A Preference for the Outside

Several years ago, Paul Schrader joked to his friends, “I’m the sort of writer-director who doesn’t win awards but gets retrospectives”--and, as in many things, he turned out to be prophetic.

The writer and/or director of such notable films as “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “American Gigolo” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” is full up on retrospectives. First there’s a two-week look back by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art starting Friday, followed by one at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image starting Jan. 9.

The awards are starting to come his way too. Early next year Schrader, 52, will be honored by his writing peers with the Writers Guild of America’s Laurel Award, in recognition of his contributions to the screenwriting profession.

These salutes don’t mean Schrader’s work is all in the past. His latest directorial effort, “Affliction,” starring Nick Nolte and James Coburn, debuts Dec. 30. It’s an adaptation of Russell Banks’ (“The Sweet Hereafter”) dark and disturbing novel, and it’s getting some Oscar buzz for Schrader’s writing and direction.

Though he began his career inside the Hollywood system via such highly regarded scripts as “Taxi Driver,” Schrader has cultivated a reputation as an outsider. His main characters were frequently existential loners operating on the margins of society, lost, confused, often given to violent sociopathic behavior. His often-dark, edgy films were clearly a touchstone for the independent film movement that emerged in the ‘90s.

Schrader came to Los Angeles at a time when iconoclasm was in fashion. The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were marked by anti-establishment films like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Easy Rider” and “Taxi Driver.” Schrader’s celebrated bad-boy image and that of his contemporaries (Bob Rafaelson, Hal Ashby and Roman Polanski, among others) were examined earlier this year by noted film writer Peter Biskind in his controversial “Easy Riders and Raging Bulls,” a work Schrader dismisses as “the revenge of the gossip culture on the counterculture.”

Most of the filmmakers from that era either adapted to the changing Hollywood system that favored big-budget popcorn fare or self-destructed. Schrader has somehow managed to last in this tough environment.

“I can’t think of any other filmmaker who survived the ‘70s with his vision intact,” says Ian Birney, executive director of LACMA’s film department. “There’s a level of stylistic consistency in his films that is rare in American movies.”

Remained Connected to Hollywood From N.Y.

After a battle with substance abuse, Schrader left Los Angeles in the mid-’80s and moved to New York. He still maintained a connection to Hollywood as a writer for hire on studio films like “Havana,” “Mosquito Coast” and “City Hall.” He’s working on Martin Scorsese’s upcoming “Bringing in the Dead” while pursuing a more eclectic directing career with such independently financed projects as “Affliction.”

“I make one-of-a-kind films--for better and for worse since I’m not saying that they all work,” he said in a recent interview. “But they are individualistic.”

He has paid a price for adhering to individuality in a mass medium. Except for “American Gigolo,” none of the films he’s directed has been commercially successful, though he says few have lost much money.

A former film reviewer, Schrader has emulated the challenging work of such ascetic directors as Yasujiro Ozu, Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson. Fans of Schrader find his work bracing; detractors call it cold and alienating. Schrader doesn’t pay much heed to the criticism.

“Both critics and viewers are pack animals,” he contends, “and if my film doesn’t fit into the pack mentality that given month, it takes a while for them to sort it out. I suspect the kind of things I do have an element of unease to them and people are more comfortable with them in retrospect. A lot of the films I’ve made wear rather well.”

Schrader says he’s incapable of, or at the very least uninterested in, following the Hollywood formula of “tell the audience what they’re going to see, show it to them and then tell them what they saw.” His discomfort with the state of movies applies to all the arts.

“We’re in a particularly fallow period,” he declares. “Audiences regard the arts as essentially trivial and decorative. The arts in return reflect that. When audiences don’t demand much from artists, that doesn’t mean they quit working. It means they start talking to themselves.

“A lot of what we see in movies, music, even painting is artists talking to themselves. All this deconstructive filmmaking is self-referential, a kind of in-joke art. That doesn’t mean it’s a permanent condition. The arts have an ebb and a flow. We are in the ebb.”

Having directed 11 movies, most of which he also wrote, Schrader refers to himself as a writer or director, depending on his mood and his assignment. He donned his writing hat earlier in the day to visit the set of the Scorsese film in which Nicolas Cage plays a New York City ambulance driver, a character in the existential loner mold of “Taxi Driver’s” Travis Bickle, “Raging Bull’s” Jake LaMotta and even Jesus Christ in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” his other scripts for Scorsese. “Bringing in the Dead” is their first effort together after a professional burnout a decade ago.

Writing, Directing Are ‘Delicious Pleasures’

Later in the day, he wears his director’s cap to hammer out the schedule for “Forever Mine,” a “flat-out love story” starring Joseph Fiennes and Gretchen Mol, which he will direct early next year.

For Schrader, both writing and directing are “delicious pleasures.” The joy of screenwriting, he says, “is that you’re in control, the weather is perfect, the actors are talented and they know just when to shut up.”

But the solitary aspects of a writer’s life can be constricting, he admits, whereas “directing is enormously communal. It’s satisfying to walk out in the morning and have 50 or 100 people say, ‘Good morning. What are we going to do today?’ ”

Creatively, directing can sometimes result in “artistic diminution” of a script, “except in those situations when serendipity strikes. For me that was the case with Nick Nolte in ‘Affliction.’ I spent most of my time dumbfounded by his talent. The personal place to which he gets [in a role] is all his own. It’s nothing you can direct.”

Though he is quite sanguine about his screenwriting abilities, he is more self-critical when it comes to his talents as a director. “Often my strengths and weaknesses are connected,” he observes. “I tend to move a little too quickly. I don’t like to waste time casting. I figure the mistake you make after seeing 10 actors is the same you’ll make after seeing 100.

“And I don’t really understand directors who shoot and shoot. For me it’s three, four or five takes and it’s time to do something different. That can be a problem. Sometimes you shouldn’t move on.”

The other hurdle as a director is logistical, the time and effort it takes to raise the financing for the kind of singular material to which he is attracted. Because studios are rarely interested in these projects, he must go to independent sources to piece together the production money, a time-consuming task.

Lately he’s been having better luck outside the U.S., and his recent films have been financed in Japan, France and England. Working in the $6-million range as he did on “Affliction,” with a well-known cast that includes Willem Dafoe in addition to Nolte and Coburn, works best for Schrader.

“I was raised a good Christian boy, and I don’t think it’s right to hustle people out of their money and not deliver,” he says. “I don’t have to make them filthy rich, but they should at least get their money back.”