Few people influenced the director-driven '70s golden age of rogue Hollywood — and, consequently, a hefty percentage of everything American indie cinema has produced since — as directly as Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Since those halcyon days, Schrader hasn't been content to become a film-school touchstone; he's remained both creative and provocative, penning the screenplays for films like The Mosquito Coast, The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out The Dead and directing works like American Gigolo, a remake of the suspense classic Cat People, the Bob Crane biopic Auto Focus, and 2013's controversial The Canyons (which starred Lindsay Lohan alongside porn star/accused sexual abuser James Deen).
Taxi Driver celebrated its 40th birthday earlier this year, but not even that milestone slowed down Schrader, whose latest directorial effort, Dog Eat Dog, comes out in theaters and via Video on Demand tomorrow, Friday, November 11. (The trailer is embedded below.) A moody and blackly comic noir about a botched heist starring Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe adapted from the novel of the same name by Matthew Wilder, Dog Eat Dog evinces Schrader's ongoing fascination with the doomed souls at the fringes of society, and the contrary traits and desires that drive them. It also marks the first time the filmmaker has appeared in a film.
CL spoke with Schrader via phone call.
Was [your part in] Dog Eat Dog the first time you’ve been in front of the camera?
It was my first, and my last.
So you didn’t like it?
Well, I… I tried to get other people, it just got too late, we didn’t have enough money, so I just did it. I don’t plan to do it agin.
The movie’s brand of dark humor is actually pretty overtly comedic in places. Did you enjoy working on something that’s laugh-out-loud funny in these weird, abrupt, unexpected places?
It is funny! The script wasn’t really written [with that tone], it was adapted from the novel, but I had the freedom, nobody was telling me to do it a certain way, As we were working on it, I thought that this really could be funny, and if I decided to do it that way, there was no one to stop me.
Do you approach a project differently as a director when you didn’t write it yourself?
To some degree. Sometimes, in most cases, I really defer to the writer’s voice. In this one, I defied the writer’s voice for my own.
Despite Dog Eat Dog having several legendary names, it’s what would be considered a smaller-budget film by American mainstream standards-
Yes.
When you’re working on a film like this, do you worry about what will happen to the film when your part is done, whether or not it will be given the opportunity it deserves to find its audience?
You’re asking a couple of different questions. When you do a genre film with Nicolas Cage, you get the movie made, but there goes most of your budget. But this type of film is not really made for the theaters. We don’t make movies like this for [extended theatrical release] anymore, this is a VOD (Video on Demand) film.
There still will be theatrical exhibitions, but it won’t be the dominant means of distribution. When you make a genre film like this, the goal of everything — of all the press, all the premieres, all the retrospectives, the goal is [to have a big] opening VOD weekend.
Do you think there’s still that perspective that being a VOD release delegitimizes a movie?
Not anymore. The people who are putting money into movies now, they’re interested in two things — China, and VOD, those are now your two biggest markets.
Even though you didn’t write it, the movie has certain elements with which you’ve long been associated — why do you think you’re drawn to the damaged and the doomed?
Well, the essence of character is contradiction. I’m drawn to these characters whose lives are lost, whose lives are stitched together with contradictions. They’re already lost, that decision was made before they even start behaving self-destructively.
As Taxi Driver turns 40, do you feel like the same man who wrote it?
I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t. But when I look at people — we had the 40th anniversary screening at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, and they they were all there — Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro, Cybil Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, we were all there. I looked at all of them, and, you know, people don’t really change much, they’re all the same people they used to be. So I’m sure they thought the same about me, even though I don’t feel it’s true.
Do you spend a lot of time thinking about things like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull even when people aren’t constantly asking you about them?
No, fortunately I’ve always been able to concentrate on the next task. And I don’t look forward to the day when that won’t be possible.
Does your body of work affect the way you approach things now? Does it give you confidence, or go the other way, create a certain amount of pressure?
No. I mean, the fact that you have critical validation very early on, you can just go out and live the rest of your life and feel that you’ve got it. Some people never get it, and they chafe at that. If you do, you get it and you move on, you keep trying to come up with something new that interests you.
I go to movies and I look up at the screen and I say, ‘This is so boring, how do they stay awake, why do they make a film that’s been made so many times before.’ So every film, you try to come up with something that keeps you awake, gives you something different. The thing with Dog Eat Dog was, how do you do a genre film in 2015 and make it unique? …Every film is a different challenge.
Trailer for Dog Eat Dog:
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This article appears in Nov 10-17, 2016.
