As the screenwriter behind “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” and the director of films like “Affliction,” “Auto Focus,” and “Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters,” Paul Schrader really doesn’t need to be taking tips from anybody. But at 70 years old, with decades in the business behind him, the filmmaker is still finding inspiration in the work of young directors, and for his wild, envelope-pushing “Dog Eat Dog,” Schrader cites an unlikely name as an influence on the movie.
Chatting with Collider, Schrader shared his reservations about making a crime today, and where he why he decided to toss out the rulebook when it came to the visual style of the film.
“…I was faced with the problem of how do you possibly make a crime movie today after [Martin] Scorsese, [Quentin] Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, Wayne Kramer, and everybody else. That started a process of thinking about the crime-film genre and watching a lot of other films,” he shared. “I started to realize that [‘Dog Eat Dog’] was funny, even though it was never written as a comedy. So then I started thinking about an idea that was percolating over the last several years of a cinema that is post-rules. I realized that because I had final cut, and I wouldn’t have considered making the film if I didn’t after that previous experience, that I could do anything. So that began a process of putting together a group of people, mostly from outside of the film industry, to try and figure out what it even meant to make a crime film today. In the end the film is as much about crime films as it is about crime. (Laughs).”
Running with that “post-rules” idea further, Schrader took that approach when it came to reinventing the way familiar set pieces or sequences were shot.
“…there were references to various movies like ‘Requiem For A Dream’ and stuff like that. What I came to realize about ten years ago while I was watching a film by Xavier Dolan [this would’ve been circa ‘I Killed My Mother‘ or ‘Heartbeats‘]. Here’s this kid, 20 years old, and he would do a Godard scene and then a Cassavetes scene and then a Bertolucci scene and then a static scene. It didn’t really matter. The audience would put it together,” Schrader said. “As a young viewer today raised on multimedia and multi-platforming, it’s very easy to process contradictory and non-homogenous material. It used to be that every film had a unified style. Every scene had to look the same. But now you can make every scene in completely different ways. I could do one scene as cinema verite then the next as Orson Welles. Everything different. So the mantra became, just be different. Get out in front of the audience, run as fast as you can, and don’t let them catch up. Never let them know where you’re going. Zig when you’d normally zag. An example would be when I was meeting with my young team to discuss how to make all the scenes different and interesting, I mentioned that we had a strip club scene. How do we make that interesting? They’re all the fucking same. Same backlights. Same shots of girls. Same shots of money. All that. Then it occurred to me that no one had shot a strip club scene in black and white in a long time. Probably not since ‘Lenny.’ So let’s just shoot it in black and white. Don’t explain why, you don’t have to explain why. You don’t need a reason. It’s just black and white. So that became the mindset.”
While reviews were mixed on the finished result, it’s interesting to Schrader throw caution to the wind and look on the work of younger, contemporary filmmakers and find something in their voice to power his own films.
“Dog Eat Dog” is now playing in limited release.