A Raging Bull Revisited

Among the lunchtime mover-and-shaker crowd at the Regency Hotel last week, writer-director Paul Schrader blended in nicely, clad in a handsomely tailored dark suit and pink silk tie. The surrounding diners (munching on pricey Cobb salads) didn’t seem to know that the quiet, 61-year-old, gray-haired man sitting among them was one of the crazy punks who revolutionized Hollywood back in the 1970’s, the guy who wrote Taxi Driver at age 26 (in 10 feverish days), Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, and also wrote and directed American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, Affliction and Auto Focus.

But then again, they couldn’t hear Mr. Schrader talk, his voice a deep, glass-grinding growl, punctuated by lots of mischievous mwha-ha-ha, Dr.Evil-like laughter. When you hear him, it’s easy to remember that this is the man who thought up Travis Bickle. Take, for example, his view of one particularly startling scene in his new film, The Walker (opening Friday), with the sudden revelation that a main character’s wearing a wig. “It’s kind of hard to shock or surprise an audience anymore,” Mr. Schrader said. “Full-frontal nudity … or kick a dog … or rape a child—everybody yawns. But take off your hair …” Mwha-ha-ha.

Or, there’s the way he’s unafraid to express his disappointment over the fact that the film’s star, Woody Harrelson, hasn’t done much to promote the film

“As a person, he’s a nice guy, and as an actor, he’s very talented, but as a professional, he’s a shit,” said Mr. Schrader, who theorized that Mr. Harrelson didn’t like his performance in the movie. (Mr. Harrelson’s publicist said simply, “Woody is taking some time to spend with his family.”) “Usually, even if an actor has a problem, they suck it up and do some work but. … Woody has not. That, to me, is pretty unprofessional.” Okay, then!

The Walker, which co-stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall and Lily Tomlin, is about Carter Page III (Mr. Harrelson), the gay escort of choice for the society ladies of Washington, D.C., who finds himself embroiled in a murder case. Mr. Schrader says that Carter Page is a relative to some of his other, famous antiheroes from Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Light Sleeper, though their similarities aren’t super apparent.

“For me, it’s another one of these service industry metaphors—my fourth and probably my last, given how long it took to get this one financed,” he said. “When he was 20 he was a taxi driver; he was angry. When he was 30, he was a gigolo, a narcissist. At 40 he was a drug dealer and was anxious, and now he’s 50 and he’s a walker. It’s kind of interesting, these sort of service jobs, which are in society and out of society at the same time. I’ve always liked them. They’re essentially character studies and therefore hard to finance as the character gets older because then you’re out of the demographic of the moviegoer. So it’s a lot easier when he’s 20 with a gun in his hand than when he’s 50 and shopping in a fabric shop.”

PAUL SCHRADER WAS born in Grand Rapids, Mich., raised by strict Calvinists, and had a childhood that didn’t include the movies. “It wasn’t an enormous sense of deprivation. I didn’t know anybody who saw movies. It was a church community,” he explained. Mr. Schrader credits his uncles, Dutch celery farmers, who were “grand storytellers, with long stories that didn’t have any point to them but were wonderfully entertaining to hear,” as early influences.

“There’s a good side to it, too,” he said of not being able to see films till adulthood. “A director never forgets his first love. And if your first love was westerns or anime—you’ll always have that reference for the rest of your life. My first love was European cinema of the ’60s: Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni—that’s when I started. The best time. Those were the films that drew me in, and I’ve never forgotten them, that love.” He used his friend Martin Scorsese, with whom he’s worked on four films, for contrast. “Marty, he went to the movies every week. He saw all of it.” But, he said, “we didn’t grow up that differently. I think we’re pretty much the same guy: sort of short, asthmatic, intellectual and temperamental. His background is urban, Catholic, Italian. Mine is rural, Protestant, Dutch. That’s the difference. It’s really a different frame of reference than different people.”

After working as a film critic (he was fired by one newspaper after panning Easy Rider; Pauline Kael was a mentor), Mr. Schrader and his older brother, Leonard (who wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman), both eventually found Hollywood success. Mr. Schrader says his family never discussed the brothers’ work. “The only time I ever heard about it was during Last Temptation [of Christ]. My father called me up and asked me about this movie. I thought that was odd. He called me later; now he was wondering how many theaters it was going to play in. I said, ‘Dad, are you involved in the movement to stop the film?’ He said, ‘Yes, but only locally!’ And they did block it.” Mr. Schrader laughed pretty heartily (considering).

“After he died,” he continued, “I went into his house and was shocked to find he had all the videotapes of all the films my brother and I were involved in, but the plastic wrap was still on them. So it’s like, my sons have accomplished something … but I never watched any of them!”

MR. SCHRADER MOVED to New York 25 years ago from Los Angeles. He and his wife, Mary-Beth Hurt, live in Chappaqua (near the Clintons), but he says an empty nest (their children are 23 and 19 years old) will probably lead to them moving back into the city. In the meantime, Mr. Schrader keeps an office in Times Square with easy access to a multiplex where he can check out four or five movies a day. “I don’t stay for everything. I just go from theater to theater to theater. I look at the cinematography, I look at the direction, I look at the acting. Only the films I’m really interested in do I go from start to finish.” (He did say he recently enjoyed Beowulf: “I saw it on Imax, 3-D.”)

As for his own films, he never watches them. The Walker is already a film he’s confident he’ll never see again (he says he hasn’t watched Taxi Driver straight through in 30 years). “I’m not terribly interested in the past, I’m more interested in the future. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation ’cause you look at them, and if they’re not very good you say, ‘God, I never had any talent.’ So you look at it, and it’s pretty good, you say, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good—where did my talent go?’” He laughed hard and wheezily. Though he may be pessimistic about the future of filmdom and his place in it (“I’m at an age now where I can ride that broken-down horse into the sunset!”), when The Observer mentioned the Stockholm International Film Festival last month, where Mr. Schrader received a lifetime achievement award, the blustery auteur got quiet, looked at his plate, and smiled. “Well … it’s nice.”