Schrader may be a bit softer around the middle now, but he is still the driven, obsessive, too-hard-on-himself artist he was when working with Scorsese and De Niro on Taxi Driver two decades ago. His script for that film remains one of most influential to come out of the 1970s, and he went on to write classics like The Last Temptation of Christ, American Gigolo, and Raging Bull, developing a reputation as an explosive, visceral screenwriter with an uncommon intellectual edge. When one speaks of great American writer-directors today, Paul Schrader's name is certain to come up.

Directing, however, didn't come as easily as writing. He basically learned how to direct on the job, and his first experiences at the helm were, well, challenging. In Kevin Jackson's definitive Schrader text, "Schrader on Schrader," he recalls a moment on Blue Collar, his first directorial effort, when "I was in the middle of the set and I started crying and I just couldn't stop, something I'd never done before. (Richard Pryor) calmed me down and walked me back in and I guess everyone realized I wasn't as much the iron man as I had been appearing."

That was a long time ago. The day Schrader and I met for this interview he was very much the iron man, directing an impossibly difficult "low-budget" (Five mil. Everything's relative, kids.) film he wrote called Touch, which stars Christopher Walken, Bridget Fonda and Tom Arnold. Fighting countless distractions from his crew and the business manager who just happened to show up on the set, Schrader paced in a small circle like a caged tiger and, between takes, chain-smoked his way through the following discussion.

Paul Schrader (PS): Yeah.

TR: How long did you do that?

PS: Two years.

TR: While at school?

PS: I was at AFI. I was among the first group of graduates from AFI.

TR: I had all these introspective questions to ask, and now I sort of feel like it's not the right time.

PS: No, I've done a lot of those kind of sit-down interviews.

TR: So just tell me what you're doing now. What are you doing today?

PS: I just did the opening scene of the script.

TR: How many days have you been here?

PS: This is the second day. It's a very complex scene. I had four characters in the house at different times interacting, so it was sort of a challenge to figure out how to choreograph it. I have a kind of double-bind on this film because of the short schedule.

TR: How short is it?

PS: Thirty-two days. Not only can I not miss a shot that I need, I can't do a shot that I don't need. It all has to be shot right to the bone. By the time this film is put together, I'd be surprised if there were more than three or four set-ups that aren't in the movie.

TR: How does that affect your style? You kind of edit in the camera usually, don't you?

PS: Actually this time much less than usual because I have long dialogue scenes. It's a taut, driven piece -- Elmore Leonard. We're really interested in seeing the faces and hearing what they have to say.

PS: Well, you've done the rehearsals and then you break down the rehearsals to their component parts and then you start watching them with a viewfinder over and over again until you find the shots. And then you basically edit it in your head and when it's all over you call out the shots -- in this case 27 of them. And then the trick is to hold the cut in your head.

TR: That's got to be a tremendous amount of pressure. You don't storyboard, I know that.

PS: No, you can't storyboard because actors tend to move around, find their own space. I wrote the script, shopped it out, had a very hard time getting it made. I put the package together, put the actors together, and fortunately Lumiere decided to do it. It was a big risk for them. They're financing it out of their own pocket -- I don't have a distribution deal. I'm under pressure, but Lumiere's under pressure, too.

TR: What's your rehearsal process like?

PS: You let the actors have the set, give them some sort of guidelines, confine their actions somewhat so that you can shoot it. Another big problem with shooting low-budget and short schedule is that in order to get a look that looks like a feature film you have to come in in the middle of the night to light the set, because you don't have time to do your major lighting during the day. And that means that often the rehearsal that you did two weeks prior to shooting where you blocked it out in a room somewhere with fake furniture, that's what you're pre-lighting for. And actors always want to do a different blocking. Unfortunately, you don't have that luxury.

TR: But you do still have the luxury of working with Christopher Walken two weeks ahead of time --

PS: Oh, yeah. You have to prepare to death. Every actor has to be good; you cannot have any performance problems. Also, you just stay on the set all day long. I haven't been able to leave the set. You leave the set, everything slows down. You come back, you find out the dolley track is six inches from where you thought it was going to be and there is no diffusion where there should be diffusion. You have to stay in the room while those decisions are being made.

TR: The performers you picked -- did you choose them particularly because you knew they could handle this situation?

PS: Yeah, that, and of course they all have to basically do it as a favor. I mean, I'm losing money every day on this film. My standard of living and salary are not in sync. I have to go get a writing job this summer to pay for the fact that I'm directing this movie. Tom Arnold is off making a little Swedish film. Christopher just got a big money gig. The actors squeeze these films in between. They can't survive on the money they get paid for these films either.

TR: While reading about your directing style, one thing I found intriguing was your idea of the floating rectangle. Can you talk abut that a little bit?

PS: The whole idea is that if there are two people in a scene there is really a third person there and that is the person who is setting the frame. How present should that third person be? In this film I'm not as present as I have been in other films, but in other films I really want the audience to know there is a third person in the scene, and that's the person who's watching these two people. But when you have dialogue-driven stuff you tend to go a little more routinely and make yourself invisible as that third person. That whole idea of letting the audience know you're watching comes from Godard and Bertolucci. As opposed to the old Hollywood style - trying to be invisible.

TR: So your visual style changes depending on the project?

TR: When you're writing does this style become clear?

PS: I mean I don't put anything in the script marked "camera." Nothing whatsoever. There are no camera directions.

TR: But as a director, don't you also think about these things?

PR: No.

TR: Really. In your writing--

PS: Not at all, not at all. When you're writing you think about what writers think about: story, theme, character, plot, dialogue. That's what you think about. When you're directing you think about what directors think about.

TR: That's fascinating because I would think as a director you would see the movie playing in your mind as you're writing.

PS: No way. I hear it, but I don't see it.

TR: You've said that once you find the theme and the metaphor in your writing, then the plot and the execution are pretty easy. I think that's true of most writers, but I'd never heard it explained like that.

PS: The theme drives right through the metaphor. As soon as the theme hits the metaphor the plot starts to move. It's the interaction of theme and metaphor that gives you story ideas. So in Light Sleeper the theme is mid-life crisis, the metaphor is drug delivery boy.

TR: How do writers go about finding that theme -- whatever's personally important to them?

PS: Yeah, but it has to be something sort of original. It has to have a little hook to it and be something that appeals to others, not just yourself. It can't be your mid-life crisis, it's got to be something that allows your imagination to jump from where you are into someone else's life and therefore into an audience's life.

TR: You were saying in Kevin Jackson's book that, coming from an evangelical background, you have to make your films speak to a large number of people; you have to do "commercial" moviemaking--

PS: Well, I mean it is a mass medium. You're making films that cost a lot of money, even five or six million dollars is a lot of money. And a lot of people have to see it to get that money back. You have to think in those terms. Even if you make smaller films it's still a mass medium and it's still a tool. It's not like writing a book or a song that can survive at a much lower threshold of economic return.

TR: I'm just wondering now, with this advent of the popularization of the independent film, if you've felt lately like you can make that very small, very personal film that you've maybe wanted to make, maybe like Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas.

PS: I don't think so. I don't think it gets any easier. I've had a hell of a time making this one. I've got one called Affliction that I want to do with Nick Nolte that I've tried to finance for four years. It's certainly not any easier for me. And it's not any easier as you get older. It gets harder. In fact, because many of the films I've made have had an intellectual edge to them it's harder for me to lie. It's harder for me to go to people with money and say "I don't care about art, all I care about is commerce, all I want to do is make money."

TR: What do you do when you're in a situation like the one you were in with the three principals of Blue Collar, and they're not getting along. From a first-time director's viewpoint, if you're in that situation, you're busy babysitting your actors and you can't spend time with your shot selection -- how do you avoid that?

PS: Even before I started I got a very strong script supervisor, A.D., and cinematographer and I basically said "you guys are responsible to make sure this looks good on screen. I' m going to take care of the story and the performances." And it really wasn't until the third film that I learned how to direct. On Hardcore I was fooling around trying to figure out how to direct and I hadn't quite figured out how. By the time I did Gigolo I knew how to direct.

TR: What turned the light on? What was it that led you to figure it out?

PS: A mixture of experience and getting involved with (cinematographer Nando) Scarfiotti and the highly stylized story. I had edited by then, and just knew what cut.

TR: So it was more of a technological education.

PS: Yeah, I knew how to block a scene in an interesting way, shoot it in an interesting way, and I knew what would cut even when people on the set said it wouldn't. I had the confidence to say yes, it will cut; yes, I can jump the line; yes, the eyeline is right; no, we shouldn't be on a 35 here, we should be on a 75, or vice versa. I knew those things by then. But it took two films to learn them.

TR: So it's just the doing of it that gives you the education.

PS: Well, the doing of it and paying attention to what everyone else is doing, not just hanging out in your trailer. Watching things, trying things, stumbling on things and learning you can do things in different ways.

TR: From an aesthetic viewpoint, what does a director need in terms of education and training? Evidently architecture influenced you quite a bit, and literature of course, and other films.

PS: The biggest challenge in directing is to cut over two hours in your head, to call the shots. The biggest thing in directing is being able to just sit down and call cut-cut-cut from start to finish. You hold that all in your head. That's one big chessboard.

TR: So as far as training goes--

PS: Learn how to play chess, to train yourself to hold complex patterns, the same sort of skill that puzzle-making is. Being able to look at pieces and see what will maybe fit where without actually picking them up and putting them there. And you get to intuitively know whether a shot is right and the mood is right and see how to communicate those shots.

TR: It's instinctive. Did your visual style evolve in a sort of instinctive way, as well? I was interviewing John Frankenheimer recently and he keeps coming back to the Steadicam, the handheld shot, the wide angle lens, that's just what he does. How did you evolve your style?

PS: Well, primarily (cinematographer) John Bailey and I watching The Conformist and I going to Rome and bringing Nando over and it evolved out of thirst. And I've added enough personalized touches now that they've become part of my vocabulary. But the truth is that the other day on the set I said the new frontier in film style is character. They've pushed film style so far that there's no sense trying to change these music video and film school kids...

TR: You go back to basics?

PS: You go back to basics. The Coen brothers realized that with Hudsucker. That's what it's about. Particularly on a lower budget, the only things you can compete on are dialogue and story. You can beat the hell out of them in those categories.

TR: That's terrific. A lot of our readers, a lot of our readers are independent filmmakers. So, a lot of your work is basically done after the casting is over, right? The casting process is hugely important, especially on a low-budget script.

PS: Yeah. I mean, there's not much you can do if you miscast. Not unless you have an action-driven picture where the cast isn't that important. If you miscast, you're dead.

TR: Tell me briefly about collaborating. I know you collaborated with your brother a couple of times. Is that easier or more difficult? What further challenges do you find when you collaborate?

PS: I don't really collaborate. The few times I have -- the two times with my brother and once with Nick Pileggi for City Hall, I wold do the structure, we would discuss the scenes, they would write the scenes and I would re-write the scenes. And that's pretty much the only way I've ever collaborated. Which isn't really like a writing team per se.

TR: How do you keep your writing muscles built up when you do stuff like this? Don't you feel like when you get out of it for a while...or have you been doing this so long that you don't really get rusty.

PS: No, no. They asked Truffault once what he liked best -- writing or directing or editing. He said when I'm directing I like editing, when I'm editing I like writing, and when I'm writing I like directing.

TR: And you find that's true? When you're directing you'd rather be writing?

PS: No, now I'm directing, and I look forward to writing something this summer.

TR: So what are your habits like when you do your writing. Do you have any set hours or anything?

PS: Well I've switched over now because I've gotten too old and I can't do drugs. I used to write nights, you know. I used to write drunk for 15 years. And it was always good; I never had a problem with the quality. But my body just couldn't take that kind of abuse anymore. And then I had children who had to get up in the morning. So I had to switch to days. And that took six months to a year to learn how to write during the day. I'd always liked to write at night, when there was nobody else around.

TR: It fascinates me that you wrote drunk for 15 years. Now that you're sober, do the ideas flow differently? How did you change your creative thinking?

PS: At first it was so much slower. So much slower. It didn't come fast enough. You know, drunk you're loose, you're uninhibited, you have everything popping. You're sober, you have so many distractions, it's hard to stay in there. But now I've sort of learned how to do it. But I still can't put in the hours. I can only write four to six hours a day. When I wrote at night I'd write 10, 12 hours at a time. I realize I got a bit excessive in certain areas in terms of dialogue, but right underneath the excess was some very nice stuff that you might not have gotten if your self-censoring mechanism was fully intact.

TR: How do you avoid that now? You have to write sober now, and most people should-how do you get out of that? It's the same thing you said in the Jackson book. You've got to leave your critic outside the door.

PS: I've learned how to get loose during different parts of the day. But like I say it took me almost a year to get to where I felt comfortable writing sober, where I was just loose enough to write, and not be self-restricting and self-inhibiting, in writing emotional stuff, funny stuff, embarrassing stuff, without -- you know -- feeling I shouldn't be doing this. Booze makes me playful. When I'm drinking, all the little people inside my head can come out and play. MM