Paul Schrader: Writing, Violence and Therapy

Affliction (Directed by Paul Schrader)

Paul Schrader’s powerful Affliction (1997), adapted from the novel by Russell Banks, charts the inexorable decline into violence of a small-town New Hampshire sheriff Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), the brutal legacy of his relationship with an abusive, alcoholic father (James Coburn). 

The plot ostensibly centres on a hunting death on the edge of town which Wade comes to believe implicates a colleague. As Wade delves deeper into the incident, he becomes convinced there is a conspiracy at work involving the mafia or crooked property developers. As the investigation proceeds, his personal life spirals out of control.

Estranged from his ex-wife and young daughter, confronted with the death of his gentle mother and isolated from his neighbours who find him strange, Wade slowly begins to come apart. Events come to a head when Wade moves in to care for his ageing father, and the cycle of generational conflict resumes. Wade’s girlfriend, Margie (Sissy Spacek) tries to stop the destruction, but she is powerless to help and is eventually compelled to leave. 

Affliction is narrated by Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), Wade’s younger brother who has sought to escape his father’s fearsome legacy by retreating into life as a university lecturer. Rolfe informs us from the outset that this is a story about Wade’s descent into criminality, and yet he acknowledges that he is implicated in his brother’s descent, because when he comes to visit Wade after the death of their mother, he encourages Wade’s increasingly paranoid theories.

Paul Schrader’s considerable reputation as a screenwriter and director rests on his exploration of the damaged psyches of American males as they try to come to terms with the contradictions of masculine desires and social reality, most notably in his famous screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Affliction revisits this theme as Nolte gradually loses each of his roles: father, husband, public official, son, lover. The power of Nolte’s existential descent is reinforced by a mythical resonance as Schrader demonstrates that Wade’s ‘affliction’ is a legacy of male violence, a hereditary cultural malaise that is passed on from father to son.

The stark beauty of the snowy wintry setting and Schrader’s understated yet intimate cinematic style builds the underlying tensions until they shatter in powerful close-ups, revealing the rage and fear as it breaks through Wade’s fragile facade.

In the following interview Paul Schrader discusses the film with Josh Zeman in an article first published in Filmmaker magazine.

So what drew you to this Russell Banks’ novel and kept your interest in it over the years it took to get the film made?

I saw it in a book shop when it came out in trade paperback, and it just caught me. The first line of the novel is actually the first line of the film: ‘This is the story of my brother’s criminal behavior and his strange disappearance.’ I was just grabbed by it, so I bought it. Besides the language, the depth of theme and the depth of the characters, I think what I liked most about [the book] was the gimmick: half or two-thirds of the way through, it’s like, boom! You realize that this small-time cop who thinks he is going to redeem himself by solving a murder is really going crazy, because there is no murder. The real drama is about his father, not about this ‘hunting accident.’

You’ve used that structure before.

Yeah, it’s kind of hidden. You use a genre to disguise your real business.

Wasn’t that same idea in ‘Light Sleeper’ and ‘American Gigolo’? You’ve found a novel that finally exemplifies your structure and style.

I view the film as a collaboration between myself and Russell Banks. It’s not really one of my themes, it’s more Russell’s – this whole theme of generational violence, male violence that is passed on from father to son. One of the differences between things that I have written and Russell’s book is that I tend to end my pieces on a kind of grace note, and this one has none. I like some sense of moral grace. But Affliction is pretty bleak at the end. Another thing I like about the film and book – Russell said to me once, ‘You know who the main character of the novel is?’ It’s the narrator [Rolfe, played by Willem Dafoe]. You don’t see the narrator’s life, but he tells you right in the beginning, ‘In telling this story I tell my own story as well.’ And you have to figure out Rolfe’s story because it’s under the surface.

You say the murder mystery ends two-thirds into the film and that your subtext becomes the main text. Compared to ‘Light Sleeper’ and ‘American Gigolo’, that transformation happens much quicker in this film.

Yes, but you still need it to create audience identification. You need to get the audience behind the character when they may not be that willing. You can sort of root for Wade as long as [you think] he is going to solve this crime. And by the time you realize he isn’t going to solve any crime, you have already identified with him, and you’re caught.

So what do you think you as a director brought to the script if the themes were mostly Russell’s?

I sort of climbed on top of Russell’s theme: how do you kill the father? I had a very strong father and an older male sibling. My father was not abusive, he was not alcoholic, but there were enough similarities. I came from that part of the country with long cold winters, so I knew these people, and I knew their violence.

I was reading the press release, and it kept speaking of male violence. But I don’t think the film is really about violence. The violence in it seems more the result of cause and effect.

Yes, that is kind of an easy handle. You know movies need handles of various sorts, and there should be themes in films that are acceptable to everyone. And then there should be layered themes underneath. So when Rolfe at the end says, ‘This is the story of generations of boys who were beaten by their fathers,’ that’s kind of the obvious theme. That is put there so people who watch the movie can say, ‘Oh, that’s what it was about, and I didn’t waste my time.’ But there’s other things the film is about too.

What were your experiences working with Nick Nolte on this project?

Well, this took a long time to get made because I had optioned the book and written the script assuming Nick would want to do it. But Nick felt that he should get his full price, and that’s what took five years. I was not able to get it financed, and finally I gave up. When Nick realized that he would only get to play this role if he took substantially less money, then I was able to get it financed. What that also meant was that by the time he got into rehearsals, he knew this character cold. He had reams of notes. He had notes for every other actor. I remember once we were shooting and I was suggesting a different line reading. Nick said to me, ‘Oh, I don’t think he would say it that way,’ and I realized that his decision had been made months ago, maybe even years ago.

So it was fortuitous that you had to wait those five years?

Yes, and I wanted to stick it out with Nick. This character does some unpleasant things, and Nick has a very audience-friendly face and demeanor. He seems like a nice guy, a guy you would like to know. Other actors don’t invite you in easily, so you need an actor who seems friendly, like an ordinary Joe.

So you wanted that audience identification right off the bat?

I wanted the audience to root for him because you know from the first line that it’s not going to work out for him. So how do you still care for him? The actor has to get you to care for him. Willem wanted to play that role, and I just couldn’t offer it to him because he doesn’t have that kind of friendly physiognomy.

The father-son relationship between Nolte and James Coburn seemed very organic.

Well, I needed a big actor, a tall actor, someone bigger then Nick, because Nick’s a big guy, and I also wanted an iconic actor. Coburn and Nolte represent two generations of Hollywood leading men. James is very much of the ’50s, a swinging cat when men were men and girls were babes. Nick is a product of the ’60s, where men were partners with women. So even though they are only about 15 years apart, they represent two generations of Hollywood male sensibilities.

One of the most fascinating scenes in the film was Wade Whitehouse pulling out his own tooth.

Well, that was another one of those sort of gimmicks in the book. You think that the affliction is maybe somehow tied to this toothache. When he gets that tooth out, maybe he will be better.

Does the film have distribution?

We just got a offer in the last week or so that Largo finds acceptable. There have been some offers out there, but they have been so low that Largo hasn’t taken them. I think they got an offer, and it will be announced out of Sundance.

Why do you think it was hard to get a good distribution deal?

It’s a buyer’s market, and it’s a dark film. The company that made it was in financial trouble, and they had told their Japanese backers that they would get a certain amount for this film. They had overestimated what they would get, so they were in a very tricky position since they were asking more then the market would carry.

So you’re still defining your career, still learning about what choices to make?

Well, I think so. I wrote a script just recently that I think is one of the best I’ve ever written. It’s for Scorsese, and it’s called Bringing out the Dead, and Marty likes it a lot. This one is about a paramedic. Again, a kid who drives around Manhattan at night, only this time he is on the side of the angels, and he brings life instead of death. But he’s still going crazy.

Do you think, as an auteur making films, you can ever exorcise the themes that define you and reach some kind of catharsis? Or do those themes just become more important over time?

They can ‘exercise,’ but they can’t ‘exorcise.’ I got into film for the best of all possible reasons – as a kind of self therapy with Taxi Driver – and I still see it as self therapy. If you watch Deconstructing Harry, which is a very scathing film about Woody Allen, he’s not a likable character. I am sure he exercised a lot of those demons [with this film], but I am sure he hasn’t exorcised them.

So you never rid yourself of the demons?

No – all you do is learn more about them and pursue them into the next realm.

– ‘Sins of the Father: Josh Zeman talks to Paul Schrader about his new film Affliction’. Winter 1998 filmmakermagazine.com 

 

Screenwriter Paul Schrader Discusses His Writing Process

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Paul Schrader has long credited the renowned French director Robert Bresson's Pickpocket as a major influence on him. Schrader refers to the film, first seen while a student at UCLA film school,  as "the most significant film in my creative life" and has often described how his preoccupation with Bresson's film led to the creation of Taxi Driver.

During his time at the university film school, Schrader thought there was a major difference between critics and filmmakers, but this film helped him understand the artistic view of each.

“When I saw this film Pickpocket, it hit me for the first time that there could actually be a place for me. I could make that film,” he thought to himself in the cinema. “I saw that there was a bridge between my theological upbringing and my current love of the movies,” said Schrader. 

In the film, a man commits a series of thefts and then goes and writes about them in his diary. “Two years later, I wrote Taxi Driver, which is exactly that film.”

While the film's formality approaches minimalism, Bresson insists on the subjective, limiting viewers to what the loner hero, Michel (Martin Lassalle), sees, says, thinks, and writes; this is reinforced by his voice-over narration and on-screen writing, and emphasised by the film's near-total lack of leading music. 

Bresson's predilection for slicing his "models" (rather than "actors," whom he thought belonged in the theatre) into isolated body parts, usually revealing only their hands, torsos, and feet, has gotten a lot of attention. Similarly, there aren't many establishing shots, and most of Bresson's black-and-white films (1943-1967) take place in cramped rooms. With a watch attached to the leg of a table and a wallet in the breast pocket of a hanging jacket, Michel (Martin LaSalle) trains in his destitute garret (like many of Bresson's locations, Michel's hovel suggests the domiciles of Dostoevsky's gone-to-seed recluses). It's no surprise that this sequence echoes the "You talkin' to me?" scene from Taxi Driver.

Over the next twenty years, Schrader made over twenty films and the influence of Bresson is pervasive not just in Taxi Driver, but American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and more recently First Reformed.

In the following extracts Schrader discusses his writing process and the influences on his work.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Transcendental Style In Film

“There are different kinds of films,” said Schrader. “You show an image and that image creates empathy, whether it’s a person or a place. Then, you move that image and you create empathy and action. That’s what we do in movies.” But, there are also efforts to break these rules.”

“When you start withholding, you are working against the very grain of cinema. Only a handful of films can succeed by withholding because that’s not what film was meant to do. But, because film is so good at providing, it can also work at withholding, but it was never meant to withhold.”

In Schrader’s book, Transcendental Style in Film, Schrader dissected the work of Yasajiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer. Where most films focus on psychological realism, these directors focus on transcendental style and camerawork. The style is meant to be devoid of self-consciousness.

This is also true of how he creates mysterious characters like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver or Toller in First Reformed.

Creating Complex Characters Through Mystery

“There’s a mystery within the character. A good character has a mystery. Sometimes, you can have a sense of what that mystery is and sometimes you don’t want to know. Sometimes he goes off or she goes off and does something and you say, Why the hell did he do that?”

“That’s part of the fun of creating,” mused Schrader. While this may back some writers into a hole, it keeps the work interesting for the acclaimed screenwriter. In the case of Taxi Driver, he knew that putting the audience in the mind of Travis Bickle would essentially create empathy, which he would then remove by the end.

Part of this mystery comes from carrying the characters around in his mind. Schrader will often tell stories to people and at a certain point, he is overflowing with an idea. This really means talking to anyone who will listen and share the story to make sure it’s enticing and engaging.

“I’m sitting here in front of the computer now and I’ve started a new script. But, it took me almost a year to get here. I don’t start writing until I know what I’m going to do. I don’t write to figure it out. I write because the well-spring is bubbling over and it needs now to be expressed.”

First Reformed (Directed by Paul Schrader)

Idea Overflow & Narrative Moments

Before Paul Schrader sits down at the computer, he will tell his movie idea to anybody who will listen. This is ironic, given that most screenwriters are so worried about protecting their ideas. Perhaps Schrader knows that no one else can write a story like him, but it’s an interesting approach nonetheless.

The writer advises telling the story to “anybody who is smarter than you… Let me take you to get a cup of coffee—By the way, I want to tell you this story. That’s how it is. It’s not what they say. It’s what’s in their body language. It’s what in their eyes. Do you actually have them? That’s all that matters. I don’t give a damn what they think of my story. All I care about is: are they sitting in my narrative moment?”

Based on the body language, Schrader will go back and change up the story to make it more engaging. This is perhaps the most intriguing approach to telling a story and another reason why Schrader believes movies to be more oral storytelling than a version of literature. This is also how comedians work on material in front of small audiences to build up an hour for a special.

Amidst the creation states and the physicality of writing, however, even an acclaimed creator like Paul Schrader has had pitfalls.

First Reformed (Directed by Paul Schrader)

Getting Knocked Down By Applause

In his 20s, Paul Schrader lived out of his car before selling the screenplay for Taxi Driver. More recently, he had a Nicolas Cage film taken away from him that he was working on as the director. Despite these odds, he managed to push forward and continue work as a screenwriter and director.

“Filmmakers, by nature, are alpha beings. We look at the lions and we say, ‘Give us a whip. Give us a chair. I’m going to go into that cage and I’m going to make those lions sit up.’ But, that’s not always the case. Sometimes the lions eat you and that has happened to me.”

Schrader has gotten into projects where he didn’t respect the other person or the other person didn’t respect him. But, with First Reformed, he’s essentially back on top and the film is being well-received by all. “When people are laughing at you and kicking you and pissing on you—it’s sometimes easier to get up than when they are applauding,” he said about the recent success.

“Now, they’re applauding. I’ve found that it’s a little tricky to get back up on your feet once you’ve been knocked down by applause,” said Schrader. Despite the success, the writer-director is not thinking of retiring anytime soon.

– Excerpt from “Screenwriting Veteran Paul Schrader Discusses His Writing Process on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull & First Reformed. From Creative Screenwriting, July 2018. Full article here 

Paul Schrader on ‘Performance’

Performance (Directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg)

‘The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness’. 

– Performance (1970)

Performance was a collaboration by two filmmakers – writer and painter Donald Cammell (who worked with the actors from his original script and supervised the film’s editing) and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (responsible for the camerawork and film’s hallucinatory imagery). Described at the time as ‘the worlds most expensive home movie,’ Performance has become over the years one of the most influential and revered ‘cult’ films ever made. 

Performance is a complex film to absorb initially, rooted as is it in the specific milieu of late 1960’s London. The criminal sub-culture of East End gangsterism, represented by the violence of the Kray Twins, comes into contact, and morphs into, the decadent bohemianism of The Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger, who plays the role of ‘Turner’ with an affected narcissism based substantially on fellow Stone, Brian Jones.

In Performance, London gangster Chas (James Fox) specialises in extortion, a ‘performer’ whose ‘role’ is to use threats and violence to enforce payment. Self-consciously masculine, the unemotional and brutal Chas falls out of favour with his boss after he kills another gangster in defiance of orders and is then compelled to go on the run. He chooses to hide out in an unfamiliar environment, the Notting Hill residence of reclusive rock star Turner and his two girlfriends Pherber and Lucy (Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton). Although Chas’s pretence to be an unemployed juggler convinces no-one, Turner is sufficiently intrigued and broke enough to allow him to stay.

Jagger’s musician Turner has run out of inspiration and retreated into the self-contained world of his house to lead a drug-fuelled existence that initially fills Chas with contempt. Soon Turner and Pherber start to play a series of mind games on Chas, taking advantage of his dependent status and using drugs to gradually undermine his aggressive persona.

Explicitly intellectual, underscored with violence and a hallucinogenic intensity, Performance’s ambitious esthetic manages to reference Kenneth Anger, Antonin Artaud and Jorge Luis Borges, while Cammell, a former artist, also relies on a Francis Bacon painting for inspiration in connecting the two worlds of the film.

When the gangsters finally arrive to take the disorientated Chas away to his death, Chas, now wearing a long wig, makes his way to Turner and murders him. There is an implied complicity between the two men in this act, as if Turner had been preparing for Chas to kill him all along. Although it is evidently Chas that the gangsters bundle into a car immediately afterwards, it is Jagger/Turner’s face that is visible at the car window as it drives away. The two men have become united: the ‘masculine’ Chas and ‘feminine’ Turner now combined into one through the ritual of death.

Donald Cammell stated that his intention in making Performance was to make a ‘transcendent’ film in which death becomes not the end of life but the beginning of an alternative existence – a notion that owes much to Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930), a film that Cammell was fascinated by, and in which the poet-martyr ultimately achieves immortality, paradoxically, through death. 

After completion, it took nearly two years for Warner Bros to distribute Performance in the United States, where, after its release, it gradually assumed cult status. A critical re-appraisal also took place over the decades in contrast to the film’s initially hostile reception. 

When Performance was eventually released on DVD in the United States, screenwriter and director Paul Schrader wrote the following piece in which he expresses his appreciation of Cammell and Roeg’s film and positions their achievement as cinema’s version of Coleridge’s opium-fuelled Kubla Khan:

Ever since the inception of movies, critics and journalists have tried to overlay its creators with the Romantic myth of creativity. If motion pictures were to be ‘art’ in the 19th-century sense, its creators must be ‘artists’ in the Romantic mode: pawns of their muse-inspired, individualistic, unconventional, and irresponsible. But, of course, then as now, this is all so much propaganda. Second only to architecture, movies are the most practical of the arts. Films are made in a disciplined manner by practical people whose creativity is more the product of sober calculation than capricious inspiration, be the film in question a classic or a programmer.

A number of films have been made in the Romantic context – personal visions responsive to instant inspiration – but, for the most part, they were unfinished, unreleased, or unwatched. The very nature of filmmaking – its financing, distribution, the physical nature of production, the conventions of storytelling, preset audience expectations, media packaging – mitigates against the success of such films. There’s no cinematic equivalent of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

The closest thing we have to the Great Exception is Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, now finally, after much delay, available on DVD. This was a film made in an unusual time under unusual circumstances, and, looking back at it now, it’s as inspired, unconventional, individualistic, and irresponsible as it was 35 years ago. It’s as if a wormhole opened in the common-sense history of film – and Performance came through.

Performance is a great film, a masterpiece, which adheres to few of the rules that define greatness. It doesn’t come out of a film tradition, it’s not the work of a great filmmaker, it doesn’t define a film style. If anything, it seems sui generis, a genuine film serendipity, the product of conflicting creative forces momentarily (perhaps magically) aligned and in sync: writer/director Donald Cammell, director/cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, producer Sandy Lieberson, technical advisor David Litvinoff, actors Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and James Fox, editor Frank Mazzola, composer Jack Nitzsche.

The insecurity of the studio system, the aura of swinging London, the social upheaval of the moment (the film was greenlit in the spring of 1968), London’s distance from Los Angeles, and Jagger’s star power combined to give Cammell and Roeg unprecedented financial and creative freedom. During shooting, the film veered ‘off book.’ Cammell and Roeg would confer at the end of each day, discuss what had happened from their separate perspectives (Cammell story and dialogue, Roeg images), and plot what should happen the next day. Everything was up for grabs: every idea, every image, no matter how outré or unexpected. Furniture was moved about between the master and the coverage, 16mm camerawork replaced 35mm in certain shots, actors were encouraged to ‘play out’ their actual relationships. Critics have been arguing for 30 years whether Performance is a Cammell film or a Roeg film or a Cammell/Roeg film – or whether, in fact, it’s a Frank Mazzola film since so much of the structure was created in the editing. Even the film’s creators were uncertain about who did what.

However it came about, the result is unique in film history: a masterpiece made from madness. Antonin Artaud was a crucial figure in Cammell’s thinking and informs Performance’s famous line: ‘The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.’ The madness that infected Cammell and Roeg, their belief in magic, their notions of visual images as language, their Blakean conviction that the road to excess – in sex, violence, drugs, you name it – leads to the palace of wisdom, cohered in a way that defies explanation.

Warner Brothers, offended by the X-rated result (Warner Bros. President Ted Ashley was described as ‘appalled’), dumped the film, releasing it in a handful of theaters with minimal publicity. I saw it opening night in Westwood Village where I lived; I walked home in a daze, so astonished by what I’d seen that I went back the next afternoon to see it again. I put it on the cover of Cinema, the film magazine I edited, and have watched it every year or so ever since, never failing to be astonished anew. When others ask me why I admire the film so, I find myself uncharacteristically at a loss for words. My best answer is the greatest compliment one can give a film: I say, simply, ‘It’s the real thing.’

– ‘Paul Schrader on Performance’. Film Comment – March/April 2007.

Paul Schrader on ‘Light Sleeper’

Light Sleeper (Directed by Paul Schrader)

Following ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘American Gigolo’ in what writer/director Paul Schrader calls his ‘man in a room’ series, ‘Light Sleeper’ is the story of drug delivery boy John LeTour’s mid-life crisis, a moody urban parable awash in waves of nostalgia and low-key despair. ‘Light Sleeper’ shows us the gradual disintegration of one man’s identity, an unraveling that begins when friends die, romance sours, a career ends, and, more importantly, when the Reagan-era highlife which fueled upscale drug use inexplicably vanishes, taking with it its accompanying aura of cool... Willem Dafoe anchors the film with an excellent performance. Travis Bickle’s hair-trigger charm, his desperation to please, ages here into the quiet pain, the persistent feeling of melancholy which lies just beneath LeTour’s affable exterior. (Scott Macauley)

John LeTour, the light sleeper, is a drug dealer who makes nightly deliveries. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver he floats around on the outskirts of society, completely cut off from his fellow citizens. Now in his forties he is caught up in the throes of a mid-life crisis.  Le Tour is concerned about the future since the 1970s drug culture has waned. He is a man out of time.

Paul Schrader’s Light Sleeper owes much to his main cinematic mentor, Robert Bresson, notably his film Pickpocket (1959), while functioning in accordance with his Bressonian instincts and transposing the spiritual search to a modern-day American city environment and infusing it with the crime genre.

A small-time crook, such as Michel in Bresson's picture, is shown as someone who seeks grace and atonement. The “search” in this instance is not shown, since it is instead linked to a plethora of superstitions, coincidences, and chance. Ann, his erstwhile business partner, appears to be an astrologer, and John visits a psychic himself who informs him of possible problems ahead. The plot turns when he's introduced to an ex-lover named Marianne, also a recovering drug addict, setting in train a lethal series of events. 

In contrast to Bresson's picture in which just the action is lethal, here the effects are deadly. Conceptually, the tale is a well-traveled one: a guy wishes to quit his criminal lifestyle, rekindles a previous lover, and the conflict and resolution are readily evident. Schrader's objective is a mood piece; his work is an exploration of how to live a full life.

Scott Macaulay spoke with Paul Schrader for Filmmaker magazine just before the film’s New York opening:

FILMMAKER: ‘Light Sleeper’ is your third ‘man in a room’ film? How has the central character changed over time and how has the audience changed in relation to him?

PAUL SCHRADER: The character has gotten older as I’ve gotten older. When he was in his twenties he was angry. When he was in his thirties he was narcissistic. And now he’s forty and he’s anxious. I think that the times have changed similarly. Part of what I’ve tried to do with this character is mix a personal evolution with a social one. I think we are in very anxious times and this character is appropriate.

FM: How about in terms of ‘Light Sleeper’s position within the marketplace? Now that his character is forty, is he as resonant a character to audiences?

PS: We will see. The character is… I don’t know. I can’t answer that. I don’t see [Light Sleeper] as a mass-audience movie but then I didn’t see Taxi Driver and American Gigolo as mass-audience movies.

FM: Nostalgia is an important theme in the film. The characters seem to be nostalgic for an earlier part of their lives and American today also seems drenched in nostalgia. There’s a sense in this campaign year that the best days are behind us.

PS: The American century is coming to a close. The days when we could drive the world economic machine are over and therefore a lot of other things are over. America is having to come back to earth in a number of areas and there’s a very anxious zeitgeist in this country.

FM: Even the supposedly glamorous scenes in the film, like the nightclub scene, seem to be an expression of this winding down.

PS: Well, the main characters are too old to be doing what they’re doing. Like so many people of their age, they got into the drug business because it was fun. All the hip people were doing it. And then times changed and those people died or went straight. Here are these dealers in some kind of time warp. I based this on some people that I know and that’s how they feel about their lives. They wonder, ‘How did we end up these old fogeys in a young people’s business?’ I felt that was a wonderful metaphor for a kind of morbid nostalgia for my generation.

FM: There’s a sense today that the European art film might also be a thing of the past. As someone influenced by the earlier films of Bertolucci and Bresson, does the sense of nostalgia you express in the film apply to film culture as well?

PS: That’s a problem of finances. National cinemas in general are in bad shape. Financing for German-language or French-language films is much harder to come by. But I wouldn’t get too sad about this. It’s all cyclical. We may be going through a trough of some sort but on the other hand there are a lot of exciting things happening right now too.

FM: What do you think of Wim Wenders’s recent attack on violence in American film and his call for some sort of European response to America’s exporting of violent material?

PS: Well, I think he’s right… It’s very hard to dictate popular art by fiat. There is some sort of pact that goes between the audience and the financiers and the filmmakers. One can’t simply say, ‘We want something else.’ There has to be an interaction. I would hope that the market for violence is on the wane. There will always be a certain niche for it. I think [violence] has gotten a little too prevalent but audiences are making that correction.

FM: Do you think Wenders could have been referring to some of your films?

PS: I don’t know. Part of the problem is that we’re making [violent movies] but that they’re buying them. We make a lot of films that Americans don’t even care to see but we export them because the foreign market wants them. Chuck Norris and those kickboxing films aren’t that successful in America so we’re making them for the foreign market, not for ourselves.

FM: In your essay ’Notes on Film Noir,’ you point out some key elements of that genre, specifically romantic narration and a fear of the future. Both of these elements are present in ‘Light Sleeper’ but you seem to have made a decision to play down issues of genre and de-emphasize plot elements in favor of character study.

PS: Each of those films has the same structure. A person goes from day to day, place to place, and has a job which takes him into other worlds. He’s sort of a voyeur who looks into other people’s lives and doesn’t have one of his own. And events happen and sometimes they seem of consequence and sometimes they don’t. At some point the events coalesce and form a plot and he’s under enormous pressure. There’s an explosion and an epilogue. I like that structure. I like that idea of the plot slowly insinuating itself into the drama.

FM: What was the production history of ‘Light Sleeper’?

PS: It happened quite quickly. I had the idea in September and finished the script by Christmas and I started shooting in March. [The script] had been turned down by everybody, even with Willem attached, and then I got Susan (Sarandon] and still it was turned down with Susan attached. I was able to put together some money. I started with a video deal and then I brought in some French money and then I upped the video deal. The video company was owned by Carolco. My agent pointed out to Mario Kassar, who had not read the script, what a sweet deal this was for the French and that his company was on the video end of it. He read the script and looked at the deal and said, ‘You’re right, why don’t we make the whole thing?’ And that’s how it came about. But it had been passed on by Carolco until I put together this enticing financing arrangement.

FM: Didn’t you at one point try to make this film with your own money?

PS: What happened was, the financing was dawdling. And I had given Susan and Willem a date of March 28 to start. Francis Coppola once said to me, ‘Just start making a movie and eventually people will believe you’re going to make it and they’ll finance it.’ So one day I came into the office and said, ‘We’re going to go into pre-production.’ And then I financed the first three weeks of pre-production until we got the money. I think that that’s what really made it happen, when people realized it was going forward.

FM: Were you affected by the union turmoil that spring?

PS: I shot during the lock-out which meant that I was able to get the best crews at a low price because studios weren’t working in New York at that time. I had all the top guys who were basically doing a low budget film in lieu of nothing at all. The union salaries aren’t that exorbitant, it’s all the stuff built on top of them. If you work at scale you can make a film inexpensively. It’s also important to know that when you’re trying to make a low-budget film that looks like a big-budget film, the sacrifice has to begin at the top. It has to begin with me, Willem and Susan. Once the sacrifice begins there, then you can run it right through the whole production. It’s almost impossible to get the crew to sacrifice when people at the top aren’t sacrificing.

FM: You’ve scored ‘Light Sleeper’ with rock ballads that have an almost literal relationship to what’s on screen. The approach makes the film warmer but it also makes the emotional drama kind of obvious.

PS: Yeah, I don’t mind that. Some people have said that it’s a little too obvious, but I like it. That gets to be a personal call. When I wrote the script I had Bob Dylan’s lyrics and I asked Bob for five songs and he offered five other songs. I didn’t want the songs he wanted to give me and he didn’t want to give me the songs I wanted. But the idea even from the script stage was to have a third voice for the character. He has his dialogue voice and his diary voice and his song voice, which is his most romantic voice. Having it come out of the mouth of another person allowed it to be more romantic. [The music] sounds sort of like film scoring but in fact it’s another way the character can talk to you.

FM: I liked the epilogue but somehow it didn’t seem to me to be as upbeat as I thought it was intended. The character’s main problem in the film seems to have been making a decision and, at the end, prison just solves that problem for him.

PS: The most important thing is that at the ending he says, ‘I’ve been looking forward’ when he’s spent the last hour and 45 minutes looking backward. It’s about getting to a point in your life when you can look forward and about finding freedom behind bars, which is a very Bressonian idea. In each of those films I’ve had people say to me that the epilogue must have been added later. Each time it was written in the first draft. It’s what the film is about. Each film is about the epilogue and if I could have just filmed the epilogue I would have been fine – but of course I had to make the film in order to have the epilogue.

– Excerpt from ‘Movie High – Scott Macauley Interviews Paul Schrader about Light Sleeper’ – Filmmaker magazine, Fall 1992. [Original article here]

See also: Paul Schrader: Notes On Taxi driver and Paul Schrader: Steps to Writing a Script

Paul Schrader: Notes On Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

A screenwriter, director and film critic, Paul Schrader is best known for his work with the award-winning director Martin Scorsese. Schrader worked on screenplays for a number of Scorsese films including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead. Schrader’s films and scripts are haunted by one dominant and recurring theme: they focus on a lone protagonist hurtling towards self-destruction.

Schrader’s early script about the disturbed New York City cab driver Travis Bickle was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and, eventually, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Having initially worked as a noted film critic, Taxi Driver was Schrader’s breakthrough.

An extraordinary and influential film Taxi Driver is however rooted in a dark time of  Schrader’s life: “Travis Bickle is me,” he has repeatedly stated said in interviews. “At the time I wrote it, I was in a rather low and bad place,” Schrader has explained. “I had broken with Pauline [Kael], I had broken with my wife, I had broken with the woman I left my wife for, I had broken with the American Film Institute and I was in debt,” he goes on to explain.

A contemporary interview with Film Comment offers a revealing insight into Shrader’s state of mind at the time of writing Taxi Driver: “I got to wandering around at night; I couldn’t sleep because I was so depressed. I’d stay in bed till four or five P.M. then I’d say, ‘Well, I can get a drink now’,” he claimed.

“I’d get up and get a drink and take the bottle with me and start wandering around the streets in my car at night. After the bars closed, I’d go to pornography. I’d do this all night, till morning, and I did it for about three or four weeks, a very destructive syndrome until I was saved from it by an ulcer: I had not been eating, just drinking,” he added.

It was during hospital treatment, that he conceived the metaphor of the taxi cab: “That is what I was: this person in an iron box, a coffin, floating around the city, but seemingly alone,” he explained.

Schrader has stated that his motivation to write the screenplay was done out of a sense of therapy rather than a quest for success, “I wrote the script very quickly, in something like fifteen days. The script just jumped from my mind almost intact”.

“As soon as I finished writing – I wrote it for no commercial reason, just because I saw that was the need — I gave it to my agent and I left L.A. and bummed around the country.”

“Taxi Driver was written when I couldn’t really distinguish between the pain in the work and the pain in my life,” he said in the ’70s. “I hope I’ll continue to write stuff that is as good.”

Paul Schrader was 26 and destitute when he wrote Taxi Driver. In a discussion published in Martin Scorsese - A Journey he reflects on the origins of the script, its transition to the screen and subsequent reaction to the film.

The script of Taxi Driver is the genuine thing. It came from the gut, and while it banged around town everyone who read it realized it was authentic, the real item. After a number of years enough people said somebody should make it so that finally someone did.

In 1973 I had been through a particularly rough time, living more or less in my car in Los Angeles. riding around all night, drinking heavily, going to porno movies because they were open all night, and crashing some place during the day. Then, finally, I went to the emergency room in serious pain, and it turned out I had an ulcer. While I was in the hospital, talking to the nurse, I realized I hadn’t spoken to anyone in two or three weeks. It really hit me, an image that I was like a taxi driver, floating around in this metal coffin in the city, seemingly in the middle of people, but absolutely, totally alone.

The taxicab was a metaphor for loneliness, and once I had that, it was just a matter of creating a plot: the girl he wants but can’t have, and the one he can have but doesn’t want. He tries to kill the surrogate father of the first and fails, so he kills the surrogate father of the other. I think it took ten days, it may have been twelve – I just wrote continuously. I was staying at an old girlfriend’s house, where the heat and gas were all turned off, and I just wrote. When I stopped, I slept on the couch, then I woke up and I went back to typing. As you get older it takes more work. Hovering in the back of my mind is a fondness for those days when it was so painful it just had to come out.

I didn’t really write it the way people write scripts today – you know, with a market in mind. I wrote it because it was something that I wanted to write and it was the first thing I wrote. It jumped out of my head.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Right after writing it, I left town for about six months. I came back to Los Angeles after I was feeling a little stronger emotionally and decided to go at it again. I was a freelance critic at the time. I had written a review of Sisters and interviewed Brian De Palma at his place at the beach. That afternoon, we were playing chess – we were about evenly matched – and somehow the fact that I had written a script came up. So I gave it to him and he liked it a lot and wanted to do it. De Palma showed the script to the producers, Michael and Julia Phillips, who were three houses down the beach, and he showed it to Marty, who was in town after finishing Mean Streets. Michael and Julia told me they wanted to do it but that Marty was a better director for it. So Julia and I went and saw a rough cut of Mean Streets, and I agreed. In fact, I thought Marty and Bob De Niro would be the ideal combination, so we aligned ourselves – De Niro, the Phillipses and myself – but we were not powerful enough to get the film made. Then there was a hiatus of a couple of years, and in the intervening time, each of us had successes of our own. I sold my first script, The Yakuza, for a lot of money. Marty did Alice the Phillipses did The Sting, and De Niro did The Godfather; Part II.

At the time I remember describing Taxi Driver’s Travis as sort of a young man who wandered from the snowy waste of the Midwest into an over-heated New York cathedral. My own background was anti-Catholic in the style of the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution. The town I was raised in was about one-third Dutch Calvinist and one-third Catholic, and the other third were trying to figure out why they were there, and sort of keeping peace. Well, both cultures, Catholic and Calvinist, are infused with the sense of guilt, redemption by blood, and moral purpose – all acts are moral acts, all acts have consequence. It’s impossible to act amorally. There’s a kind of divine eye in the sky that ensures your acts are morally judged. So you know once you’re raised in that kind of environment, you don’t shake that, you shake a lot of things, but the sense of moral responsibility, guilt, and redemption you carry with you forever. So Scorsese and I shared that. I came from essentially a rural, Midwestern Protestant and Dutch background, and he is urban and Italian Catholic, so in a way it’s a very felicitous joining. The bedrock is the same.

Taxi Driver was as much a product of luck and timing as everything else – three sensibilities together at the right time, doing the right thing. It was still a low-budget, long-shot movie, but that’s how it got made. At one point, we could have financed the film with Jeff Bridges, but we elected to hold out and wait until we could finance it with De Niro. It was just a matter of luck and timing. Marty was fully ready to make the film; De Niro was ready to make it. And the nation was ready to see it. You can’t plan or scheme for that kind of luck. It just sort of happens – the right film at the right time...

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Bob was so determined to get the character of Travis down, he drove a cab for a couple of weeks. He got a licence, had his fingerprints taken by the police and hit the streets.

The dialogue in Taxi Driver is somewhat improvised. The most memorable piece of dialogue in the film is an improvisation: the “Are you talking to me?” part. In the script it just says Travis speaks to himself in the mirror. Bobby asked me what he would say, and I said, ‘Well, he’s a little kid playing with guns and acting tough.’ So De Niro used this rap that an underground New York comedian had been using at the same time as the basis for his lines.

I remember the night before Taxi Driver opened, we all got together and had dinner and said, ‘No matter what happens tomorrow we have made a terrific movie and we’re damn proud of it even if it goes down the toilet.’ The next day, I went over to the cinema for the noon show. There was a long line that went all the way around the block. And then I realised, this line was for the two o’clock show, not the noon show! I ran in and watched the film and everyone was standing at the back and there was a sense of exhilaration about what we had done.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that all the great movies are successful for the wrong reasons. There were a lot of wrong reasons why Taxi Driver was successful. The sheer violence of it brought out the Times Square crowd.

I’m not opposed to censorship in principle but I think that if you censor a film like Taxi Driver all you do is censor a film, not confront a problem. These characters are running around and can be triggered off by anything.

When I talk to younger filmmakers they tell me that it was really the film that informed them, that it was their seminal film, and listening to them talk, I really can see it as a kind of social watermark. But it was meant as a personal film, not a political commentary.

– Paul Schrader in Martin Scorsese - A Journey by Mary Pat Kelly. Pages 87-98.

   

Paul Schrader: On Screenwriting

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

The films and screenplays of Paul Schrader and his eventual effect on the American cinema is considerably larger than his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, despite the creation of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle whose energy and mysterious terror are a notable career achievement. 

Paul Schrader can be mentioned in the same breath as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas among the generation of directors known as the "Movie Brats." However, he doesn't have any connection to the era of populist cinema of the classical Hollywood era or that which found inspiration in morning serials. Instead, 'Transcendental Style in Picture: From Robert Bresson to Yasujiro Ozu' is key to understanding his intentions.

Divergent cultural cinema styles, as described by Schrader, employ a universal style, also known as the transcendental style, to express transcendence. Although it can never be reached, to always strive for the unknowable and unseen is part of the work itself. Schrader's quest is to get to the bottom of things, yet never hope to fix anything impossible. The style of transcendentalism is the subject of the book titled "Transcendental Style in Film." 

This book analyses the unique characteristics and triumphs of the films showcased, which exemplify the quest for transcendental sensation. Schrader looks at all the individual traits these movies share, rather than seeing what separates them. After that, however, the critical focus is no longer on their differences, but on their similarities. And then Schrader introduces the universal, overpowering ability of these films to transcend their own (intentional) trappings of a "cold, unfeeling world" by just providing a "irrational and undefined" passion into a heartless existence. The final catharsis of the work does not come out, but as Schrader calls it, the "stasis," which means a re-configuration of the harsh, homogenised style of the picture, merely impacted by the events. 

Paul Schrader's work is considered to be one of the most important in establishing the distinction between experiential and expressive modes of artistic expression, and demonstrating that big emotional reactions have a foundation in intellectual theory and knowledge. The publication examined the works of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, and included numerous cinematic references. As Andre Bazin and Donald Richie present an extended framework of Schrader's didactic expansions, critical theory is considerably more important in ‘Transcendental Style'. 

A more accurate statement may be that this 1972 work represents the arrival of academics and criticism in the New Hollywood epoch. Schrader was Pauline Kael's protege. However, it is surprising how long this topic sticks with the reader after he or she finishes reading. Films such as Ordet and Day of Wrath are continually becoming visible through their application of the ruminations of Schrader (though it helps Dreyer to be the 20th century Canon Film Founder) and those who move towards a more popular art-house mode, such as Ingmar Bergman, are reinforced by found elements of a transcendental style.

In the following extract Paul Schrader discusses the screenwriting process in relation to his work on the seminal films Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ – each directed by Martin Scorsese. 

You wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver in about ten days, and I know you’re of the school of thought that the faster you write a screenplay, the better.


You have to understand that the gestation period could be months, or even years, and the idea of writing fast is to keep from writing as long as possible, so that it just endures time and obstacles. By the time it comes out, it comes out almost fully formed. Then you write in approximately a time frame that’s like viewing a movie. You can sort of feel the experience as you’re living it, it doesn’t get attenuated, it doesn’t get threshed out. But I’m also of the school of I’m not going to write unless I know what I’m going to write. I pretty much know what’s going to happen on page seventy-five before I sit down and write.

So you have to have the whole thing in your head before you write it? 

Yeah, and outlined. It moves and shapes itself as you go along, but it is pretty well worked out, and it has endured numerous tests before it is written. By tests, I mean the oral tradition, telling people. You sit down and you tell people the story. You say, ‘Look, I wanna tell you a story. Man walks into a bank. There’s a robbery going on....’ There you are, you’re off and running, and you can watch people. It doesn’t really matter what they say, it’s what they do with their eyes and how they sit. You can see whether or not this story has a resonance, and as you tell it, sometimes you have to make changes. Because like a stand-up comedian, you realize you’re losing your audience, you gotta do something drastic. I think it was Chandler who once said, ‘If you ever get in trouble, introduce a character with a gun. Your reader will be so glad he’s there, he won’t ask where he came from.’ The same thing with telling a story; you realize you’re losing your listener, then you say, ‘All of a sudden, a red car pulls up, and these two guys in black coats come out.’ Boom! You got your listener back. Of course, you’ve also got a red car and two guys in black coats, but that’s one of the things you do when you work the oral tradition. By the time you write that script, you’re pretty confident that it’s worth writing because you have seen it work. If you can tell a story for forty-five minutes and keep people interested, you have a movie.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Who would you use as a sounding board? 

Anybody. The more ordinary someone is, the better, because they’re not going to give you arcane points, you’re just going to see if they’re interested. It’s like telling a joke – you know when it works. Obviously, certain material is very sophisticated, and it’s not going to work that way. I’m not going to sit and tell Mishima to somebody at the 7-11! But in general, if you’re dealing with a kind of a narrative, you want to get that kind of feedback. Also, another good thing about it is it stops you from writing a lot of scripts, because you see them die, and you see yourself getting stuck. It is very discouraging to write scripts that don’t get sold or made. If you can stop yourself from writing those scripts, you can prolong your career. Because all you have to do is write five or six of those scripts, and you’re about beat up. So if you have a bad idea, you can catch it in time. You haven’t lost a script, you’ve saved yourself four months. I lecture from time to time on screenwriting, and when I lecture, it’s a five-point program. It goes from theme, to metaphor, to plot, to oral tradition, to outline. That’s the progress of an idea. It all begins with a theme, and another word for a theme is a personal problem. In Taxi Driver it was loneliness, the metaphor was a taxicab. Bing-Bang-Boom, it starts to move.

When you sit down to write an original screenplay, where do you begin?

At any given time in your life, there are a number of problems running around. Problems that have a lot to do with where you are in your life cycle, whether it’s a mid-life crisis, problems with parents or children. You’re always looking for metaphors that will somehow address that problem. And once you find that metaphor, particularly if you’ve written as much as I have, it’s like a factory is standing there, fully manned, ready to go. All it needs is the raw material. The metaphor is the raw material. Once they get that, they can go to work.

The Last Temptation of Christ (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

But your last few projects have been adaptations? 

About four years ago, I ran into a little dry period. Like so many others I turned to books. I did some adaptations where I originated the projects: Touch and Affliction. For about a year now I sort of fell back into the groove and have been doing a lot of writing again. That feeling of not having anything original to say has sort of gone away. I think I’ll be good for a couple more years.

It goes through cycles. 

Yeah. I don’t think anybody has something fresh to say every year. You just don’t have an original script every year.

You adapted ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, which was not an easy novel to turn into a film. How did you approach that adaptation?


I do the same process in terms of problem/metaphor. You look at the book, and you say, ‘Where’s the problem?’ And it’s not necessarily the problem in the book, it’s your problem that you find in the book. ‘What part of me exists in this book that I can address?’ You have to personalize it, and therefore in a book like Last Temptation, there were probably five or six different scripts that could have been written from that. You have a 600-page philosophical novel, and it’s going to become a 110-page script. What I did in that case was I listed every single thing that happened in the book – there were probably 400 or 500 things that happened in the book – then I did columns. Did they address my problem? Were they important for expositional needs? Did they address any of the sub-themes? I went through all the scenes and put checks behind them to the degree that they were useful to me. And then I just took the top fifty scenes, because only between forty to fifty-five things happen in a movie anyway, and said, ‘Okay, what do I have to add?’ Or, ‘How do I make this meld all together?’ That way I was able to take three- quarters of the book, and just wipe it off the table in one grand stroke and reduce the size of the book. Then I went back and picked up from those pages I had swiped off, whatever little bits and pieces I might need.

Raging Bull (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

You did a rewrite on the film ‘Raging Bull’, and Martin Scorsese said that your version of the script was the breakthrough that helped get the film made. What exactly did you bring to the script for ‘Raging Bull’?


Well there was no Joey La Motta. Jake La Motta had written a book called Raging Bull with Pete Savage, and he cut his brother out of his book because he didn’t like his brother! So I started doing research, and I started hearing about the fighting La Motta brothers and that they were boxers together. I interviewed Vickie [Jake’s ex-wife] and Joey, and I realized you had a sibling story. The movie was about these two brothers who had this contract. Basically the contract was, they were both boxers, but one of them had the gift of gab, and the other one didn’t. So Joey basically said to Jake, ‘Here’s the deal. You get the beatings, you get the fame, I get the girls, we set up the bookies, and we split the money.’ Well that contract is fraught with dangers [laughs]! That was the implicit contract between these two men. Jake would be the headliner and take the beatings, and Joey would be the pretty boy who got the girls and they would split the money. You know that there’s going to come a day that someone doesn’t agree with that contract! So without Joey, you didn’t have a movie...

From – Paul Schrader Interviewed by Jim Mercurio and David Konow: Creative Screenwriting, vol 6, #1 (Jan/Feb 1999) and vol 9, #5 (Sept/Oct 2002).

Paul Schrader: Steps to Writing a Script

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

The films of the 1970s, according to the author Robert Kolker, are part of "a cinema of loneliness." Nothing, he believes, better captures contemporary man's loneliness than Taxi Driver. The book's cover depicts Robert DeNiro strolling through New York's streets, past the posters of long-gone porno cinemas that formerly dotted the city's central business district prior to the introduction of the video. 

Since the film's 1976 release, other interpretations have been made. According to some, it is a resctionary and violent picture that conveys a very conservative message. Others regard it as a reflection of the turbulent decade of the 1970s in America, presenting a nightmare vision that ensued following the demise of the hippie dream. The truth is that the film does not provide answers; rather, it raises more questions. 

According to the film's writer Paul Schrader, Travis Bickle – the cab driver played by Robert DeNiro – is not a victim of a socially imposed loneliness or wrath; it is rather an existential type of rage that confronts us with Scorsese's and Schrader's religious crises after they abandoned their studies in theology to pursue careers in film. 

Martin Scorsese's failed attempt to attend Catholic seminary is well known while Paul Schrader was born into a strict Calvinist family where he was not permitted to see films until the age of eighteen. 

“I believe that what makes the film so vivid is what has made all my collaborations with Scorsese so interesting – says Schrader, who has collaborated with the Italian-American director on films such as "Raging Bull" and "The Last Temptation of Christ" – which is that we share a similar moral foundation – a kind of closed-society Christian morality, though mine is rural and Protestant and his is Roman Catholic. 

Scorsese and Schrader's work is frequently described as a quest for atonement. Their troubled and obsessed characters exemplify contemporary man's state of being stuck in his own contradictions. These are characters like Travis who are buried in an urban inferno, continuously battling their sins via a catharsis of violence and horror. 

“At the time I wrote it,” Schrader explains, “I was obsessed with guns, suicidal, drinking heavily, and obsessed with pornography in the manner that a lonely person is.” According to the writer, "all of those elements are included in the script." According to the filmmaker, "the book I reread just before sitting down to write the script was Sartre's Nausea, and if anything serves as a model for Taxi Driver, it is that." 

In his paranoid solitude, Robert DeNiro's character spirals into a violent fantasy that culminates in a bloodletting. Taxi Driver, like "Hardcore" or "Light Sleeper," is an urban epic about vice and evil that contrasts with Travis's quest for purity. These are ethically ambiguous creatures trapped in a neon inferno who battle their own selves in order to transcend their misery and reach some measure of serenity. 

Drawing on his own battle with his demons, Paul Schrader clarified the screenwriting development process in an interview with Richard Thompson from 1976 when ‘Taxi Driver’ had just opened. Below are excerpted comments from that interview. 

Paul Schrader: I think there are three steps to writing a script. First, you have to have a theme, something you want to say. It doesn’t have to be a particularly great thing, but you have to have something that’s bothering you. In the case of Taxi Driver, the theme was loneliness. Then you find a metaphor for that theme, one that expresses it. In Taxi Driver, that was the cabbie, the perfect expression of urban loneliness. Then you have to find a plot, which is the easiest part of the process. All plots have been done; they’re fairly easy, you just work through all the permutations until the plot accurately reflects the theme and the metaphor. You push the theme through the metaphor and you should come out with the plot.

Schrader reveals how he arrived at his plot for ‘Taxi Driver’:

Two things happened which tied the project [Taxi Driver] together: a Harry Chapin song called ‘Taxi,’ in which an old girlfriend gets into a guy’s cab; and [Arthur] Bremer shot [Presidential Candidate, George] Wallace. That was the thread which led to the script. Maybe I shouldn’t admit to this, but why not be honest? After all, there’s really nothing new on the face of the earth.

Elaborating on his method Schrader goes on to explain:

One of the problems with screenwriters is that they think first in terms of plot or in terms of metaphor, and they’re going the reverse way; it’s awfully hard to do. Once you have a plot, it’s hard to infuse a theme into it, because it’s not an indigenous expression of the plot; that’s why you must start with the theme and not the plot.

Metaphor is extremely important to a movie. A perfect example is Deliverance, where you have point A and point B, and four men going from A to B—the first time [theme] for the men, the last time [metaphor] for the river. On the strength of that metaphor, you could put the Marx Brothers in that boat and something would happen. When somebody walks up to you and says, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a Western and this is the twist,’ you know right off the bat that they’re in trouble, because they’re coming at it the wrong way. Maybe they’ll be able to write a novel that sells, make a lot of money, and live in Beverly Hills; but it’s not interesting to me; not something I really care about.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

As Pipeliner [his first script] was falling through, I got hit with two other blows to the body at the same time: my marriage fell through, and the affair that caused the marriage to fall through fell through, all within the same four or five months. I fell into a state of manic depression. I was living with someone at the time, and she got so fed up with me that she split. I was staying in her apartment waiting for the cupboard to run out of food.

I got to wandering around at night; I couldn’t sleep because I was so depressed. I’d stay in bed till four or five P.M. then I’d say, ‘Well, I can get a drink now.’ I’d get up and get a drink and take my bottle with me and start wandering around the streets in my car at night. After the bars closed, I’d go to pornography. I’d do this all night, till morning, and I did it for about three or four weeks, a very destructive syndrome, until I was saved from it by an ulcer; I had not been eating, just drinking.

When I got out of the hospital I realized I had to change my life because I would die and everything; I decided to leave L.A. That was when the metaphor hit me for Taxi Driver, and I realized that was the metaphor I had been looking for: the man who will take anybody any place for money; the man who moves through the city like a rat through the sewer; the man who is constantly surrounded by people, yet has no friends. The absolute symbol of urban loneliness. That’s the thing I’d been living; that was my symbol, my metaphor. The film is about a car as the symbol of urban loneliness, a metal coffin.

I wrote the script very quickly, in something like fifteen days. The script just jumped from my mind almost intact ...When you’re writing films, you’re dealing with a kind of nascent, primitive force that’s alive.

The Yakuza (Directed by Sidney Pollack)

Schrader goes on to recall:

Before I sat down to write Taxi Driver, I re-read [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s Nausea, because I saw the script as an attempt to take the European existential hero, that is, the man from The Stranger, Notes From The Underground, Nausea, Pickpocket, Le Feu Follet, and A Man Escaped, and put him in an American context. In so doing, you find that he becomes more ignorant, ignorant of the nature of his problem. Travis’s problem is the same as the existential hero’s, that is, ‘should I exist?’ But Travis doesn’t understand that this is his problem, so he focuses it elsewhere, and I think that is a mark of the immaturity and the youngness of our country. We don’t properly understand the nature of the problem, so the self-destructive impulse, instead of being inner-directed, as it is in Japan, Europe, any of the older cultures, becomes outer-directed. The man who feels the time has come to die will go out and kill other people rather than kill himself. There’s a line in The Yakuza which says, ‘When a Japanese cracks up, he’ll close the window and kill himself; when an American cracks up, he’ll open the window and kill somebody else.’ That’s essentially how the existential hero changes when he becomes American. There is not enough intellectual tradition in this country, and not enough history; and Travis is just not smart enough to understand his problem. He should be killing himself instead of these other people. At the end, when he shoots himself in a playful way, that’s what he’s been trying to do all along.

- Paul Schrader interviewed by Richard Thompson,  Film Comment magazine, March-April 1976.