid cynicism and corruption in an urban, political setting with a righteous protagonist standing alone in this harsh world in which he is attacked from all sides, sometimes by those he loves and trusts the most.
Lumet received another nod from the DGA for his handling of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), on which he applied a masterful mix of static and dynamic camerawork, turning the play into a distinctly cinematic work with a classic performance from Katharine Hepburn in the lead.

Lumet's growing reputation was further enhanced by his intelligent handling of the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964), and his compassionate treatment of a complex psychological theme in The Pawnbroker (1965), the profoundly disturbing story of a Holocaust survivor's anguished existence in New York's Harlem amidst his burning memories of the concentration camps. After generating a powerful drama of the wretched life in a British military prison in The Hill (1965), the first of his four collaborations with star Sean Connery, which also included Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and the little-seen masterpiece The Offense (1973), Lumet's next big commercial splash came with Serpico (1973), the riveting true-life police thriller starring Al Pacino about an honest cop trying to expose widespread corruption within the NYPD. Lumet followed this classic with the equally-lauded Dog Day Afternoon (1975), again with Pacino in the lead in a story ripped from current headlines about a young Brooklyn man who robs a bank to pay for his lover's sex change operation. This was followed by another classic of the 70's, Network (1976), his greatest commercial triumph. Although the film, which was written by Paddy Chayefsky, was denounced by broadcasters and many critics as preposterously false, it was a huge moneymaker earned several Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It won four Oscars in the writing and acting categories. Lumet next shared an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Prince of the City (1981), another true story of police corruption in New York. His subsequent films in the 80's received mixed notices, with the notable exceptions of the riveting The Verdict (1982) and Running on Empty (1988). In 1995, Lumet wrote the best-selling book Making Movies which is now in its seventh printing.

Lumet's 40th film, being released this month, is Night Falls on Manhattan, which Lumet adapted for the screen from Robert Daley's novel Tainted Evidence. The film explores familiar Lumet territory of political corruption, tough cops, and the mean streets of New York in telling the tale of one Sean Casey (Andy Garcia) an Irish-Puerto Rican former cop and wet-behind the-ears assistant D.A. who is thrust into the limelight after being chosen to prosecute a high profile, headline making case. As he moves deeper into the criminal justice system, Casey's world is torn apart, as he experiences personal and professional betrayal after discovering a crime and cover-up among those closest to him. Richard Dreyfuss, Lena Olin, Ron Leibman, James Gandolfini and Ian Holm give fine support in the large, emsemble cast. The film is a riveting drama, and ranks among Lumet's best work to date.

Although now in his early 70's, Sidney Lumet looks at least ten years younger and carries himself with the countenance and boundless energy of a man in his mid-20's. Mr. Lumet sat down recently in a plush suite at the Four Seasons Hotel to reflect on his prolific and distinguished career, and to talk about Night Falls On Manhattan.

How did someone who seemed to have a bright future as an actor, suddenly fall in love with directing?
SIDNEY LUMET: You know one of the things in everybody's life, and people always seem to think I'm kidding when I say this, luck has a tremendous amount to do with it. It's stunning to me how big a part luck plays in your life. I'd been an actor, and I was making a decent living, not great, but decent, and I was teaching--I'd set up the drama course at the High School for the Performing Arts--and a friend of mine, Yul Brynner, was directing for television at that time, and a wonderful director by the way. And Yul said (imitating him)'Come on over! Nobody knows what they're doing. It's great fun! You'll make good living!' And so I went into CBS as Yul's a.d., his assistant director. And then when Yul left to do "The King and I" on Broadway, I took over the show, which was a melodrama called "Danger." It was a half hour show every Tuesday. So I really just fell into it. I did that for some months. Then I started doing more shows from there.

Henry Fonda was apparently instrumental in bringing you onto 12 Angry Men. How did the two of you hook up originally?
Again, luck. I had worked with Reggie Rose, who wrote the script, on "Danger." We had done some of Reggie's first scripts. He always liked what I did with his work. So when the movie came up--I had not done the original television show--Reggie wanted me to do it. Before I began directing, I and another group of actors had formed a workshop off-Broadway. And we'd be there doing exercises, vocal exercises, physical exercises, and work on scenes. And I had done some directing there, that's actually where I started directing. There wasn't an official director in the group, but somebody had to say 'You go over here,' 'You do this,' So I started doing it...and at the end of every year, we tried to find a new American play that we would mount in a workshop format...now, we're talking about luck again. One of the actors in the workshop, a guy named Joe Bernard, was also in "Mister Roberts" at the time on Broadway...when it came to the year end project, Fonda came down to see him. Two or three years later, Reggie brought (Fonda) 12 Angry Men and mentioned my name to direct, and Fonda said "Oh yeah, I remember him. I saw something he did down in the Village two or three years ago that was extraordinary! Yeah, I think he could do it." And that was it. Again, talk about luck!

How did you build and then maintain the tension in 12 Angry Men since you were working in such a confined space on such a tight schedule. Was it what you did with the actors, was it camerawork...
A combination of both. Technically it's an enormously complicated movie. You'd think that shooting in a tight space would be the easiest thing in the world, when in fact the easiest thing to shoot is a cattle round-up! Just put six cameras on it and all the footage will be so marvelous you won't know what to choose because the action is so terrific. Here, through the slow intensification of performance, and then also through a very subtle use of the camera: use of lenses, use of lighting...not trying to avoid the claustrophobia, but trying to take advantage of it. Make it more claustrophobic. Make the ceiling feel lower, make it seem as if the walls are closing in on them. We weren't kidding anybody. We were going to be in one room. Let's use it dramatically!

With Night Falls on Manhattan, I noticed that you return to some familiar themes in many of your films: the lone protagonist fighting and exposing corruption, and so on. Is there something specific that occurred in your life that interests you in these themes?
Nothing that I know of. It's an age-old interest. What I find interesting about Night Falls on Manhattan is that (Andy Garcia's character) doesn't pursue anything, it pursues him. And slowly the world that he's living in keeps closing in, and closing in with a complexity he never thought possible, and what he always thought was simple. And suddenly it becomes like peeling an onion, layer after layer, until there's no bottom to it. It just never stops. So that circumstances kind of overtake him, and it's a question of what he does in those circumstances. So in that sense it's different, but it's in the same area. For want of a better word, we'll call them 'The Justice Movies.' (laughs)

Is that what drew you to the book Tainted Evidence initially, those same themes?
The book is actually quite different from the screenplay. Both begin with the same incident--which really happened. It may not have happened exactly that way, but it certainly happened. That was the kickoff, that if this story was true, that a bunch of cops had gone up to knock off the biggest drug dealer in Harlem, and that he had took out four of them and escaped anyway, and the defense that was offered in the real trial was that (the cops and the dealer) were in business together, and that this was self-defense because he knew they were coming up there to execute him, and that if that is so, since that is so ass-over-tea kettle to begin with, such a reversal from what you normally think would happen, all of a sudden it's 'Wait a minute, where am I. None of this makes sense.' I thought, okay, now let's take the prosecutor, the prosecutor's office, all those people, and what happens afterwards. How do they cope?

So that part of the screenplay was all original?
Everything (in the film) from the trial on was original.

I know you've only written two of your other films prior to this, Prince of the City (with Jay Presson Allen) andQ & A. How do you find writing and directing as opposed to just directing?
I love the writing process. It's fairly new to me. And I don't consider myself a full-fledged writer yet. A full-fledged writer is really someone who can invent people, who can get that individual sound of people. So far, I have been, again, very lucky in the sense that, because of my interests, I wind up dealing with cops, so I know how they sound. I've spent so much time with them--thirty years. And the three pictures I've written, the first one in a sense was even easier. The protagonist in that, who was based on a guy named Bob Lucie, I had all his tapes, because he was wearing a wire all those years. So we just transcribed exactly what was said into a lot of the scenes. With Q & A I branched out a little bit more, with Night Falls branched out a little more and who knows, maybe one day I'll be a writer. We'll see. (laughs)

It's a great life.
It's wonderful way, isn't it? And I'm not an egotist, so when we're in rehearsal and the actor says 'Sidney, this line doesn't feel right,' or two actors may say 'Sidney, this scene isn't going anywhere,' we'll talk it out and I'll go home and re-write it and sometimes it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to do it through a writer! (laughs)

I read in your book that a lot of the dialogue in Dog Day Afternoon was improvised. Do you encourage improvisation from your actors?
No I don't. I'm not a believer in improvisation, although I like it as a rehearsal process, but not for shooting. I find most improvisations wind up being rather self-indulgent, and what takes seven minutes to say in an improv could actually be said in a minute or thirty seconds. And time is precious on the screen. But Dog Day presented a unique problem: in its style...the first obligation of that picture was to let the audience know that it really happened. And as a result, the style of that picture isn't even realistic, it's naturalistic. I wanted it to feel like a documentary, and as part of that, I told the actors 'Look, as long as you don't change the meaning of anything, or shift the scene to another direction, use your own words. ' And by the way I did this with the complete approval of the writer, Frank Pierson, who was there and wrote a wonderful screenplay. And we never changed the structure of anything...much of what we used were Frank's words. But he saw the advantage of that. And what we would then do, we wouldn't just leave it as an improvisation. I brought my sound man in and the boom operator, and we recorded the improvisations and that night a bunch of secretaries would sit down and type them up, then Frank and I would sit down...and by the time we began shooting, we had the shooting script with dialogue composed of the improvisations. Only two of the scenes in the film are actually improvised on camera: Pacino's scenes with Charlie Durning and Pacino's yelling 'Attica' at the cops outside the bank.

You seem to experiment with a great deal of styles in your films. How do you respond to critics who accuse you of not having a distinctive personal style?
They're not wrong in the sense that I think that my job is to serve the material. When I'm doing Murder On the Orient Express, I don't want that to look like or feel like Dog Day Afternoon. I shift styles by picture and by subject matter, and by subject matter I mean not only the genre the picture's in, but what the picture's about emotionally. And the only thing is, I do it with great subtlety. To me, a bad shot is a shot that you notice.

Who are some present day filmmakers whose work you admire?
Gee, there's a lot...I love Zemeckis' work. I think Spielberg has become a great director. And I'm not using the word 'great' like Variety uses the word 'great,' I mean of all-time. I think two of the greatest American movies every made are E.T. and Schindler's List. Those are two great movies in the classic sense of the word. E.T., even though it's very different kind of movie in that it's not 'serious,' is one of the most beautiful, perfectly-made movies I've ever seen. An extraordinary piece of work. Nobody knows who hasn't tried it, how hard it is to make a fantasy work. Film is a very literal medium...and when that group of bicycles took off, my heart just leapt, as did the whole audience the night I saw it. The whole place just screamed and cheered and applauded...the sense of emotional release that you had from that, the sense that they were going to win--that's great moviemaking!

Any other names that come to mind?
Well the bad thing about a question like this is that I run the risk of offending those that I leave out, either intentionally or not. There's so many...I love Jonathan Demme. I love Ron Howard's work. He's a wonderful director.

What do you think about the independent film movement?
Well...I'm not sure there is an independent film movement. I hope there is, but Miramax belongs to Disney and Harvey Weinstein is getting himself up to 30 and 40 million dollar budgets, a far cry from where he began. New Line belongs to Turner, so their Fine Line budgets are going up, up, up...The history of independents, by which we really mean in this country, is independent financing of movies--we don't mean 'independent movies.' John Sayles, for example, still makes independent movies. And he's another director I love. There have always been the John Sayles', the individuals who get it done. But the history of independent movies in this country seems to indicate that the independents eventually all get swallowed up by the majors: Dino di Laurentiis, Lorimar...and I think that'll happen more and more as the problems with distribution, I guess I should say the stranglehold on distribution, gets more complete.

Since so many independent-minded films did well at the Oscars this year, do you see those types of films coming back into vogue, like in the late 60's and 70's?
I don't think so. I think you're going to see a big backlash next year! (laughs) I think you're going to see the most expensive movie from every studio nominated next year. I'm probably wrong, but what can I say? I'm a cynical old man! (laughs)

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Paul Schrader: The Hollywood Interview

Writer-director Paul Schrader (right) on the set of Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.


PAUL SCHRADER:
DOMINION OF THE DARK
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2005 issue of Venice Magazine.

Paul Schrader cemented his legendary status in cinema when he penned the Oscar-nominated script of Taxi Driver, which was directed by Martin Scorsese in 1976. Since that time, Schrader has become a sort of thinking man’s mogul, a writer-director whose work plumbs the depths of the human soul and psyche, and takes viewers to many dark corners that they may have preferred to remain hidden.
Schrader’s journey has been as fraught with dark shadows as some of his characters. The product of a strict Calvinist upbringing, he was born July 22, 1946 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the second child of a business executive and a homemaker who refused to let their children (older brother Leonard is also a renowned screenwriter, earning an Oscar nomination for Kiss of the Spider Woman) see a film until they were 18. Schrader was educated at Calvin College, Columbia University, and UCLA and was heavily influenced by foreign filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dryer and Yasujiro Ozu. After an initial stint as a film critic, Paul and Len Schrader became established screenwriters with the sale of their script The Yakuza to Warner Bros., with Paul’s Taxi Driver soon following. Written during a period of intense alcohol and drug abuse, and suicidal behavior, Taxi Driver has gone on to become the ultimate look into the heart, mind and soul of a societal fringe-dweller whose yearning for recognition explodes with furious violence. Robert De Niro’s psychotic cabbie Travis Bickle seemed to provide the world with insight into what made previously incomprehensible “whackos” like Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and Charles Manson tick. It remains a potent classic and a testament to Schrader’s gifts as a writer.
Schrader made the jump to director with 1978’s Blue Collar, followed by the classic American Gigolo (1980, and regarded by many as a touchstone film of the era), Cat People (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Light of Day (1987), Patty Hearst (1988), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Light Sleeper (1992), Touch (1994), Affliction (1997), Forever Mine (1999), and Auto Focus (2002). Schrader has penned the scripts for such diverse films as Obsession (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Old Boyfriends (1979), Raging Bull (1980), The Mosquito Coast (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), City Hall (1996), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999).
Paul Schrader’s latest film has had a perilous journey that could be a movie plot in and of itself. Schrader inherited Dominion: A Prequel to The Exorcist after director John Frankenheimer died during pre-production. Intended as an exploration of the Father Merrin character (portrayed by Max Von Sydow in the 1973 film) and his first encounter with the demon who dominates the original story, Schrader’s film was rejected by Morgan Creek Pictures and its CEO James G. Robinson as being too cerebral and not gory enough. Schrader was then let go as director, and replaced by Renny Harlin, who proceeded to reshoot almost 100% of the picture, resulting in the box office and critical bomb Exorcist: The Beginning.
Schrader’s version has been given a new lease on life, however, having received a limited theatrical release last summer and arriving on Warner Bros. DVD this month. Watching the two films back-to-back, one is struck by how distinctive the two schools of filmmaking are that Schrader and Harlin’s work represents. Paul Schrader sat down with us recently to discuss his experience making the film, as well as other aspects of his storied, legendary career.

When I heard you were going to be directing a prequel to The Exorcist I was a bit surprised, since it’s a change for you in terms of genre. What attracted you to the story?
Paul Schrader: Three things, not in any particular order: I loved the inversion of the premise, that instead of tormenting a cute little girl, you edify an afflicted outcast and turn him into Lucifer. I just thought that was genius. I loved that it was a real character study, with Father Merrin’s journey. I also loved the fact that it was in motion, and real. From the day I read the script to the day we started shooting was only three months. (John) Frankenheimer had scouted locations, had partially cast the movie, developed the script, budgeted the movie. It was a going, happening thing. For someone who’s spent years and years raising money to get films made, that was very attractive.

Is there a certain degree of baggage for a filmmaker when you’re making a film as a sequel to a legendary film that came before it?
An enormous amount of baggage. The kind of baggage that would scare off a number of other directors, because you can’t recreate The Exorcist, and you can’t compete with it. That’s a losing game. I’ve never been afraid of trying things other people say are impossible. I ended up with Patty Hearst because no one could figure out how to do it. I ended up with The Comfort of Strangers because (John) Schlesigner couldn’t figure out how to do it. So when someone tells me “You can’t do this,” my response is “Yes, I can.” But most importantly, this film takes place 25 years before the events in Georgetown. I wasn’t locked into anything, as a result, except I had to show Father Merrin meeting the devil, I had to show an exorcism, and I had to be sure that Merrin survives in the end. Beyond that, I had no allegiance to the Friedkin film. So I can roll back in history and make a film that stylistically, is more like an old-fashioned film, like the films of the 40s, when this film takes place.

Did you watch a lot of the old Universal horror films from that period to prepare?
No, mostly westerns. This film was never a horror premise, to begin with. This film is essentially a western, right down to the last shot, which is Shane. It’s the gunslinger who’s gotten out of the gunfighting business and has to strap on the six-shooters one more time to face the bad guys who ride into town. There were a lot of conscious references to the American west. This was because, when I was getting ready to do the movie, I went to the African location where the movie takes place, which is in West Kenya on the Sudan border, very wild country. There was a civil war going on, half-naked teenagers walking around with AK-47s, that part of the world. Very desolate, very wild, like the old American west. The architecture was even reminiscent of the old American west. That’s when we went back to the drawing board, and said this isn’t Nairobi in 1947, this is Fort Apache. This is a frontier post in the middle of nowhere. So we created this town based on that. The cowboys and Indians became the colonials and the natives.

This film is also unusual for you because it was written by someone other than yourself. Usually, you’re a writer/director.
Yeah, although I’ve directed a few pictures before that were written by others. The truth is, I sit down and retype the whole script anyway if it’s by someone else. I change things into my punctuation, my phraseology, so that when we’re on the set I can say ‘Oh yeah, I remember when I wrote this,’ (laughs) which is very unfair, in a way. When you write and direct, you’ve got to separate the two functions. It’s two different sides of your brain. Writing is very left brain, while directing is very right, and you can’t confuse the two. Whether you’ve written the script yourself or not, you have to attack it and destroy it so it fits the new form of logic that is directing. It’s also important that you understand the antagonistic nature of the two tasks, because writers and directors often lie to each other, and if you’re the same person, you believe those lies.

How was the film received by the studio brass during that first screening?
We had a ten week shoot: five in Morocco, five in Italy. I was under enormous pressure to deliver a cut very, very quickly, which always makes me suspicious. So I showed the first cut, which ran about two hours, ten minutes, to Jim (Robinson, CEO of Morgan Creek). We talked for three or four minutes, he said “It’s a little long. Take ten minutes out of it.” So I did and showed it to him the next week, and he didn’t come. In fact, that was the day that the editor was fired, and I was told to go home. There were no notes, and there were no discussions. That’s why I feel it’s a case of buyer’s remorse. I think somewhere towards the end of the process, Jim realized that they’d financed the wrong movie. He hoped they could bring in another editor and re-edit it, and it didn’t work. When they brought in Renny (Harlin) he said the same thing: “You don’t have a horror premise.” So they went back and started re-writing the script and changed the premise to have the demon possess a beautiful, young girl, a la the Friedkin original. And then they had their new movie, and more of a horror film.

I actually rented the Renny Harlin version after I saw your film. The contrast between the two was quite striking.
Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it?

My guess is there will be many articles, papers and monographs written about the two for years to come.
Yeah, maybe to the point where film professors will start saying “You can write your term paper on anything you want, except the two Exorcist prequels!” (laughs)

What really stood out about Harlin’s version is that it was so clearly made as an exploitation film: Graphic violence, sex, over-the-top histrionics. What I liked about your film, is that it explored the human psyche instead of quarts of blood. Once upon a time that’s what films used to do, in general.
When you see the two films as you did, you see a generational gap. There’s the generation that was raised on story and character, ostensibly a version of stage drama. And then you have a generation that was raised on video games, commercials and MTV. And no one saw my film. It’s been sitting on a shelf for two years. It wasn’t shown to Warner Bros., or in house at Morgan Creek. Only Jim, Guy McElwaine and David Robinson, they’re the only ones who saw it. Never previewed, never tested. So finally, I heard the most true comment from someone over at Morgan Creek who said “Schrader’s is a better film, but Renny’s is a better trailer.”

Which sums up the difference between the Easy Riders and Raging Bulls and the MTV generation.
Yeah, exactly. And he was right: Renny’s is a better trailer.

The other big difference between your generation of filmmakers, who were students of film and only made films, and the newer crop of filmmakers is that they cut their teeth on commercials and music videos—which isn’t filmmaking, it’s advertising. So they’re inherently not storytellers, they’re salesmen. And what they wind up making is $100 million mouth wash ads, disguised as movies.
Yeah, and the core of those movies, the stories, have to be greatly simplified, just as in advertising, the message is greatly simplified. “Buy this product, and you’ll get laid.” That’s how simple it is. You never sold anything by saying “Buy this product, maybe you’ll get laid, maybe you won’t.” (laughs) It’s very frustrating. If you like language, and character conflict, and ambiguity, there’s not a lot of room for you in a movie studio. And that’s one reason that I think the theater has been getting so much better lately. So many writers who were shuttled off to Hollywood a decade ago have started coming back to the theater. Writers like John Patrick Shanley, who won an Oscar for Moonstruck (1987), then got stuck writing stuff like Congo (1995), he won the Pulitzer this year for Doubt. John is a close friend of mine, and he’s returned to the theater because movies just don’t have the substance that they used to.

The other option you have is to go indie, but you also don’t make the same kind of living you would doing studio pictures, especially if you have a family to support.
I don’t even know if the indie route is all it’s cracked up to be. The studios have swallowed most of them up. To release a $2 million indie film, requires the same $5 million print and ad budget that a $50 million film does. When a distributor looks at a $2 million film, they’re looking at how much money they’re going to have to put in to get it out there. This might all change, of course, with broadband distribution, showing first run films on the web. Who knows how this is going to change things? I read a piece in The New York Times the other day, about how the Hong Kong film industry from a high of 300-400 films a year in the mid-90s, is now down to less than 50 films a year. From the Hong Kong perspective, the industry is near-dead now. They attribute its death to piracy, that there’s no money in making films anymore. Music in China is 95% pirated now, so that music groups issue albums to promote their tours, the opposite of the original paradigm, which was you went on tour to promote your album. If China is in some way the precursor of the new economics of entertainment, we’re in for a big shock, and a major case of whiplash, because this whole house of cards with these prohibitively expensive movies is going to come crashing down, just as it has in the music business. There is no more pressing issue than piracy. The best solution is the I-tunes solution: just sell it on the web and go to your competitors and fill their free software with viruses. (laughs) So movies may be headed toward that direction: on-demand, an IMDB catalog of films, available on a per-view basis. Everything about movies is obesely bloated at this point, and it deserves to collapse.

It’s gotten to the point where the people in charge of greenlighting movies don’t know or even like movies.
I can’t tell you the last agent or executive I talked with who likes movies. It’s becoming harder and harder. I was talking with Steven Soderbergh recently and the same subject came up, and he said “I find that I can’t mention films I like now if they didn’t make money.” Anytime you mention a film that didn’t make money, they get this look in their eyes, and it’s like: oops! (laughs) The people who run the business who don’t like movies are shameless about viewing movies as simply a commodity. They’re proud of it!

What do you do in that situation? Do you jump on the bandwagon to try and make a living, or do you hold fast to your ideals?
Well, fortunately I’m at an age where it’s almost too late to jump on the bandwagon. I’ve got another three or four films left in me, and I will struggle and I will get these films made.

But you’re still a young man. You’re what, 58?
Yeah, but it’s not easy for me to get a film made.

What was the last film you made that, according to Hollywood standards, was a “success”?
Well, both Affliction and Auto-Focus made money, but they don’t count.

Even the Oscars that Affliction won and was nominated for don’t count?
Nobody’s interested in prestigious, low income films. It’s just not what they do. The first time I realized this, I made a movie called Light Sleeper. It was made for Carolco, and because of Carolco’s arrangement with either Universal or United Artists, it had to be offered to them. Mike Medavoy, was at that time the executive. Mike is someone I had known for many years, and at one time was my agent. So Mike had to look at the film to see if they would release it. He called me up and said “This is really a good film. I really like it but you know, we don’t really distribute this kind of movie anymore.” And it was that blunt, that simple. They’re in another business now. So the films that I was making when I began, which were all studio films, then became independents.

One thing that struck me about Dominion was its theme of a protagonist questioning his faith, which is something that runs through most of your work. You came from a very strict, Calvinist family growing up. Although you obviously didn’t adopt that philosophy as an adult, it would seem that certain questions were raised in your psyche that have stayed with you.
They never leave you, no matter how far or how fast you run, you don’t outrun your childhood. And if you’re raised in an environment of good and evil, a very real hell, moral consequences, that stays with you your whole life. If you’re raised that at any moment, Jesus will return and judge you, maybe catch you masturbating, you’ll go straight to hell. I remember this very vividly, here give me your hand (Schrader takes my hand, palm up). I asked my mother, when I was about seven or eight, what was hell like? She took a sewing needle and went like this (Schrader jabs my finger, gently, with his fork) and jabbed me, and blood was coming out of my thumb. She said “You know how that felt when that needle went in your thumb? That’s what hell’s like, all the time.” I thought ‘Oh boy! Okay! I’m not going there. You want me to wash the dishes, clean my room, no problem! I don’t want to go to that needle in the thumb place!’ So that was the world in which I was raised. I later saw it for the metaphorical construct it was: a system of thought in order to make the world simple and understandable.

What did your father do?
Well, to his great chagrin because he wanted to be a minister, the Depression came, and he couldn’t support his family, so he dropped out of Calvin College, the college that both Len and I went to, and ended up as an executive for a pipeline company called Michigan-Ohio Pipeline. He then decided that his sons would become ministers, so that was the great drama and trauma of our adolescence. I learned a lot from my brother, who is three years older than I, because my father came at him. My brother resisted him, but he broke my brother. He broke his spirit. I remember watching him work my brother over verbally. I remember talking to Len, and Len saying “This is what’s going to happen.” So when my turn came, I fought back. I punched him. And that’s probably the difference between my brother and I. When my father died, my brother was not able to go to the funeral. And I think my father is still alive inside my brother. He never really got to punch him. It’s so strange, so Freudian, when you look at people whose lives are still defined by hating somebody who’s long in the ground. That’s what therapy is all about.

Has therapy been helpful to you over the years?
Yeah, very. The very first money I made, for the sale of The Yakuza, I went into analysis five days a week. I was frightened. I was walking around, carrying a gun. I could only sleep with a gun in my mouth. And I was thinking, ‘How long can this go on?’ (laughs) So when I went on the couch five days a week, it saved my life. And I’m forever grateful for that. My presenting cause--which is an infirmity you have that’s psychosomatic--of my neurosis was extreme claustrophobia, which I learned through research results from fear of the womb. I couldn’t ride on elevators, or go on airplanes. I’d have rather walked up twenty flights of stairs that go on an elevator. My doctor said to me “When you see a woman’s vagina, what do you think?” I said ‘The first thing I think is that I’m in the wrong place, that I walked into the girls’ locker room by mistake. I shouldn’t be there.’ Then I said, right out of the blue, ‘I feel like I’ve stepped into an elevator, and once those steel doors close, they’ll never open again.’ And I jumped up from the couch and started running around the room saying ‘I just said it! I just said it! I made the connection!’ It was about the power of the female to swallow your ego, and devour it.

So was your mother more dominant in your life than your father?
Yeah, but I mean, it’s always a give and take. I loved my mother and feared my father. My hatred of my father was more resolved than my love of my mother.

Did your father see any of your films?
It’s funny, the one time my father and I discussed it—and he didn’t go to movies, didn’t believe in movies—I started getting phone calls from him around the time Last Temptation was finished: “How’s the new movie coming along?” and so forth. The first couple calls I was a bit confused by it all. The third time he called, he started to ask me about the theaters it was going to be playing in. I said ‘Dad, are you by any chance in the group that is trying to block this film?’ And he said “Yes, but only locally.” (laughs) And he did manage to block it locally! There is some comfort in the fact of knowing that your father walked the line, even though it might have been tempting for him to support the work of his son, he stuck to his beliefs to the end. After he died, every film that my brother and I had done, he had purchased on video. And we found them all, still in their original plastic wraps. He never opened them or watched them, but he had them! (laughs) “My sons have done this, but I haven’t seen them!”

How have you maintained your relationships with your fellow Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas?
Not much, really. Obviously, once you get successful, everyone has their own little communities, and you live inside those. So those early years of swapping each other’s ambitions, that goes away. Some of my fellow soldiers have wearied of the fight, which is the premise of Peter Biskind’s book. I disagree with the premise. I think he found himself a premise that he was determined to see through regardless of the evidence that he gathered. I remember calling Peter just before the book came out and saying ‘Peter, I know you think we all sold out, but I just finished a film called Affliction that’s as pure a film as anything I’ve ever done. I wish you’d see this before you go to press on your book,’ but I couldn’t get him to see it. It’s like that graduate student who decides on his doctoral thesis premise and then makes everything fit into it, no matter what.

Getting back to the purity of your films, I would argue that Affliction is the second purest, and your purest is Mishima, which to me is an unheralded masterpiece.
Well, it’s the most original, but I don’t know that it’s the most personal. I think Light Sleeper is the most personal. But it is the most original and the most unique. When I was younger I knew Charles Eames, the architect. I used to spend a lot of time hanging around his workshop at 901 Washington. Charles said to me once “Art is really only about problem-solving. Before I make a new chair I go around and measure everyone’s ass in the workshop—problem-solving.” In a way, the genius of Mishima lay in problem-solving. Here you have a functioning schizophrenic: a man who lives multiple, simultaneous lives, contradictory ones. How do you portray such a character? How do you portray his inner life as well as his creative one? So you create this odd, cross-hatch structure: time, place, film stock that reflects the contradictory, schizophrenic nature of the character. So the beauty of Mishima is that it was the right solution to the right problem. I never made another film like it because I never had a problem like that before. It was the only way I could see to solve it.

Tell us about how Taxi Driver changed your life.
It’s kind of a wonderful thing to be associated with a classic. People have actually said to me “It must be terrible when one of your first scripts becomes a classic. How do you live up to that?” And I know full well that in my obituary, the first line will mention Taxi Driver, unless I kill the President or something. (laughs) And my response to that is, ‘Don’t you understand that it’s a wonderful film?’ I have friends in their 40s and 50s who are still on their hands and knees, crawling down Hollywood Boulevard for a little recognition. The fact that I got that kind of recognition early and powerfully, is not an intimidation, it’s a liberation. I suddenly could say that I never had to worry about becoming somebody. I did something that has allowed me to go on, and be free because I will never top it. Rather than being a sword hanging over my head, it really released my self-confidence as an artist because I knew that I had produced creative work that had value.

What was it like making the jump from screenwriter to writer/director with Blue Collar.
I made the decision not because I felt my work was somehow being ruined by the directors who’d shot my screenplays—which is the normal screenwriter’s lament. But I came to the point where I said ‘What are you? What is your identity? Are you a writer, why don’t you write something, like a book, where your words are the final product. Or, are you a filmmaker, in which case, you’d better start making films. This thing called screenwriting has such an unshaped background that by itself, will only bring unhappiness as you go down the road.’ So that’s when I started thinking about directing. I think I would have gone back to film criticism, rather than just be a screenwriter, because in being a film critic, your words are still the final product, whereas as a screenwriter, that’s never the case.

Is a first-time director ever prepared for that first day they walk on the set, or is it baptism by fire?
It’s on-the-job training. It’s not that hard to direct a movie. That’s one of the myths of filmmaking. All you have to do, is surround yourself with an experienced team. So many cinematographers and assistant directors ghost direct movies. We know their names. They get paid to do that. I can take anyone here, put them with that team, and an efficient, workable movie will result. So what you are bringing to the dance is not experience, but a kind of vision and originality. “I would like to tell this story. It hasn’t been told before, I don’t think. But I don’t quite know how to tell it. Help me out.” I did two films where I didn’t know how to direct: Blue Collar and Hardcore. Somewhere during American Gigolo I figured out what directing was, which was primarily because of a production designer named Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who got me to start thinking in visual terms instead of literary terms. They’re different thought processes. By the time I did Gigolo, I was starting to think as a picture maker much more than as a storyteller. But it takes a while. During the first and second film in particular, you’re just trying to keep your goddamned head above water.

One thing I’ve always loved about your films is that you’re a proponent of “less is more.” This is never more evident that if you put your version of The Exorcist next to Renny Harlin’s.
You have to get the viewer into the dance. And the only way you can do that, is to back off. If you keep throwing things out there, there’s no way they can ever participate in the story. And when the viewer participates, that’s when the viewer comes alive, and becomes part of the creative process. And therefore there has to be a certain mystery in every story that the viewer can address, a kind of disparity, a kind of uncertainty where the viewer says “Wait a second. This, and this, and this, they don’t really go together. But if I move this here and this, then they go together.”

What you’ve just said sums up what so many filmmakers today have forgotten: they know how to stimulate they eyes and the ears, but not the brain.
Right, and unless the viewer can join in the creative process, they’re strictly outside voyeurs.

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