Schrader on Schrader

The writer-director comments on some of his films being shown in the LACMA retrospective:

“Taxi Driver” (writer)–“It’s the real thing. I really don’t think there’s a false note in it. Even though no one thought it would be commercial, it was somehow accepted by audiences.”

“Light Sleeper” (writer-director)–“My personal favorite and my most personal film. During, before and after this film I was in a midlife crisis. It was a radical thing to take a vilified figure like a drug dealer [played by Willem Dafoe] and make him my midlife crisis character. The perversity of that gave me great pleasure.”

“American Gigolo” (writer-director)–“In many ways it’s a film about surfaces. I remember saying to Richard Gere that there was a kind of neo-Edwardianism on the horizon for American males. But it’s also a kind of intellectual film. I know that Barry Diller [who released the film when he headed Paramount] feels that if the film hadn’t been quite so intellectual it would have made ‘real’ money.”

“Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (writer-director)–“It’s like the flip side of ‘Taxi Driver.’ I was being interviewed about ‘Taxi Driver’ by someone who said I was writing down to Travis Bickle. But the pathology of suicidal glory and purification is not just common among the uneducated. Mishima was a man from the East, highly intelligent, highly rewarded in life, homosexual and yet still in the grips of that pathology, which I went through myself in my 20s and 30s. Ironically just before I started the movie my daughter was born and a month later all my suicidal feelings went away.”