Schrader Discusses Characters, Career

“It’s not necessarily the best film, but it’s the one that moves me most...It’s the only time a script came to me in a dream,” quipped writer-director Paul Schrader at a screening of his 1992 film “Light Sleeper” during last weekend’s three-day retrospective of Schrader’s life at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA). “I mean, a lot of scripts come to me in dreams. It’s the only time a good script came to me in a dream.”

Such lighthearted banter is unexpected from a man who’s built a career writing gritty films like “Raging Bull” and directing urban classics like “American Gigolo.”

Schrader was present at two of the six HFA screenings and also reached out to students at Kirkland House and in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) during his time in Cambridge.

As a student himself in the late sixties and early seventies, Schrader did not plan to become a director. He received a late introduction to the world of film, prevented by his strict Calvinist background from seeing a movie until the age of eighteen.

He made up for lost time by watching an average of three movies a day while studying at UCLA and earning his MA in Film Studies. While viewing Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” though, Schrader became inspired by the film’s careful investigation of society, and his work veered from film criticism into screenwriting.

“I got into writing for the best of all reasons: self-therapy,” Schrader says. “It was an artistic self-exorcism.” Now when teaching screenwriting classes, Schrader coaches his students in what he calls “the evolution from problems to metaphors to stories.”

Often this problem is loneliness. Before writing “Taxi Driver,” the film that catapulted him to national acclaim, Schrader spent a stretch of time living in his car, eventually coming to the chilling realization that he hadn’t spoken to another human being in weeks.

“I’m like a kid in this steel box, this steel coffin, surrounded by all these people but all alone,” he recalled. “If I didn’t start writing this, it would have started writing me.”

When Schrader has derived a story from a given problem, he develops the plot by testing it on an audience. If the story can hold someone’s attention for forty-five minutes, he is confident he has a film. And as someone who grew up “listening to grown-ups telling stories” in lieu of television, he knows how to hold an audience. Even while fielding serious questions, he managed to draw laughter from the crowd.

Schrader both wrote and directed “Light Sleeper” and “Blue Collar,” shown at the HFA on Saturday night. When asked about his transition to directing, he said that screenwriting was too intermediary.

“I didn’t feel I was a writer,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I was an author, an artist. I felt like I was part of a process.” As a director, Schrader said he also realized that “a literary logic is different than a visual logic.” But regardless of which “logic” he is using, Schrader employs it to emphasize the characters in his films.

Though his protagonists stem from similar problems, they vary widely in their realization. “I don’t believe that social ideology should determine your film,” Schrader said. “The ending should be determined by the spiritual integrity of your characters.”

The full reign that Schrader gives his characters accounts for the differences in ideological philosophy that arise: in “Blue Collar,” the street-talking factory workers were read by audiences as spearheads for communism; in “Mishima,” the militaristic title character reaches a violent end in part due to his right-wing politics.

This “spiritual integrity,” however, doesn’t mean the characters are always completely honest. “I love the unreliable narrator,” Schrader says.

Though Schrader said he rarely watches his work after it is released, he retains an impression of each of his films, reflecting the initial emotional stimulus behind the film’s conception. “Certain things stay with me,” he said, referring to “Light Sleeper,” in particular. “And I remember the yearning, and how much I loved the yearning.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Schuetz can be reached at schuetz@fas.harvard.edu.