It’s a weekend night at the Cannes Film Festival. My schedule informs me that I am supposed to meet Matthew Wilder, screenwriter of Paul Schrader‘s “Dog Eat Dog,” at the Carlton Hotel for drinks. As I make my way to the entrance, I can’t help but notice the glitz and glamour scene going on in the lobby. Women in the tightest dresses imaginable with ultra-red lipstick walk around as if on a catwalk. Meanwhile, as Lamborghinis and Ferraris park, men in $5,000 Armani suits tip the valet and make their way to the ritzy hotel.
My eye catches Wilder standing in the middle of it all with an older looking man – that man is Paul Schrader. They both look like they don’t belong in the crowd. They just stare at the circus happening around them waiting for my arrival. Once I arrive, comments about the surroundings eventually occur, with Schrader and Wilder exchanging witty back and forth banter about the sheer lunacy of it all. After the hilarious banter, Schrader pronounces “Let’s get out of here” zooming past the exit. “Where’s Paul?” says Wilder. “He’s long gone” I reply. “It wasn’t his scene.”
Based on the book by Eddie Bunker, “Dog Eat Dog” is Paul Schrader’s latest movie and it’s a doozy. The three main guys in the story, Troy (Nicolas Cage), Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook), and Mad Dog (Willem Dafoe), have been released from prison and find themselves trying to adapt to everyday life. The California “three strike law” is very much on their minds, but they don’t care. One more hit, one more jackpot, that’s all they want to get the satisfaction needed to live their version of a normal life.
What spurned on the idea of the screenplay in the first place was, of all people, a producer Wilder already knew. “I was encouraging the producer, at the time, to get into more ambitious stuff, and frankly more good stuff. Someone came to him and said ‘I have an Eddie Bunker book.’ He asked me if I knew who that was and said, ‘Yes, he’s amazing, he wrote the book that ‘Straight Time‘ is based on, ‘Animal Factory,’ and so on.’ We went to meet these brothers who said they had the book. I said, ‘So…do you guys have an option?’ Classic moment: they looked at each other and said ‘Uh…yeah…we got a lotta options!’ That’s when I knew the book was out there. So we contacted the Eddie Bunker estate and it all went pretty smoothly.”
There isn’t an ounce of fat in Wilder’s wildly inventive screenplay. The film is an amalgam of everything that’s come before it in the gangster genre and yet it feels fresh. Schrader’s direction is possessed, and he hasn’t seemed this energized by a film since 2002’s great “Auto Focus.”
There is no more studio system. I think the ecosystem as it stands now bears no relationship to the classic studio system.
The opening scene to the film, a little backstory about Dafoe’s Mad Dog, is an open invitation for the audience to get on board with the movie or not, filled with nasty gravitas, wholly terrifying violence and non-PC humor. There were a few walkouts during my screening, but Wilder and Schrader wouldn’t have it any other way. Schrader concurs by saying, “That’s the shot across the bow. If you can handle this level of high-octane absurdist ultraviolence, you can take the movie. It actually gets no worse than that throughout the movie. But it’s an alarm: hey, if you don’t dig this, you’re not gonna dig the rest.”
This is only Wilder’s second screenplay, and yet the freedom he was given to write “Dog Eat Dog” is, quite frankly, refreshing. “Remarkably, Schrader changed almost nothing of what I wrote,” he excitedly says of his adaptation. “The stuff that changed was largely logistical — some of it having to do with the move of the shoot from L.A. to Cleveland — and some of it was the Humphrey Bogart — oriented, afterlife stuff that Nic Cage put into the end. But he did something that reminded me of my days as a theatre director: Often times I’d deal with new playwrights who were pissed off when the production ‘didn’t feel like’ what they wrote. Well, what I wrote was a fairly straight-ahead, gritty ’70s-style crime thriller, and what Schrader directed is a kind of Godard-ian romp through ultraviolence. That surprised me — but unlike those playwrights, I wasn’t horrified that it wasn’t ‘my thing,’ I was delighted. I never thought of it this way, but ‘Dog Eat Dog’ is kind of a strange flipped version [of Schrader’s ‘Rolling Thunder‘]: It’s really a movie about three hyper-emotional guys talking about their feelings to people who aren’t looking, or are staring at their phone.”
I wanted to push the envelope, to never be boring, to take this as far as it could go without breaking the conception of the material
In casting “Dog Eat Dog,” Schrader got two game actors in Dafoe and Cage, who gleefully feed off of each other. It’s as if they’ve been working together for years, yet this was the first time the two were part of the same movie, and according to Wilder they also couldn’t be more different. “Dafoe is a vegan, Buddhist, super yogi — he can slither around and climb walls like a 20-year-old. There is a deep-centeredness to him, along with a very wry, very razor-tipped wit. All this I think made the role of Mad Dog really fun for him, because it is so completely not him. As he says, it’s fantasy, and pure fantasy can be really exhilarating.”
“Cage is a guy who has a life I can’t imagine. People come up to him and say, ‘Neecolas, I want you to have these healing oils, they have spiritual properties,’ and he quite remarkably accepts this with not one molecule of condescension or eye-rolling,” Wilder continued. “That’s his life, and it’s quite a surreal life. That alone suggests to me someone who is quite, quite advanced. I think as an actor he is restlessly seeking the place where he can put his individual imprint on everything. He really is the definition of the actor as auteur.”
The last decade and a half hasn’t been an easy ride for Schrader. He lost final cut in 2005 for his “The Exorcist” prequel and was replaced by Renny Harlin (though Schrader was later able to complete and release his version), released the “The Canyons” led by Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen, which earned more sensation for the making of the movie than the actual film, and again faced studio meddling with “The Dying of the Light,” which was re-cut and completed without his input. But for “Dog Eat Dog,” Schrader ensured his vision would be the one on the big screen, and he relished the opportunity.
“I wanted to push the envelope, to never be boring, to take this as far as it could go without breaking the conception of the material, and I think ‘Dog’ was something that really enabled this,” the director said. “Every department head, we said, ‘Go for it. Take it as far as you can go’ – so the movie is playing at eleven in every scene. I did not want to take that final-cut status for granted – I used it essentially as the fundamental building block of the movie.”
To see a legendary figure like Schrader have to still negotiate final cut, might make one feel a lament for the studio system, but the director has a different perspective. “There is no more studio system. Maybe there is in the worlds of Amazon and Netflix, but I haven’t been there yet. I think the ecosystem as it stands now bears no relationship to the classic studio system. And I’m not at all sure that’s a bad thing,” he reflected.