October 23, 2024
By Koraljka Suton
American director and screenwriter Paul Schrader grew up in a strict Calvinist family in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since he was not allowed to watch movies, Schrader sneaked out of his home at the age of seventeen to go see his very first picture (The Absent-Minded Professor, which left him thoroughly unimpressed). And even though he was studying to become a minister in the Dutch Christian Reform Church, his path ultimately took him from working as a film critic to thriving as a filmmaker. After writing screenplays for movies such as Sydney Pollack’s 1974 crime film The Yakuza (co-written with his brother Leonard, as well as Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne), Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder (1977), Schrader made his directorial debut with the crime drama Blue Collar (1978), another film he co-wrote with his aforementioned sibling. The second feature he was set to direct was a 1979 neo-noir drama initially named The Pilgrim, a title chosen so as not to alienate the people of Schrader’s conservative hometown where part of the movie was shot. When The Pilgrim’s real title was revealed, many locals and business owners were in dismay, claiming that they would most likely not have permitted the use of their locations had they been aware of what the movie was actually called. The real title was, of course, Hardcore.
Schrader’s picture follows Jake Van Dorn (played by George C. Scott), a pious Calvinist and successful businessman who lives with his teen daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis) in the city of Grand Rapids, MI. At first glance, they are the perfect family unit living a peaceful and quiet life. But everything changes after Kristen goes on a school trip to California sponsored by the church. She is soon reported missing and Jake is willing to go the extra mile to find her. When the police prove to be of almost no help at all, the exasperated father decides to hire PI Andy Mast (Peter Boyle) to track down his daughter. But what the detective finds out is a pill his client finds rather hard to swallow—Mast shows him an 8mm stag movie (a short and silent hardcore porn film produced in secret) starring Kristen and two young guys.
After a falling out with the detective he had been paying quite handsomely thus far, Jake takes matters into his own hands and heads out to Los Angeles in order to track down the movie’s origins and his daughter along with them. This unexpected journey takes our protagonist through L.A.’s seedy underbelly, as he visits sex shops, strip clubs and adult film theaters and studios in search of Kristen, who he is convinced was coerced into doing porn. He manages to get help from Niki, a porn actress/prostitute with a heart of gold, who sees him as somewhat of a father figure, which is something she so desperately longs for.
Although the movie’s title seems rather self-explanatory, seeing as how it pertains to explicit porn films, it may very well be argued that there is another layer of meaning it strives to convey, as it was stated in Movie News magazine in 1979. For the film industry the protagonist’s daughter becomes a part of is not the only thing worthy of being deemed hardcore—Jake’s religious beliefs and conservative values are just as deserving of the adjective in question. This dichotomy is perfectly mirrored in the contrast that can be seen in the movie’s opening scenes showing the snow-covered city of Grand Rapids with its family-friendly, God-fearing community on the one hand and the depiction of L.A.’s shady and morally questionable microcosm on the other.
Yet what is truly fascinating about the protagonist is the extent to which he seems absolutely unfazed by the inner workings of the underworld he had all but stumbled into. As he chases the white rabbit down the proverbial rabbit hole, his determination never wavers and his objective remains unchanged, no matter how far down he goes. The people he meets along the way serve merely as a means to an end and in his mind’s eye, they could never even begin to understand him, the world he comes from or the values he holds dear. While that may very well be the case, he himself does not make the effort of giving them the benefit of a doubt and trying to understand them in return. And even though he starts developing a closer bond with Niki than he might have anticipated, with her becoming the only character he engages in a serious conversation with, her role as a sort of surrogate daughter stops being relevant the moment he finds his real one.
But the ‘happy’ ending we got to see was in no way intended from the start. The studio disliked Schrader’s original idea, one in which Jake never tracks Kristen down, but finds out that she died in a car accident that had nothing to do with her porn career. As Schrader himself has said: “The ambiguous ending is always better.” And while that may very well be the case, it could also be argued that the ending we did get was no less ambiguous. For even though Jake manages to reunite with his daughter and convince her to come home with him, the question of whether she would stay put or return to the scene where she felt most welcome still lingers in the viewer’s mind. We are presented with a logical reason behind her radical decision and her father ultimately breaks down in tears, blaming his pride for standing in the way of his emotional availability, something he admits to never having learned in the first place. And while his vulnerable admission is both unexpected and touching, the girl’s decision to go with him seems rushed, dishonest and unmotivated, leaving viewers wanting more.
This ending was not only something Schrader was profoundly displeased with in narrative terms, but it also turned out to be a scene that was not very rewarding to film, because of it being an unplanned reshoot that gave the actress important screen time she was deliberately never meant to have. In the director’s words: “One of the complications of changing the ending was that this girl (Davis) had been cast essentially because she would do the nudity, but she wasn’t cast because she was such a strong actress.”
Apart from being dissatisfied with the ending and claiming, in hindsight, that his writing was both bad and too explicit, the filmmaker also regretted that Season Hubley was cast in the role of Niki. He had nothing against her acting, but he “just felt she was too pretty.” He initially gave the role to Diana Scarwid, but studio executives thought that she was not attractive enough for the part. As far as the casting of the lead man was concerned, Scott was exactly the person Schrader had in mind. But as it turned out, Warren Beatty wanted to star in the film. The director had spent half a year working on the script so the actor would like it, but Beatty demanded changes Schrader was just not willing to make: “Warren Beatty wanted to buy the screenplay, but he wouldn’t take me as a director. And in his version, it would have been his wife, not his daughter, who split for the Coast. No good. I held out. I turned down a very large sum of money. I went after Scott and I got him. One of the greatest actors in the world.”
And although Schrader got the actor he had wanted all along, their relationship on set ended up being tumultuous at best. Scott had a drinking problem and had at one point chosen to drink and not show up on set. Schrader then went to his trailer and the actor told him that he is a good writer, but an awful director and that “this movie is a piece of shit.” It was only after the filmmaker promised he would never direct another film again that the actor agreed to come back to work. Schrader, as we well know, did not keep his word. Scott also claimed later on that he would not have accepted the part, had he known that the movie would be filmed on actual, real-life locations. And while Scott was not too keen on shooting in sex shops and strip clubs, the film crew was originally looking forward to the prospect, but their excitement dissipated soon enough. According to Schrader: “By the time we were finished I had more than one crew member say ‘Boy I’m gonna be glad to get out of this. I haven’t been able to touch my wife in three weeks now.’”
Hardcore is, in many ways, inspired by John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers that has John Wayne searching for his kidnapped niece, but it is also based on a true story Schrader heard while in high school, about a local teen who was reported missing, only to resurface in a porn movie. Hardcore is also a movie in which the main character is modeled after the director’s father, making it one of Schrader’s most personal projects, as well as a film he himself has deemed one of his worst. But despite the filmmaker’s crippling self-criticism, he could not be more wrong. Hardcore is a gripping and well-written story that successfully juxtaposes religious rigidity with unabashed sexuality, while forcing its main character to cross the invisible line between the two, only to see if he would reemerge a changed man.
Koraljka Suton is a member of the Croatian Society of Film Critics and has a master’s degree in German and English. For her thesis, she did a comparative analysis of Spielberg’s ‘Band of Brothers’ and ‘The Pacific’. Koraljka trained at a Zagreb-based acting studio for six years and fell in love with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg’s acting techniques. She is also a contemporary dancer and a Reiki master who believes in the transformative quality of art. Read more »
Screenwriter must-read: Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Hardcore [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
For the first time in decades, Paul Schrader revisits Hardcore and criticizes the film, citing a variety of elements that he now finds objectionable, such as the lack of camera movement. He also discusses the studio-mandated alterations to the ending, original casting choices, and autobiographical elements of Hardcore.
How do you feel about Kael’s review of Hardcore? I just noticed it today, and I thought, Wooo, this is kind of personal.
I didn’t pay it much mind. I had broken with her at that time. What happened was, I came up here for Christmas. I was the film critic at the L.A. Free Press at the time, and she was a kind of gatekeeper for film criticism in this country. So I was at her house, and she said, “There’s a couple openings. There’s an opening in Chicago, but with Roger [Ebert] there, I don’t think you should be there. But there’s also an opening in Seattle, and I think that’s perfect for you. It’s a great movie town, a very serious movie town, you’ll have freedom. I’d like you to take that job.” And I said, “Well, tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Can I have a week to think about it?” She said, “No. I want an answer right now.” I sat there, and I had been thinking about maybe trying my hand at writing a script. I knew if I went to Seattle, that would be that. So I said to her, “If you need an answer right now, the answer’s gonna be no.” She said, “Okay.” About five minutes later I got up and walked out. I got on the airplane and said, “Well, there goes your career. You just fucked it.”
—Paul Schrader
TARANTINO ON MILIUS, 1982
This interview with writer-director John Milius was conducted when I was twenty years old (and boy does it show). The last film he had done at the time was ‘Conan the Barbarian.’ I just called up his assistant and told her I was writing a book, and she set me up with an interview with him. I met with him twice for the interview. The first time was in his office on the Paramount lot. The second time was on the set of the film ‘Uncommon Valor,’ which he was producing. He told me he didn’t want Gene Hackman for the lead, he wanted James Arness! Later I was to become friends with Big John. At the beginning of ‘95, before the Academy Awards, I was taken duck hunting by John Milius, Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. John and I sat in a duck blind all day, sipping whiskey out of a flask, talking about movies and shooting the tail feathers off of ducks. This is only part of it. Later I’ll transcribe more.
QT: You produced ‘Hardcore’ for Paul Schrader?
JM: Yes. A wonderful script that turned out to be a lousy movie. I blame Paul’s direction for that.QT: I heard at one point it was going to be Warren Beatty in the George C. Scott role. And absurdly going to be Beatty’s wife who runs off to do porno films and not his daughter?
JM: That was just embarrassing. (Beatty) Seducing Paul like a girl, talking him into it.QT: Schrader said they made him change the ending from what he’d originally written?
JM: (Milius snorts) Nobody made him change anything, he did exactly what he wanted.QT: I love his film ‘Rolling Thunder.’
JM: He wrote that for me to direct.QT: (surprised) He did?
JM: He wrote the script and gave it to me, and said, this is your movie.QT: Why didn’t you do it?
JM: Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t think I wanted to do something that dark at the time.QT: I interviewed the director John Flynn, and he said Schrader’s script was un-filmable?
JM: No… it was terrific. (lost in thought, remembering it) Boy it was a good script, with wonderful stuff in it. Paul at his best.
MICHAEL CHAPMAN, ASC
Legendary cinematographer Michael Chapman discusses his work on Hardcore.
INTERVIEW WITH PAUL SCHRADER
Paul Schrader conducted this interview for Cahiers du Cinéma on 29 January 1982 at Martin Scorsese’s apartment in lower Manhattan.
~ ~ ~
This interview was conducted for Cahiers du Cinéma on January 29, 1982, at Martin Scorsese’s apartment in Lower Manhattan. Marty had spent the night editing The King of Comedy; I had spent the night researching after-hours clubs on the Upper West Side. As 7 a.m. light streamed through the Hudson River windows, we began our conversation. During the first hour we discussed American movies; the second, our collaborations.
Paul Schrader: What movies were you attracted to as an adolescent?
Martin Scorsese: There are many, many films—I’ll just talk about what first comes to mind. The first image I remember seeing in a movie theatre—my father used to take me because of my asthma—was a trailer in Trucolor of Roy Rogers and his horse jumping over a log. My father said, “Do you know what Trigger is?” I said, “That’s trigger.” [Scorsese pulls the trigger of an imaginary gun.] I was about three or four years old. My father said, “No, that’s the name of the horse.” And there was this beautiful horse and this guy with fringe jumping and flying in the air like an angel. Ever since I always wanted to be a cowboy and never was.
PS: Between the ages of seven and ten, what movies would you prefer?
MS: Mainly westerns. Duel in the Sun. My mother took me to see it even though it was condemned from the pulpit. My father didn’t go. For some strange reason the film was very effective on me. To this day I love the picture. And somehow I couldn’t watch the ending; I had to cover my eyes. It seemed like a horror story. The two lovers loved each other so much they had to kill each other. Even to this day.
PS: At what point did puberty set into your movie-going experience? Who were the first women, as women, that you saw on the screen and sexually desired?
MS: Wanted them, or was interested in what they looked like?
PS: Both.
MS: And what they felt like when you touched them?
PS: Yeah.
MS: Bypassing Barbara Britton—I was in love with her. Crazy. You see, Barbara Britton and John Paine were my favorites.
PS: How old were you at that time?
MS: About ten. I Shot Jesse James. Barbara Britton’s in it, you know. I remember being on a bus, being taken to see it. I remember thinking, what’s the matter with these people? Don’t they realize I Shot Jesse James is playing? They’re on a bus, what’s the matter with them? Why aren’t they going to the theatre?
PS: She was your first screen crush?
MS: Then in ’56, Elizabeth Taylor on the cover of Life magazine in a still from Giant, sitting on a bed. She was very beautiful. Oh, however, there’s Jean Simmons in Great Expectations. That was a killer. Always been a killer.
PS: As you know, I wasn’t allowed to go to movies as a child. One of the first films I saw was Wild in the Country with Presley and Tuesday Weld. Tuesday was sixteen at the time and was my first major movie crush. One of my strangest experiences when I came to Hollywood was sitting in a screening room next to Tuesday Weld. I thought she lived on another planet.
MS: I’m trying to think. Women never really interested me that much in movies. I wonder why that is…
PS: I have to take exception, because having just read Jerusalem, Jerusalem [Scorsese’s first script, preceding Who’s That Knocking at My Door], I’m aware of the enormous sexual impact of the movies on you.
MS: One of the first sexual images I remember from film, besides Duel in the Sun, which I couldn’t look at for some reason unknown to me, was Peter Pan. In one scene where Wendy has to cross over a rock and she lifts her dress and you see her calf and that’s absolutely wonderful. Disney had everything. Michael Powell is right, Disney was a true genius. She had a wonderful leg. I’m serious. It was really a shock. I said, “This is it. I’m in love with Wendy.”
PS: Old Walt knew where the buttons were…
MS: I think the first time we met I told you this. My aunt, Aunt Mary, who was a very tough lady, took me to see a double bill of Bambi and Out of the Past…
PS: Of Mitchum, Douglas, or Greer, which one did you identify with?
MS: Forget the women, I just remember the raincoats. But all during the film I kept asking, “When is Bambi coming on?” My aunt kept saying, “Shut up, this is good, I’ll kill you.”
PS: By twelve, you were starting to get the itch between your legs.
MS: That of course was like High School Confidential with Jerry Lee Lewis and Blackboard Jungle. Sex came on the screen with the music and you knew it. My father was sitting next to me and was shocked. When the MGM logo came on and you heard Bill Haley—I mean the film was not the best, but it was for me…
PS: Strictly below the waist.
MS: Right.
PS: At what point did your love of neighborhood movies merge with an awareness of foreign films?
MS: My father bought a sixteen-inch TV set in 1948. At that time they showed a lot of features on TV. Every other Friday night they would show Italian films…
PS: Subtitled?
MS: Absolutely. They showed Paisà and Bicycle Thieves, and my grandmother would cry, and my mother would cry. They didn’t want to see it ’cause the men were in the war, but the men wanted to. The women got very upset.
PS: There wasn’t any clear demarcation between American and foreign films? They merged together?
MS: Yes, except that we made the Westerns.
PS: Was there a point when American movies diverged from non-American movies?
MS: 1958, when I discovered Bergman for myself. When I was in high school and not doing well at preparatory seminary, all the Bergman films had titles like Monika and A Secret Shame of Love. All on the Condemned List. Smiles of a Summer Night I went to see and to this day I still don’t understand…
PS: Yes, somewhere in my adolescent imagination Smiles of a Summer Night and The Immoral Mr. Teas were equated…
MS: I finally saw The Immoral Mr. Teas when I was twenty-two. I never had the guts to go to those theatres. At the same time, however, I saw Seventh Seal and I realized that, of course, all the great filmmakers were in Europe. For about three years I had that sense of snobbism that American films were bad. Then in 1961 I read, in Film Culture, Andrew Sarris’s article based on the theories of Cahiers, the “politique des auteurs,” which is old history now. But I went through the lists and underlined every one of the films I saw and put a star next to the ones I liked. Of all the directors, I found I liked the “pantheon” directors most. I liked John Ford’s films best—and they weren’t all Westerns either.
PS: At this point you realized you could express ideas through films—
MS: But Seventh Seal is highly emotional as well. When the penitents come in—that speech is extraordinary.
PS: I noticed you quoted Diary of a Country Priest in Jerusalem, Jerusalem. When did you see it?
MS: Around 1964. I must make a confession. It’s very difficult for me to watch it again. That and Ordet.
PS: I see them once a year. Voyage in Italy is difficult for me…
MS: Voyage in Italy I can watch over and over again. I cry and get crazy. But those two pictures and Europa 51—it’s amazing. I really can’t take it anymore. I can’t do it. I can’t handle it.
PS: Let me ask you another question. [Consults some scribbled notes.] Let’s see, I wrote this down a couple of hours ago when I was about as awake as I am now. Do you want history to remember you?
MS: I can be glib and say let’s both be pretentious, right? I’m not sure I would answer that if someone else asked me. But again, my ego is enormous. I love that problem. Yes, most likely I would. I don’t know why.
PS: If you had to choose…
MS: The thing about being remembered is that it replaces fate and the salvation of the soul. How could you replace that? You can’t…
PS: If you had to choose between being remembered or fulfilled, which would you choose?
MS: It would have to be fulfilled. You have to be content with yourself. Not necessarily happy, you could be miserable but fulfilled.
PS: So fuck history when it comes to personal fulfillment?
MS: It’s a hard thing to replace what you really believe in. The salvation of the soul, whether it’s Presbyterian, Jewish, Catholic, or whatever. You know what I’m saying? If you don’t have any belief in it now, you’re dead.
PS: When I was in Amsterdam last year—I think we talked about this before—I was giving a lecture and I went to the Rijksmuseum, probably the best organized museum in the world. All devoted to Van Gogh, totally devoted and organized around thirty-nine miserable, increasingly tormented years of a man’s life. And I remember in the middle of the lecture I was overwhelmed by an awareness: I said to the audience, “If someone came to me right now and offered me a deal—if he said, we’ll build you a museum if you will live a life like Van Gogh’s”—and I said—
MS: I think I have to pass.
PS: Exactly.
MS: That drive has been replaced.
PS: Was there a point when it was more important to be remembered?
MS: Yeah, when I was trying to get Mean Streets made. When I tried experiments in Alice and Taxi Driver. I never thought Taxi would make a dime. I just came across some 8mm footage of you and me and Vernon Zimmerman bowling in LA. It’s wonderful. It just came out of storage. I put it all together.
PS: I don’t remember.
MS: It’s wonderful. It’s beautiful because it’s just about a month before it happened. With Michael and Julia [Phillips, the producers of Taxi Driver] that Sunday morning after it opened and it was successful. We made that film because we felt something—the Notes from the Underground thing.
PS: That’s a blessing of success. It allows you to live without worrying about being remembered.
MS: You know, when we made Taxi that was like a major, major footnote for my life. Because that was it. If somebody a thousand years from now finds that thing and there’s no credits on it—and if there were credits on it but they couldn’t read them—but they understood what it was. Even then, it’s not being remembered…
PS: To a god unknown…
MS: Exactly. The process of making the film for me was more important than the final result. And you know the second week I threatened to stop. I loved it so much I wanted to kill it. If it was not going to be done the right way, kill it. If someone is going to take it away it might as well be you. It’s your duty to kill it. It’s almost like the end of a movie I’ve seen many times, The Horse’s Mouth, where Alec Guinness destroys the wall. He figures, “I might as well do it”’ Fuck it. His performance carries the whole thing. It’s wonderful. In any event, I was doing a balancing act at that time. Mean Streets. I never thought it would be released, you know. I said, at least if somebody picks up this movie twenty years from now they’ll see what Italian Americans look and talk like. I was very surprised when people picked up on it.
PS: But you had ambitions, hopes you can’t deny…
MS: Right, but I had already made a picture for Roger Corman. So Mean Streets goes on the shelf, I make another picture for Roger. But at least I made an Italian American movie that supposedly nobody wanted to see.
PS: I just won’t let you get away with saying you had no aspirations for that movie.
MS: No, no. It was my whole life. The only other thing that gave me that fire was Taxi.
PS: Do you consider yourself 100 percent American?
MS: Yeah.
PS: If you no longer work in this country, where would you work?
MS: You’re assuming I would even continue to make pictures. That’s something we talked about before. Then, it would seem to me, I’d have one major drawback, my ear for language. I think I have a certain thing for dialogue, words and phrases, and I think I would be very hurt if I didn’t know a language inside and out.
PS: Would you like to work in Italy?
MS: I would try. I have a problem with the Italian language. I’m serious. I know French better than Italian. I never went to Rome until 1970. Now, with my wife, we travel back and forth. But even though I know French better I’m not comfortable with it. My ear for Italian is very good: the gestures, moves, guttural sounds—I don’t care what the words are. However, I have a problem learning Italian because my grandparents were very severe and they would take care of my brother and I during the day. They would yell at me, “You’re younger and your brother speaks better Italian.” It’s the older brother syndrome. Raging Bull comes out of that. So I have a block against Italian. I’ve taken it in school, I lived in Italy; I speak it somewhat, but very badly.
PS: What American films or scenes have stayed with you longest: have affected your life emotionally, philosophically, sexually…?
MS: Are you going to give me a second or two?
PS: Yeah.
MS: I’ve got a long list.
PS: So do I.
MS: Obviously, Public Enemy, which still holds up. The use of music is extraordinary. At the end it’s all source music. No scoring. At the end when the body falls they’re playing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” When I was thirteen years old in 1956, after I graduated from grammar school, me and Joe Morales and another guy went to see The Searchers at the Criterion Theatre. Walked in in the middle. And I’ve lived with that picture over the years. The Red Shoes. Renoir’s The River. The way he used music. He goes into a sequence where they talk about Krishna and suddenly it becomes a musical.
PS: The things which come back to me are more isolated and I think fewer. Jimmy Stewart crying next to his horse in Naked Spur, John Wayne not allowing Jeffrey Hunter to look in The Searchers, when Kim Novak walks into the green neon-lit room in Vertigo, Quinlan investigating the Mexican boy in Touch of Evil, the water scene in Sunrise. You seem to be talking more in technical terms…
MS: No, no. I’m not talking technical. I’m talking about having a great time. For the last ten years I can look at Touch of Evil and have a ball. When I first saw it, I was dissecting it. I remember the emotion of a French film by Allegret with Gerard Philippe, in English called The Proud and the Beautiful, in French Les Orgueilleux. That’s one of the great sexy scenes of all time. Michelle Morgan alone in the room with the fan and the half-slip and the bra—forget it. You want to see that scene? I’m glad this is a French publication because maybe somebody can help me. I’ve tried everybody. Nobody can get the print for me. You want to rent it in America, they send you the 16mm print, terrific, etc.—except that scene is missing. And it’s about a six-minute scene. You can’t get a complete 35mm of it, you can’t get a 16mm—it’s impossible. The sexuality of that, when I was fifteen years old, was very important.
PS: Hopefully this interview will put the Cinémathèque on the trail.
MS: I’m talking about an emotional level. You talk about green rooms, but when I saw Vertigo I was scared. I don’t know why. I loved that I was scared, I loved the picture.
PS: For me it’s the most sexual of American films.
MS: I couldn’t think of it in those terms at all. It was a mystery, not a whodunit, but a sense of doom and fate. When the man comes up in the last shot we’re all dead. We’re all going to hell and that’s it.
PS: I’d like to ask you some personal questions. After all, the blood is already on the sheet. You and De Niro and I have collaborated on two films and now possibly a third. How do you view this relationship?
MS: Right now?
PS: At a working stage.
MS: How do I work with De Niro? Is that what you’re asking?
PS: Yes, and me.
MS: It’s very interesting. I worked with Harvey Keitel on Who’s That Knocking. Later I met Bob through Brian De Palma, and I knew Bob in a different way. I loved what he did in Mean Streets, and it was an absolutely collaborative effort. But somehow during that period, Bob found—although, as you know, Bob can be very quiet whereas Harvey and I talk and talk and talk—Bob found he was interested in certain things, the things you are interested in, the same way. And one of them was Taxi Driver. And we all felt the same way about that. Okay, it was a labour of love. But the point is this: New York, New York became a testing ground for me and Bob. We could play around, doing improvisations, not knowing if we would ever work together again. It was a very difficult shooting period. Twenty-two weeks. When you shoot that long, you try to do something of your own, your personal life starts to fall apart—the old story, as you know. Particularly in this film with artificial sets and improvisational techniques. In any event that was a strong testing ground for me and Bob. Somehow we shipped it together. In other words, we had the same comings together and partings. We wanted to say the same things in different ways. In Raging Bull, for example, he never said what he wanted to say, I never said what I wanted to say, but it’s all there. We are both satisfied. I’m not satisfied with whether it’s a good or bad film but that we got out what we wanted to say. Then you came in at that point. You want me to talk about that too?
PS: First I’ll tell you how I view my role. There’s seven or eight directors I would like to work for.
MS: That’s a lot.
PS: Unfortunately most of those seven or eight directors do not respect my freedom as a writer because they want to write themselves. Somebody has to play the pipe and somebody has to do the jig and I’m a bad dancer. You are one of the few, if not the only, director I’ve worked with that respects me as a writer. On the other hand, I’m smart enough to respect you as a director. I feel I deliver three things: theme, character, structure. Bam, bam, bam. That’s my job. I give you that then I walk away.
MS: Yeah, but you’re also writing dialogue. Lines like “Suck on this” [from Taxi Driver], which I take seriously…
PS: I’ve found—maybe I’m paranoid—that most directors have a hard time accepting the writer’s theme, character, structure.
MS: In the case of Raging Bull, we asked you to come in. I’ve always hated this discussion because Mardik Martin [the author of the first Raging Bull script] is like a brother to me. New Year’s Eve I realized we’ve known each other for twenty years. The person I’ve been closest to for twenty years. He has been with me through all my crises, all the good times, all the bad times. We started writing the script of Raging Bull during New York, New York. I just want to say for the record, the poor guy, I never gave him any direction. I was running around writing the script of New York, New York—what we would shoot the next morning. Everybody was working on it, Earl [Mac Rauch, the screenwriter], Irwin [Winkler, the producer], Julia, my second wife. I didn’t want that to happen again, but when Mardik came in with Raging Bull it was like Rashomon. He got twenty-five versions of the story because all the characters were alive. Bob and I felt that if you came in for six weeks, no matter what the price, it was important. And I still hadn’t made up my mind about directing the picture, by the way. When we met at Musso-Frank’s, you came up with the one image right away—that of masturbating in the cell, which was never in the film, which is okay because it’s in there anyway…
PS: I still think it’s one of the best scenes I ever wrote. [I’m referring to a three-page masturbation soliloquy by Jake LaMotta in solitary confinement.]
MS: On paper it was beautiful, but how do you shoot it? I move the camera in, it’s dark, you can’t see what the fuck’s going on. Besides, you don’t even want to see the guy. Leave him alone. I don’t want to know him anymore. Let me go home. I won’t go see my pictures—that’s a cute remark, but it’s true. I haven’t looked at it since I finished it. But when you came up with the masturbation idea at Musso-Frank’s, I knew you understood something intrinsically, deep down. As you say, you deliver the structure and I put in detail, that kind of thing. But I need the structure, the direction. I eventually wound up going through my own personal crisis in a life and death situation; and when a friend, in the hospital, said, “Do you really want to make this picture?” I found myself saying yes immediately, from my subconscious. Why? Because I understood that the character was no longer Jake, it was me, Bob, you, all of us. In structuring the film during that six weeks, you created a situation where I could understand the essence of it. Do you follow?
PS: But Raging Bull is not the film I wrote…
MS: Oh, but it is, my dear.
PS: [Laughs] Okay.
MS: I’ve said this a number of times. I know we’re a little tired and I hope you won’t be offended, but when Brian De Palma gave me a copy of Taxi Driver and introduced us, I almost felt I wrote it myself. Not that I could write that way, but I felt everything. I was burning inside my fucking skin; I had to make it. And that’s all there is to it, Paul, do you follow me?
PS: I know, and feel even stronger than you about it.
MS: Therefore there’s something deeper than just paper between you and me. There’s a man like that taxi driver, a man who is a fucking vehicle on screen.
PS: It’s almost ten years later but I feel just as strong about The Last Temptation of Christ [a script I was writing for Scorsese from the Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel]. It’s the final panel of the triptych. No more middleweights; this time we’ll deal with a heavyweight sufferer.
MS: You know, I like the script very much, and we’re going to work on it, but I’ve got to take a rest after this picture…
PS: Of course you’ll direct this. Because if you don’t, I will—and you couldn’t bear that!
MS: No, I couldn’t deal with that at all. I really want to do it. I think I know what he looks like. A man in a tunic who says, “Come over here, you’re doing it all wrong.” It’s a middleweight or heavyweight. In the context of Christianity no person is minor league. Just as with Jake LaMotta. Many critics said this animal, this Jake LaMotta, judging from the film they judge the man! First, they have no right to judge the man. Second, they’re dealing with an essence—like a whole tree distilled into one drop. And that something comes from me, you—it’s so obvious it’s ridiculous—and Bob. But Bob could never get himself into a situation like this, a philosophical discussion. Never. He was revealing himself in his own way. And that’s why I like working with him.
PS: I’ll make a generalization. Tell me what you think of it. The generalization is this: of the three films, I think Taxi Driver is more mine, Raging Bull more Bobby’s, and Last Temptation more yours.
MS: It’s a generalization; it’s not true. Generalizations are not true. It’s like looking at a marriage and saying he’s right and she’s wrong. She’s always right, she’s always wrong, he’s always right. You can’t go into somebody’s marriage. And it’s a marriage we’re talking about.
PS: They are collaborations. Maybe I’m just saying the one originated with me, the other De Niro, another with you.
MS: And even that one, Last Temptation, was recommended to me by David Carradine and Barbara Hershey. Outsiders don’t understand the collaborative process. I’m a writer and an actor too, but I don’t take credit for writing. It doesn’t matter. We all see if we can think of the same things in our own ways.
PS: When I was in Montreux I bought three stations of the cross which are hanging in my house. Each time I stumble drunkenly up the stairs I have to pass the stations of the cross. Do you still feel you’re a Catholic?
MS: According to the Church?
PS: In the same way I’m a Protestant.
MS: I’m afraid so. We started talking about fulfillment. There’s nothing worth anything else.
PS: What role does it play in your life?
MS: Are you talking about Mass, confession…?
PS: No, I guess I’m talking about private thoughts, imagery. What goes on when the lights go out.
MS: You fight the devil. That’s not pretentious. You know what goes on when the lights go out? When I was having troubles, a black present fear of death, a depression from which I could not return and into which I was going deeper and deeper. There’s got to be a way to stop that sort of thing. I do things to a bit of excess, I guess. The point is that after a certain age, and I’ll be forty this year, certain things don’t get you excited. When I was fifteen or sixteen this masturbation problem started in which I felt that I could kill myself slowly like Scobie in Heart of the Matter…
PS: Jerusalem, Jerusalem was the diary of a masturbator…
MS: Exactly. People say I’m a jerk-off. [Laughs.] The point is, you can’t live with that guilt, you can’t live with that guilt. Nine years of analysis. It’s a matter of learning to deal with it. That’s why I’m trying to redefine my life, editing this film, trying to keep a household together. I’ve moved from uptown to downtown—back to the old neighborhood. It’s a very difficult situation for me. I’m trying to hang in there. When I discovered masturbation, I was sure terrible things would happen to me. And sure enough they did. But terrible things happen every day—that’s life. It’s a matter of knowing what’s good for yourself. It’s a matter of working in your house, going downstairs to work, going back upstairs to sleep. Becoming a more and more compressed unit by yourself, being alone a lot of the time. It’s a matter of overcoming that image of when life’s gone. It’s taken over the death image, thank God.
PS: This privilege we have as directors, creating fantasies…
MS: I can’t do a fantasy. I can’t create a fantasy. I don’t believe that…
PS: Okay, this privilege we have of creating unreal images, things that we make up, that never happened—does this privilege, this freedom, allow you to live vicariously? To what extent does it relieve sexual tension?
MS: None.
PS: I find the fantasy works.
MS: No.
PS: That leads me to my last question. This internal battle—
MS: This “eternal bowel”?
PS: No, this internal battle—
MS: I’m sorry.
PS: This internal battle which expresses itself in your films—does it evolve or repeat?
MS: It repeats, but–
PS: Because if it only repeats…
MS: It repeats and evolves. We have to give each other strength. When you wrote Last Temptation, you gave me strength. But to put something on film doesn’t mean you’re rid of it. I was crazier when I finished Taxi Driver than when I began.
PS: It was just the opposite for me during the writing.
MS: There is an evolution. I’ve seen it. However, you also have patterns—and you have to deal with them.
PS: You’re one of the few filmmaking friends I have left. I’ve dumped most of them because I don’t feel they are growing. Their repetition, their stagnancy, is holding me back. So I let them go. But I don’t think you have any choice but to grow. You couldn’t choose not to grow.
MS: But when we do meet, it’s like official meeting. We don’t have any fucking social things. Do you know what I mean?
PS: Yes, it’s sad.
Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. Photographed by Wynn Hammer © Columbia Pictures. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.
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