Two Paul Schraders

Paul Schrader's two lectures at Cinefan Film Festival were clubbed with the screening of two of most well known works- Mishima and Taxi Driver. After attending the two lectures I realized that they were perhaps given by two different people.

The lecture that followed Mishima was about the New Media and The Death of Cinema. Schrader joked about how the organizers very nattily omitted mentioning the Death of Cinema part on the program! The lecture was supposed to be an insight on the new emerging media trends where in anyone could make a film. I gathered that perhaps Schrader had just used the new technology to color correct a few scenes for Mishima’s DVD release and he might have been mega-impressed with the whole deal.

The lecture turned out to be an anti-climax. By the end of it I realized that Schrader was only to pissed off at the big players losing millions of bucks thanks to new media aka piracy. He was impressed by the reach of the Internet but rather than talking how someone like him could adapt this new technology, ended up sounding rather morose at the prospect of people downloading movies and not paying for them. It was a bit of a let down because one expected an old hand like Paul Schrader to talk more about the threat that new media poses to creativity rather than the business angle of it.

Isn’t Schrader worried about the fact that now directors could add ‘emotions’ like a tear on a character’s face in post-production (Blood Diamond) or use dead people’s unfinished work (John Lenon and the goodies hidden in his closet) by making computers do the needful and bring them back to life. Or the thing done in Beowulf where muscles were added in post on the main character! If one looks at the other end of the argument, then someone like Robert Altman would have really used the 'new media' and done some wonderful work with it. Mr. Schrader sounded like a big studio emissary who came to the East to show how worried they were about the threat of a free uncontrolled Internet.

The other lecture was on screenwriting and it was much better. A few minutes into this one I was convinced that the first lecture wasn’t half as interesting because it was delivered by someone who didn’t really understand the subject. In stark contrast if there was someone who knew a thing or two about screenwriting then it would sure as hell be Paul Schrader.

The Master Class was a quick run through of what Mr. Schrader teaches at UCLA. It gave a rare insight into the mind and the style of a screenwriter whose credits are nothing short of case studies. Schrader had some very interesting take on writing for screen and one wonders why the hell did he have to deliver the first lecture? He made no qualms about making writing a very personal journey, nothing short of therapy. he came across as a someone who knew his contribution to the world of cinema but didn’t make too much of a deal about it. When asked how different would Taxi Driver be had he directed it? He replied that he was glad he never directed it for he would have made a mess of it. He revealed that his script was tampered around with too much save a few omissions here and there, and was happy when Martin Scorsese decided to cut some bits about Travis talking about loneliness. He said that this convinced him that the metaphor he came up with for loneliness, a big yellow metallic box of a taxicab, worked for the film.

Schrader talked briefly about his new script- a meeting between a CIA agent, who has lost faith in his work and is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and his former interrogator, who, surprise surprise, had lost his will to carry on as a terrorist! He calls this his old man film and is looking forward to starting work on it soon.

Image: www.observer.com