Feature Interview by Sian Thatcher
Writer and director Paul Schrader is talkin’ to Sian Thatcher about Taxi Driver and the outsider in his new film, The Walker
With a childhood entrenched in Calvinist doctrine, it’s no surprise that Paul Schrader has a reputation for punctuality. And, as expected, he’s turns up bang on time to meet us at a trendy Soho hotel.
His black, round-rimmed spectacles and sharply pressed shirt say ‘discipline’, but with his twinkling blue eyes and raspy braying laugh anyone can see that he’s no saint.
Indeed, it was Schrader, now 61, who worked through his own inner demons in a process of catharsis to produce some of the most iconic anti-heroes in celluloid history. His CV features seminal works such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, American Gigolo and Light Sleeper – all films that focus on the lonely man, suffering from a self-induced melancholy. Some of his films have formed a loose series, he says, with his latest offering marking the last chapter.
“I’ve written a series of films about a certain kind of American guy, a drifter, an outsider, a peeper,” he says. “And as I’ve gotten older the character has changed. So, in his 20s he was angry and a taxi driver, at 30 he’s a narcissistic gigolo, and 40, he’s an anxious drug dealer. Now, at 50, he’s a superficial walker. That’s a kind of progression of a certain character, it may mark the progression of my life, it may mark the progression of society, I don’t know, but it is a sort of progression and I think I’m done with it now hopefully.”
The Walker is a chamber drama set in Washington DC, following bitchy socialite Carter Page III, a gay gossip merchant who escorts the wives of senators around town. But after one of their lovers is found dead, he becomes embroiled in a political scandal and is forced to question his place in society and reassess his allegiances.
The lead character of Carter, played by Woody Harrelson, is the eponymous ‘walker’. The figures who squire rich men’s wives to the theatre have been around for hundreds of years, says Schrader, but that particular term came from W magazine to describe Nancy Regan’s walker, Jerry Zipkin. Schrader says that it’s impossible to be around New York society without bumping into these men.
“My agent is Lauren Bacall’s walker. He happens to be married, he’s not gay, but Betty Bacall likes to go out, she likes to go to openings. She’s 84 years old – she can’t go alone. Who’s gonna take her? So, enter my agent, who about once a week has to schlep Betty to some event. That’s how she ended up in the movie.”
Truman Capote was a walker of his day, escorting all the “swans”, as he called them, around town, and a book about him features in the film as a nod of acknowledgement. But Schrader looked closer to home when searching for inspiration for the film.
“[Carter is] primarily based on a friend of mine, who’s from a political military family in Virginia and not unlike this guy,” he says. “Of course, the original idea came from Gigolo, just wondering what would that character be like at 50. His skills would now be social, not sexual and he would probably be out of the closet.”
For the film-savvy viewer, there’s even a reference in the film to American Gigolo in the form of a dressing montage at the beginning. While the film focuses on narcissism and sexual betrayal, it’s surprising to find that it was filmed on the conservative Isle of Man, who have traditionally had very conservative views on homosexuality (“the irony was pointed out to me…”).
Schrader admits that as much as he enjoys filming in the UK, he would rather be filming in the US and is candid when explaining the reasons behind his decision. “The Isle of Man gives you 25 per cent of your budget if you shoot 50 per cent of your film there. Now I’ve heard that Taiwan has a programme they’re working on where they’re gonna offer 30 or 33 per cent of your budget if you shoot in Taiwan. So you go where that kind of financing is…”
Getting the finance in place has been the biggest hindrance for Schrader. “If you’re originating a project and it is off-kilter and not automatically in a certain kind of genre, it’s going to take a while and you’re going to have to scrounge the planet like an scavenger dog looking for the scraps of international funding which fall off from somebody else’s table, and it takes a while,” he sighs. “The Walker was particularly frustrating because I did have it financed on a couple of occasions and it fell through.”
As The Walker is set in the current day, Schrader had to constantly rewrite the script each time it was refinanced. Politics takes a central role in the film and there are even the notorious torture images of Abu Ghraib painted by Carter’s boyfriend, Emek Yoglu (Moritz Bleibtreu). To many, this would appear to be Schrader’s protest against the Iraq war. “When I first wrote it, Clinton was in office, and it got more and more political as the current squad of gangsters tightened their control over the Washington system.”
After directing the Exorcist Prequel and being unceremoniously sacked from the project, Schrader thought he might never work again. “I ended up doing that whole debacle with the Exorcist just because I had been offered the film straight after The Walker fell through,” he says. “I jumped into that project as a sort of therapy, but it turned out to be therapy of the wrong sort.”
Since then, he has had two films financed, back-to-back. His next film, Adam Resurrected, stars Jeff Goldblum as a clown spared from death in a Nazi concentration camp so he can entertain the inmates – another venture into the dark side, then.
But is the ‘lonely man’ series really finished? Will there be no more Travis Bickle/Julian Kaye/John LeTour/Carter Page? Is there no more alienation we can squeeze out of Schrader? “As actors get older, you can’t have them running around with guns. I suppose if I had to do it again and he was 60, he’d probably drive an elevator – ‘I take ‘em up, I take ‘em down’,” he laughs. “I’d have a hard time financing that one!”
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