Paul Schrader NYFA Lecture

I just watched a video of Paul Schrader giving a lecture at the New York Film Academy. He spoke about screenwriting. Paul Schrader, if you aren't familiar, wrote the screenplays for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, American Gigolo and a host of other films.

When you go to write a screenplay, how do you start? Schrader suggests you look at yourself. Look at a problem in your life and turn it into a metaphor. That metaphor, mind you, isn’t a replica of the problem. So, to use Schrader’s example, if you are an overweight Jewish girl, your metaphor can't be ‘an overweight Jewish girl’. Things are a little different if you are adapting something to film. Instead of developing a metaphor from your problem, you must pull the problem out of the metaphor. It is finding a problem in a text which you identify. He establishes that the core of his method is the idea of a metaphor and proceeds to explain how Taxi Driver came to be.

He was twenty-five and living in LA. He had been a movie critic and wrote a book but he was now, for the most part, out of work. His marriage and another relationship were failing. So he spent a lot of time in his car driving around the city. Patrons can sleep in adult movie theaters so because he spent a lot of time there. After a number of weeks, he checked himself into the hospital because he had horrible stomach pains. He had a stomach ulcer. At that point, that he realized that he hadn't spoken to anyone in weeks. He just drank and drove and watched porn. This image of a man driving a steel coffin came into his mind. Despite being surrounded by people, the man is alone. So this steel coffin is a metaphor for loneliness, his loneliness. For Schrader, screenwriting is an outlet. If he didn't write Taxi Driver, he feared he would become Travis Bickle.

The unique quality of Schrader's method is that he doesn't put too much emphasis on plot. Normally, as he notes, people are taught to start with the plot. Make a thesis statement of the film; one sentence which summarizes everything. According to Schrader, if you have a strong metaphor, plot just kinda follows. He relates this back to the simple enough plot of Taxi Driver. This lonely guy wants a woman he can't have and has a woman he doesn't want. He tries to destroy the father figure of one and fails but succeeds in killing the father figure of the other and, in doing so, inadvertently becomes a hero.

As another example, consider Jaws. A giant shark lurking off the coast of a New England town is the embodiment of anxiety. Now that the metaphor is established develop a plot. That's simple enough: the giant shark eats people and is, in turn, hunted.

Schrader's methodology is a perfect example of why I love film. Something very personal can be shared, viewed and appreciated by a community (whether that means theater-goers or critics or film makers).