The movie Paul Schrader thought was his “most original and unique”
It’s fair to say that as a screenwriter and film director, Paul Schrader is an artist who has frequently shown himself to be bursting with originality. A true legend of the cinema game, responsible for bringing some of the most impressive pieces of film to the big screen, Schrader’s reputation is one of genuine excellence.
With his brother Leonard, Schrader wrote the screenplay for Sydney Pollack’s 1974 neo-noir crime drama film The Yakuza, which set him on his way to success. Before long, Schrader had written for Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg, but it was in 1976 that his name was truly lit up in lights.
Schrader would forever become known as the writer of Martin Scorsese’s legendary psychological neo-noir Taxi Driver, and from there, he continued to collaborate with the iconic director for many years to come: on Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ. Taxi Driver is certainly Schrader’s most acclaimed work, but he doesn’t perceive it as his most unique.
In a discussion with The Hollywood Interview, the screenwriter once said of his 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, “Well, it’s the most original. It is the most original and the most unique.” Directed by Schrader, written with brother Leonard and his wife Chieko, his 1985 work explores the like and writing of Japanese author Yukio Mishima.
The film tells parts of Mishima’s life and interweaves them with dramatic segments of many of his books. Elsewhere, Francis Ford Coppola were on hand to produce, Philip Glass provided the score and Eiko Ishioka did the production design, and another famous figure had provided Schrader with a link to the artistic ethos of Mishima, the architect Charles Eames.
Eames had once told the screenwriter, “Art is really only about problem-solving,” and Schrader felt that Mishima’s “genius” had largely lay within the realms of problem-solving. “Here you have a functioning schizophrenic: a man who lives multiple, simultaneous lives, contradictory ones,” he said. Schrader then had to ask himself his own artistic questions and wonder how he was to detail the life and work of the Japanese author.
These questions included, “How do you portray such a character? How do you portray his inner life as well as his creative one?” And the answer for Schrader was to “create this odd, cross-hatch structure: time, place, film stock that reflects the contradictory, schizophrenic nature of the character.”
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a stunning film and an important one for Schrader in that fact that it allowed him to express his originality and uniqueness to the highest degree. The result was that the film is visceral to watch and provides a key insight into one of the greatest Japanese authors of all time.
Signing off on his overall impressions of the project, Schrader explained, “So the beauty of Mishima is that it was the right solution to the right problem. I never made another film like it because I never had a problem like that before. It was the only way I could see to solve it.”
With 23 films to his name as a director, including Blue Collar, American Gigolo and Cat People, it was Mishima that showed Schrader that he could make films according to his own vision, especially when the subject matter was something that meant so much to him on a personal basis.
