Paul Schrader (director)

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Paul Schrader at the Montclair Film Festival in May 2018

Paul Schrader (born July 22, 1946 in Grand Rapids , Michigan ) is an American film director , screenwriter and film critic .

Life

Early years

The son of strict Calvinist parents, Paul Schrader studied at Calvin College in Grand Rapids and then, with the patronage of Pauline Kael , studied film studies at the University of California to become a film critic. He also reviewed scripts ( script coverage ) for Columbia Pictures . He wrote film reviews for the Los Angeles Free Press, Film Quarterly and Film Comment magazines, and published Cinema magazine in the early 1970s . Schrader attributes his intellectual rather than emotional approach to films and filmmaking to his youth, when he was banned from going to the cinema. Schrader only saw his first movie at the age of 17, but The Crazy Professor still left him “unimpressed”.

In his essay Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972) he examined similarities between the directors Ozu Yasujirō , Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer . In the same year to be published literature on film noir often cited article on Notes Film Noir . Besides Bresson, filmmakers like John Ford , Jean Renoir , Roberto Rossellini , Alfred Hitchcock and Sam Peckinpah impressed and influenced him . Renoir's The Rule of the Game was what Schrader called the “quintessence” of cinema. Other films to which he repeatedly referred are Vertigo - From the Realm of the Dead and The Black Falcon .

Schrader's early career was marked by repeated breaks with companions. Because of his piss of Easy Rider , he fell out with the editors of the Los Angeles Free Press , he had to end a scholarship at the AFI Conservatory prematurely because of a dispute with its director George Stevens junior . His decision against a job offer mediated by Pauline Kael as a critic in favor of professional screenwriting led to a break with his sponsor.

Screenwriter and director

Schrader wrote his first film script, Yakuza (1974, directed by Sydney Pollack ) with his brother Leonard Schrader . Warner Bros. paid them the then record sum of $ 300,000. It was later revised by Robert Towne at Pollack's request . This was followed by the scripts for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Brian De Palma's Black Angel (both 1976). A draft of the script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) from the mid-1970s displeased director Steven Spielberg so much that he urged Schrader's name to be removed from the credits. Schrader's script for The Man with the Steel Claw (1977) was rewritten without his intervention; the author distanced himself from the finished film by calling it "fascist".

The success of Taxi Driver made it possible for Schrader to realize his first directorial work, Blue Collar , in 1978 . On his second film, the autobiographically tinged Hardcore - A Father Sees Red (1979), John Milius acted as executive producer. For Scorsese's Wie ein Wilder Stier (1980), Paul Schrader wrote the script together with Mardik Martin ( Hexenkessel ) . Schrader wrote two other scripts for Scorsese, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Bringing out the Dead (1999).

Schrader's 1980 film A Man for Certain Hours became more famous . Other films followed, most of which he wrote the script himself, including Mishima - A Life in Four Chapters (1985) produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas , a film biography of the Japanese author of the same name , and the Oscar- winning drama Der Hunted (1997). The script for the biopic Auto Focus (2002), which traces the life of US actor Bob Crane , who was murdered in 1978 , was again written by Michael Gerbosi.

In the film Exorcist: Dominion (2005, working title) Schrader was deprived of artistic control, director Renny Harlin re- shot large parts of the film. With Harlin's version (titled Exorcist: The Beginning ) failing at the box office, production company Morgan Creek Productions gave Schrader a limited budget to complete his original version of the film, which was called Dominion: Exorcist: The Beginning of Evil at Festivals and ran on a small scale in cinemas. Dominion: Exorcist - The Beginning of Evil is - besides his Cat Man remake (1982) - the only Schrader film that is directly linked to a film by another director.

In addition to Yakuza , the scripts for Blue Collar , Diane and Mishima were also created with the help of his brother Leonard Schrader ( Kiss of the Spider Woman ) . Although some of the films Paul Schrader was involved in received Oscar nominations or awards, these were never recognized by Schrader's director or screenplay. The scripts for Taxi Driver and Wie ein Wilder Stier were nominated for a Golden Globe , but came out empty-handed. - Schrader named Taxi Driver as his own favorite among his scripts, and Mishima among his directorial work . He described Light Sleeper as his most personal film.

In 1995, Schrader's play The Cleopatra Club premiered in Poughkeepsie , New York, and in 2011 a German-language version was played for the first time in the Viennese StadtTheater walfischgasse . His piece Berlinale , which was created in the 1980s, was never performed. In 1998 Schrader was a member of the jury at the Sundance Film Festival , and in 2007 he headed the jury at the Berlinale . He has also repeatedly given lectures in film classes, for example at the New York Film Academy and the Film Society of Lincoln Center .

Schrader is married to Mary Beth Hurt , who played minor roles in Light Sleeper , The Hunted and The Walker .

subjects

Many of Schrader's scripts and films have in common the portrait of a character who has embarked on a self-destructive path or who harms himself with his actions. At the end of his films there is often an experience of redemption for the person concerned - after an extremely painful journey. It is not uncommon for this to be combined with a kind of self-sacrifice or a cathartic act of violence. Schrader repeatedly explored some frameworks, such as the lonely, nocturnal protagonist's search for meaning in Taxi Driver , Light Sleeper and Bringing out the Dead (which was based on a novel) or the descent of the superficial woman or society favorite, who is after one Initial experience loses its social environment and finds itself, as in A Man for Certain Hours and The Walker .

Schrader described Taxi Driver , A Man for Certain Hours , Light Sleeper and The Walker as a coherent tetralogy under the term “Man in a room” films, which ended with The Walker . The main character develops from an angry, then narcissistic and later troubled character to a man who hides behind a mask of superficiality.

plant

Director

Screenwriter

Unrealized scripts (selection)

  • Pipeliner
  • Covert People
  • Quebecois
  • Eight Scenes From the Life of Hank Williams
  • The John Gotti Story

Short films

  • 1970: For Us, Cinema is the Most Important of Arts
  • 1985: Tight Connection (music video)
  • 1995: New Blue

Plays

  • Berlinale
  • The Cleopatra Club (first performed 1995)

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Bettina Klix : lost sons, daughters, fathers. About Paul Schrader (= Filit. Vol. 6). Verbrecher-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-940426-57-4 .
  • Reinhold Zwick: Cracks in the visible. Paul Schrader's Transcendental Style as the implicit aesthetic of the sublime in film. In: Christian Wessely (Hrsg.): Art of Faith - Faith of Art. The view of the “unavailable other” (Gerhard Larcher on his 60th birthday). Pustet, Regensburg 2006, ISBN 3-7917-2033-3 , pp. 285-306.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Schrader in Tales from the Script . Eds. Peter Hanson, Paul Robert Herman. 1st edition. HarperCollins Publishers, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-06-185592-4 , p. 7.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Schrader on Schrader and Other Writings. Faber & Faber, 2004.
  3. ^ The Yakuza (1974). In: imdb. Retrieved December 28, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Dominion: Exorcist - The Beginning of Evil in the Internet Movie Database.
  5. ↑ Interview with Paul Schrader on The Hollywood Interview , first published in Venice Magazine , November 2005, accessed November 6, 2011.
  6. ↑ 1995 Powerhouse Season Mainstage: The Cleopatra Club by Paul Schrader, directed by Barry Edelstein ( Memento from January 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) On: NewYorkStageandFilm.org (English), accessed on May 16, 2019.
  7. ^ FAZ of February 3, 2011, page 35: tragicomics in the film business.
  8. ↑ Article on Paul Schrader and his films in Senses of Cinema number 56.
  9. ↑ Schrader: Indies are scavenger dogs, scouring the planet for scraps - Interview with Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times on December 11, 2007, accessed on November 22, 2011.
  10. ^ Movie High - Scott Macaulay interviews Paul Scrader about Light Sleeper. ( Memento of February 22, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) On: Filmmakermagazine.com , Fall 1992 (English). Retrieved May 16, 2019.

Web links

Commons : Paul Schrader  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Schrader, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American screenwriter and film director
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States