When your resume includes writing some of the more important films of the past decades, and your colleagues are the likes of Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, and Peter Weir, is there really anything left for you to learn?

Paul Schrader, the acclaimed screenwriter of the films “Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull,” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” as well as the director of the films “American Gigolo,” “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” and “Affliction,” says that the circumstances that the film industry finds itself today require nothing less than constant vigilance.

“Today, we are in another period of crisis. Today we have a crisis of technology and revenue collection. These are not quite as exciting problems to address, but they are in fact without any solutions yet,” Schrader says.

Schrader delivered this message to film buffs, future screenwriters, and industry players alike at “Manila Meets Paul Schrader,” part of the activities in line with the ongoing Cinemanila International Film Festival at the Market! Market! in Taguig City. The talk served as a look into Schrader process as a writer and director, as well as providing Filipino film lovers an inside look at the state of the entertainment industry and independent film in the United States.

STORIES THAT COME FROM WITHIN

For Schrader, writing a screenplay serves a personal purpose: it allows him to work out any personal problems through the characters that he creates.

This was the case with ‘’Taxi Driver,’’ which he wrote in 1972 and starred Robert de Niro and a young Jodie Foster. Only 26 years old at the time, the young Schrader was down and out on his luck, often spending his time watching pornographic films in Los Angeles theaters and sleeping in his car.

“At that time, the cinemas were open 24 hours, and you could go and sleep. You could go into the Pussycat Cinema at Santa Monica Boulevard and you could sleep. That was my life for a while,” he recalls. “And then one day I saw that the sky was the color of a steel box, a coffin, and I realized that in the middle of the city, surrounded by people, I was absolutely alone. I believe movies are metaphors for personal problems, and at the time, ‘Taxi Driver’ became the metaphor for my loneliness.”

The personal origins of ‘’Taxi Driver’’ would result in Schrader’s most recognizable and critically acclaimed screenplay, the one that also allowed him to fund his other projects. Rooting one’s stories in their own problems, says Schrader, is something that today’s screenwriters should remember if they want to be recognized.

“Screenwriting always comes from within, because if you just stand there and look at a movie and say “I can write that,” of course you can. But there are a lot of people like that, thousands of them in Hollywood. Why would they hire you? You have to find something that you have that they don’t have. That’s why internal process is the best commercial process,” he says.

This is an approach that he carries with him to the screenwriting classes which he conducts at the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA), where he spends the first few weeks of his class asking his students their most pressing personal problems and discussing it with them.

“We don’t even get down to writing until the sixth or seventh week in, we just talk about our problems. You always have the overweight girl, you always have the homosexual who hasn’t told his parents, the kid who wants to kill his parents,” he reveals. “It is a dirty laundry business, and if you’re afraid to expose that then you’re in the wrong business. Storytelling is about expiation and about exorcism and about getting something out that’s been bothering you. That’s what makes it interesting and original.”

HOW TO TELL A STORY

Schrader also emphasized the main difference that exists between stories told on the screen and ones told on the pages of a book – authors follow the written tradition, while screenwriters
focus on the oral one.

“Movies are really all about the oral tradition and has very little to do with writing. You have to be a good storyteller. If the story works, the story works, and the only way you’ll know that is you have to tell it,” he explains. “Just tell it from person to person. Start with an idea. It may only be two or three minutes long. Keep telling it to yourself and keep asking yourself what happens. You have to make it up. That’s what a movie is. It doesn’t matter what they say about the story, what matters is what happens between your two eyes when you’re telling the story. If you have them, you have them, it doesn’t matter what they say afterwards.”

This approach, he says, is especially practical in the American film industry, where scripts are routinely discarded and never made into feature films. Running your story before a “test audience” makes it easier for the aspiring screenwriter to gauge if his script is going to make it as a movie or not.

“It is very debilitating to write script after script and not have it done. You should do everything in your power to keep yourself from writing,” he says. “Every time you tell the story and add to it, you realize you need some action right now, you need a jolt right now. You re-outline and tell it again. By the time you can tell a story for 45 minutes you have a movie. End of discussion. Then you can actually write it.”

READ, READ, READ

But despite the different traditions that book writing and screen writing adheres to, Schrader says that there is no question that any aspiring screenwriter also needs to have a knowledge of great literary
works if he wishes to be any good at what he does.

“You can learn a lot about storytelling by reading novels. When you read good literature, you’re reading people who know how to tell a good story and keep you interested. Most of the good storytellers we have are good authors. If you don’t like to read, you’re probably not interested in good stories,” he remarks.

While Schrader had tips for the aspiring screenwriter, it was a much bleaker picture that he painted for aspiring filmmakers looking to make a dent in the Hollywood machine. Schrader talks about an industry – whether it is the mainstream studios or the independent productions – that is having a problem adapting to the rapid technologicalchanges happening around it.

DIFFICULTIES

“The world of independent cinema is now in a state of free fall in the US,” he declares “Independent filmmakers like myself are like scavenger dogs, crisscrossing the planet, looking for money, and looking for the scraps that fall off the table. This year, it has not been financially viable with companies going out of business. It won’t be long before some of the studios collapse.”

Schrader has experienced this financial crunch firsthand, relating how he’s had to travel all over the world to find the financing to get his films made.

“In the world of independent film you have to finance the film against all odds. I’ve had a Japanese language film financed. I’m working on two things now. One is a Latin story, with Mexican money. Then I’m going to Mumbai next week to try to finance a Hollywood/Bollywood collaboration,” he says.

Films, according to Schrader, suffer from the fact that one needs to have money if one wants to see the film he envisioned come to life, something which songwriters and authors do not have to contend with.

“Films need money. Unlike writing a song or a short story, films don’t exist unless someone puts money into it,” he says. “We are faced with the crisis of revenue collection. The theatrical mechanism of revenue collection is getting weaker and weaker and will essentially die.”

The fact that more and more forms of entertainment are emerging because of advances in technology only complicate the problems the film industry faces even further.

“We’ve created maybe 20 more kinds of audiovisual entertainment but we still only have 24 hours of the day. Out of that 24 hours you’re probably online three hours a day,” he says. “I think we will look back and see that movies – images projected on a wall in front of a crowd – is primarily a phenomenon of the 20th century. That idea seems to be going away.”