“There is no more studio system,” director Paul Schrader told us this spring in the south of France, where he unveiled his latest film, “Dog Eat Dog,” in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. And while that posit might be up for debate, the filmmaker has certainly stepped completely out on his own in the latter portion of his career, making films without the usual Hollywood mechanisms in place. And this has seen Schrader embark on efforts such as the unlikely team-up between Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen in “The Canyons,” the high-concept thriller “Dying Of The Light,” and now “Dog Eat Dog.”
Based on the book by Eddie Bunker, and starring Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe giving it their all, the film tells the story of a trio of bad dudes who don’t know the meaning the boundaries, coming together for one last score, in a movie with no shortage of stylized violence.
“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,” Schrader explained. “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.”
The no-holds-barred movie doesn’t have U.S. distribution just yet, but you can get a pretty good taste of it in the new trailer. [Cine Maldito]
